Uncomfortable Questions About Android Developer Verification | Hacker News Reader

Uncomfortable Questions About Android Developer Verification

commonsware.com

400 pointsingve307 comments

This shouldn't just be "questions"; this should be a full-on opposition. Do not give them even an inch, or they'll take a mile.

"debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers." - Richard Stallman, The Right to Read, 1997

Stallman's fallacy is thinking every system is perfect and unbreakable and that people have a perfect understanding of software and systems (for better or for worse)

People will be running pirated debugger copies if that comes to shove

99.9% of people DNGAF about OSS. They do care about doing what they need on their phone without malware/bloatware/nagware

Also publishing and development are separate activities

Your fallacy is thinking that authoritarian governments care about enforcement or successful enforcement of such laws. The goal is to create a status quo in which all citizens break many laws daily and so are already guilty if they ever rock the boat and disturb those in power.

Stallman's "Right to Read" is an accurate reflection of reality in that sense.

Yeah and people had gay sex when it was illegal but it still is a shameful injustice for the government to decide what software I run on my own hardware

I doubt that Stallman, of all people, thinks literally that. But systems which are breakable have ways of improving themselves, closing off the exploitable holes. So it makes sense to regard systems as being eventually unbreakable. Or at least having an unacceptably long "mean time between cracks". The game plan cannot simply be "oppressive software and hardware systems will always have imperfections so the good people will cheerfully get around them", even if is is de facto that way at some point in time w.r.t. certain systems. That's actually a kind of defeatist attitude disguised as optimism; passively accepting crap based on the faith that you will scrape through somehow.

> I doubt that Stallman, of all people, thinks literally that

Yeah I agree his opinion is probably more balanced, however Right to read is a short story displaying characters with too much learned helplessness and too little agency so I'm just going based on what he literally put to paper

What an absurd ask. How is a $2.5 trillion dollar company supposed to make any money if it has to spend a bit of time on security? Did you even think about the economy?

Clearly it wasn't doing fine in 2018 when Apple became the first trillion dollar company. Nor was it when in 2012 when Apple's market cap exceeded oil companies, barely breaking half a trillion dollars. And the economy was definitely in shambles back in 2005 when no company even had a 400bn market cap! Seriously, how could the economy ever survive?!

Where would the wold be without all those innovations. Like the 2005 invention of YouTube, the 2007 release of the iPhone. Where would we be without such world changing technologies that followed with tech's rise in global dominance? Technologies like, Bitcoin, VR, and an even thinner iPhone? Do you even know how many peoples' lives these technologies have saved? Seriously? Because I don't...

> They do care about doing what they need on their phone without malware/bloatware/nagware

Yeah you're absolutely right, tell that to Facebook/Instagram/Temu/TikTok/Pinduoduo/(any other _spying_ apps) users.

Their spying doesn't prevent anyone from using their bank app, or using other apps on their phone, or consume (too) much battery

I wouldn't bet on hackers saving us from everything. There are 150 million Nintendo Switches in the world, and nobody has figured out how to jailbreak one without getting into the hardware and shorting some wires (and even then only on early unpatched models). I don't think its out of the realm of possibility to make a best-selling phone that stays uncrackable for the general population for its entire lifecycle.

> I don't think its out of the realm of possibility to make a best-selling phone that stays uncrackable for the general population for its entire lifecycle.

It is surely possible if only because the general population is not interested in infosec.

On the gripping hand,firmware writing practices being that they are; it is impossible to produce an uncrackable phone.

> There are 150 million Nintendo Switches in the world, and nobody has figured out how to jailbreak one without getting into the hardware and shorting some wires (and even then only on early unpatched models).

It's is acceptable for the hack to be difficult so long as it exists. I'm sure later models will eventually be jailbroken too. In the meantime, all of nintendo's best efforts haven't ended the piracy of switch games which is what the vast majority of people care about, not getting their favorite linux distro to run on the hardware itself.

Why is it so complex to have a foss mobile OS.

I only have Linux PCs (laptops) and servers, 100% of my work and personal stuff is done there (though for work I do need to hop into MS365, Google Workspace, Zoom, etc, hooray for browsers, my final firewall between me and the walled gardens, though we can have a whole discussion on that).

For mobile, we have PostmarketOS, Phosh, Ubuntu Touch. I really must try living in them, is it on me? IDK, our government even has an identity app for iOS and Android. I should not be using it, I should stick to web. But its so much more convenient. I'm just weak, aren't I?

Maybe I should go for Ubuntu touch, with an iPad on the side or something. At least my most personal device is something I control then. Or just keep my Linux laptop handy (or make a cyberdeck!). But I want a computing platform that does not require carrying a bag. It's kinda sad. Even GrapheneOS (one of the most personal and secure mobile computing experiences out there)'s future is in the hands of its greatest adversary, the one that does not want you to have a personal computing experience.

Do not forget Android is also a FOSS mobile OS.

That "F" (as in freedom) is certainly eroding. Perhaps not by its source availability directly (although without any drivers, what is the use?), but very much by a company trying to lock you out of all the goodies that once came with it.

Even if Google would stop open sourcing AOSP, I think it would be much easier to fork AOSP than to start a new Linux-based FOSS mobile operating system from scratch

Obviously even maintaining AOSP yourself requires a huge effort and a lot of people would need to donate development time/money.

Android is not FOSS in any sense of the word and doesn't produce any user benefits that FOSS is meant to produce.

Most of AOSP is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and GPLv2 for the Linux kernel. These are FOSS licenses recognized by the FSF.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLv2

I think that they are pointing at that using Android in daily life in a meaningful way requires installing Google Play Services because many apps require it.

And my point is throwing out all of AOSP because of that is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Whatever other FOSS OS someone comes up with won't have Google Play Services built in either.

Oh yes, I fully agree. AOSP is the best shot at getting an alternative OS and sandboxed Google Play (like in GrapheneOS) is a good transition method.

Isn't AOSP developed behind closed doors, with infrequent code drops & zero community participation ?

Good luck building anything on top of that & keeping it in sync long term.

AOSP has yearly releases for the new major versions, but you can contribute code upstream.

I wouldn't say that means it's not FOSS, it just means things being FOSS isn't enough to ensure things are good.

This is a very misleading wording. FOSS is enough for everything unless a monopolistic megacorp forces you into their proprietary software (and your government stays silent).

You can use microG which provides a lot of Google Play Service functionality.

at the mercy of Google, yes.

???

No. microG is an ABI-compatible replacement for Google libraries, just like wine is a replacement for Win32 APIs.

Android is a proprietary operating system developed by Google. Try running your "free" modified AOSP in the real world, on a real device, like a real person would and see how far you get before being blocked and restricted due to hardware attestation.

I have been running AOSP-based LineageOS and now GrapheneOS for more than a decade now. While some apps are restricted to Google-certified operating systems, most are definitely not. I can use my countries eID apps and my banking app without issue. The only thing not working is nfc payments (since they are limited to Google Wallet)

It doesn't matter if it's only some apps if those apps are critical. MyGov in Australia for example requires Play Integrity or it crashes. Your government's app does not... for now.

The grip of Google, Microsoft and Apple are tightening. Microsoft's TPM requirements for Windows 11 are ostensibly for security, but they're also a mechanism to enforce hardware/software integrity and authentication. Google wants to extend their integrity APIs to Chrome and I doubt Microsoft would object to implementing something similar.

Soon enough computing and the web may end up segregated, with there being devices authenticated and controlled by a central authority and those that are not. In a lot of ways this is already the case, I can't access the 4K Netflix streams I'm paying for on Linux because of DRM and using anything other than stock Chrome can often get you flagged for annoying captchas. But it can get so much worse than that.

> Your government's app does not... for now.

My govt's app did, but after bugging them a lot they removed safetynet.

AOSP is only a subset of what makes Android, an actual mobile phone OS.

Linux is 30 years old, and still it has a laughable percentage of desktop usage. Plus, the only reason it's even usable is because of the relentless work by thankless developers for reverse engineering device drivers. On smartphones this is orders of magnitude more difficult. How do you properly profile and debug a random modem in a phone? What about the cameras?

So, how can anyone expect FOSS mobile OSs to ever exist unless forced by law by the US or something?

Because of hardware standardization Linux has become a pre-competitive layer, a commodity we have decided not to compete on. And it turns out that such a commodity by definition is private, because we don't want any one party to reap all the benefits of a commodity project (we'd rip it out before using it anyway), in the same sense that we don't want want 1 company sitting on all our water consumption data for example.

So, how do we get to a commodity layer for Mobile devices? It looked like it was going to be Linux (Android), and that was Google's intention. But now they are just using their significant resources to corrupt that original idea, using their trojan horse called "play services".

The public at large only cares about convenience, not about privacy. Why don't we? How much enshitification is enough to draw that line in the sand?

The Android stack, right back to the pre-aquisition "Danger" stack, ripped out everything GPL'd above the kernel, and Google has been investing in their "fuschia" project to make a non-GPL'dv kernel as well. Gradually making more and more of it proprietary was the plan.

Google is a big company and there may have been some factions pushing to make android an open ecosystem, but I don't see that that was ever the companies intent overall.

So the real question is: Why are people so social and pleasant, and why are companies so egoistic (and I mean egoistic in the cancer/parasitic/enshitifying way, not in the Ayn-Rand/social/We-are-all-equal way).

Is it the lack of deep, DNA encoded morality? What are we going to do about this? What is the DNA of an organization anyway?

How, as a society can we take away these stimuli that make it so natural to consume individual freedoms when we grow our tribe-size?

Maybe we need more freedom, more freedom to say: "F-this I'm out of here, I just like the set of rule of this other society better." Maybe we are still too constrained. By our ways of generating income, by our countries, continents and ultimately our planet. We have 1 lifetime, we have to make do with what we find.

There are mechanisms which make firms more social: cooperatives. In another world, public infrastructure such as android would be owned by a cooperative of it's users. Instead, users are tenants of infrastructure owned by others, always vulnerable to the owners changing the deal

The problem is that it's difficult for cooperatives to raise capital: they can issue debt, but not equity (because the definition of a co-op is that it is owned by members (usually customers and employees )-and no-one else). But debt is not really risk capital in the same way as equity and doesn't enable bold initiatives and innovation.

> Why are people so social and pleasant, and why are companies so egoistic (and I mean egoistic in the cancer/parasitic/enshitifying way, not in the Ayn-Rand/social/We-are-all-equal way).

It's specifically publicly-traded companies, because they cease to be controlled by real people who can make a human decision when there is a trade off between a marginal increase in profits and not being schmuck.

This is 'easily' solved by following the Apple road - focus on one or two devices. I think many FOSS enthusiasts would be happy to buy such devices.

(I am holding out hope for the phone that the GrapheneOS project is planning to make.)

This has been attempted multiple times, and always fails because followoing FOSS to the letter doesn't play with how hardware industry works, and when people aren't willing to make concensions they cannot ever deliver a product the general public would replace their Android/iOS phones with.

GrapheneOS and SailfishOS focus on a narrow set of devices and they can keep up with hardware support. I agree that you have to make concessions in terms of allowing proprietary firmware blobs and opaque baseband hardware. You also have to choose your hardware wisely (e.g. GrapheneOS can/could piggyback on Google's driver work).

I was just saying that you can make the problem more narrow by not trying to support every device out there. Start small and pick your battles (which probably means using AOSP and using sandboxed AOSP).

I think the main issue of many previous attempts was what typically happens in the FLOSS community: there are N attempts rather than one coordinated attempt (Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, PureOS, etc.) and everybody is targeting different hardware. It's similar to how the Linux desktop got fragmented, though it's even more problematic for mobile, since the usage is probably 1/1000th of Linux desktop usage.

Yeah, the fragmentation is the main issue, however Firefox OS is a proof that even a single device doesn't work if there are no concessions, and the only thing left are unintesting hardware for the general public.

Are you aware of the PinePhone and Librem 5? As others have said, it's already been tried.

I bought a PinePhone, and after a few too many show-stopping issues (not being able to receive a call for a scheduled job interview was the last straw), I went back to using LineageOS without gapps. I'm not a developer either, just a fairly technical user, so when the device wasn't working, all I could do was report bugs, and things weren't improving fast enough. I haven't checked on progress in a while now. postmarketOS seemed like the one to follow, and they do also support some beefier devices like the OnePlus 6T, but then you'd miss out on the PinePhone's ability to easily remove the battery and to boot off the SD card in addition to eMMC.

I also felt a bit bait-and-switched that the PinePhone Pro came out not too long after the original and then everyone seemed to switch to that one. It reminded me of the awful Gemini PDA and how quickly they rushed out a successor without fixing any problems.

Don’t worry, the PinePhone Pro is now EOL while the original one will go on for 2 more years!!!

> after a few too many show-stopping issues (not being able to receive a call for a scheduled job interview was the last straw)

When was it? There are no complains from people daily driving both phones in the last couple of years AFAIK.

Late 2021, IIRC.

I know this isn’t what you meant but it’s important to remember there is some hope. Thirty years ago I was required by my CTOs to use Windows, Borland, AIX, and Solaris. Linux, FreeBSD, and Free dev environments were viewed with deep suspicion.

In 2025 you’d be viewed just as much suspicion for not building your stack on Freedom. I still have hope that we’ll get there with phones, too, some day.

In 2025, we all use Windows and macOS laptops around here, Linux is something we run on cloud environments, mostly the distributions of the cloud vendors themselves, which certainly don't upstream everything.

The use of managed language runtimes, and SaaS products with low code/no code, makes the OS kind of irrelevant, and many times we don't even consider Linux on the cloud vendor, it is seen as an implementation detail, as many workloads are done via managed deployments like Vercel, Netlify, Azure Web App Service, and similar services.

> In 2025 you’d be viewed just as much suspicion for not building your stack on Freedom.

Tell me you live in the web bubble without telling it.

> How do you properly profile and debug a random modem in a phone? What about the cameras?

This is a huge factor. Mobile chip sets (CPU/SoC, crypto enclaves, GPU modems/basebands) are buried under NDAs a mile thick, and you can't just whack an oscilloscope on the bus like its 1979. Those companies treat their opaque hardware as their defense against IP theft, they'll never, ever give it up in the current environment.

And the cameras are super complex and require a bunch of DSP and AI to even vaguely work let alone do all the headline features.

Law is no longer interested in giving freedom to people

It's pretty obvious, it's costly to make one that is up to the level of quality of commercial ones. It's not a mistake that the 2 mobile oses are owned and created by some of the largest and most profitable companies in the world.

It’s costly, but those two companies also operate in a hierarchical manner (like the military or a feudal kingdom) which makes decision-making and accountability much easier. The FOSS world has been rife with petty agree-or-fork squabbles, often over relatively abstract philosophical concerns about license language.

> The FOSS world has been rife with petty agree-or-fork squabbles, often over relatively abstract philosophical concerns about license language.

You cannot say that. This means we have thousand half-baked projects to choose from, and choice is good. At least this is what I was told.

Look inside the kitchen of Microsoft or Google. It is comparable to all the FOSS world petty squables and pfiefdom wars.

You can even see this into the abominal products they release, rife with frankesteinian cobbled together bits and pieces from different 'orgs' trying to grab a piece of the (tr)action and the wild inconsistencies in the UX.

Mobile OSs are very consumer focused. I have criticized the FSF for, in there lengthily argued ways, abandoning the consumer.

You have to commercialize openness if you want the muscle of the consumer to be able to produce it.

Short presentation of the basic concept: https://youtu.be/SO46oEdlkY8

Some things with massive value in excess of the cost of production cannot be pursued by capital nor bought by the individual. Your choices are government, non-profit, or something in between all three. PrizeForge aims to be between all three and to completely change how we do consumer open source, incidentally bringing billions of dollars into making it.

That's a very clear vision on how to solve this kind of funding/cooperation problem outside of government and mission-focused nonprofits. And incidentally would be an existential threat to surveillance capitalism should it reach critical mass.

BTW your password-based signup flow isn't working (on iOS Safari at least).

:-) Yeah. Only SSO was working because while email would double my users, I was doing an experiment and looking for at least some signs of life. Doubling nothing would be useless.

Turns out, some new enrollments topped up their accounts and dropped off before the final step that makes it show up on the home page, so now I know it's something, and something is worth doubling.

> existential threat to surveillance capitalism

Should I buy a gun? I'm an American.

> Should I buy a gun? I'm an American.

No, that's unnecessary. Nobody will be taking you that seriously.

> some new enrollments topped up their accounts and dropped off before the final step that makes it show up on the home page

Did they actually put money in?

Yeah, there were two streams that I tried so far. Interestingly, PrizeForge itself initially got $105, a $100 and a $5 enrollment. The UI was even shittier. I took one look at that $100 and knew I've got to f&*#ing go.

So, for a second experiment, I was actually running a stream for Emacs (yeah, yeah, I know, I know). They managed to raise all of $10 for themselves. The premise was to pay out a weekly prize for whoever developed something cool. Super simple.

There's so little data, but it very clearly, very, very clearly seems to say the enthusiasm is for PrizeForge to get good more than it was to use PrizeForge for something else.

And I'm going to keep expanding in various directions because there's no way I'm oriented yet, but it's not nothing. It's terrible UX, terrible everything, but just clearly enough on top of something.

> ...stream for Emacs...

> ...terrible UX, terrible everything...

I think I accidentally enrolled for emacs and can't unenroll on the site. I guess I'll have to finally start using emacs now

Hey at least customer support is still pretty good when I can twiddle the database for each one. Shoot something to support@prizeforge.com.

Oh I see your username. You were over the subreddit. Welcome aboard.

Mostly because the "web" was sabotaged. I use archlinux and my only GUI application is a web browser. On mobile, I need an email app, maps app, food delivery app and a communication app. Even whatsapp doesn't work on the web (on purpose).

If the web was enabled, app stores wouldn't be possible and you could run anything without an installation. But somewhere along the line both Google and Apple realized that this isn't really to their benefit and "walled ecosystems" are an advantage.

> I use archlinux and my only GUI application is a web browser.

Debian here, and... yup. It's so weird to realize this. I have lots of browser windows open with lots and lots and lots of tabs open, but the only other app I have open is a Matrix client (which honestly is not that great; Element's web version has more features and better polish), and a terminal. If you can call a terminal a GUI app.

Sure, I do use native apps sometimes. A calculator app, GnuCash, VLC, some others. But they're not open all the time; they're infrequent-use apps. And a lot of my VLC use has been replaced by streaming on the web.

It's incredibly sad.

I mean, that's a choice. Most of my activity is still native apps, because I hate web apps and avoid them like the plague. I don't doubt you could do the same, but you have chosen to use web based options - which, to be clear, is totally fine! But it's not the way it has to be.

I could be one of the people running an ungoogled phone, but my bank refuses to have an app that runs on an ungoogled OS for "security"

Write them. My bank's app had safetynet, but they disabled it and now it is usable over GrapheneOS.

Unfortunately no NFC Payments though, since they are only available for Google Wallet (which uses safetynet)

> Unfortunately no NFC Payments though, since they are only available for Google Wallet (which uses safetynet)

A workaround for NFC payments I've heard about for folks running OSes on their Androids that don't support that feature is a smartwatch with NFC.

Precisely. Google pixel, Garmin watches, even Samsung watches.

Or using a bank that supports NFC payments (not using Google Wallet).

GrapheneOS Foundation raised this practice with European Commission because it unfairly penalises secure and safe competition giving instead a lie to the developers and banks that ancient, unsafe, vulnerable platforms are more secure.

Fidesmo Pay is another option, though the bank support is limited: https://fidesmo.com/consumer/fidesmo-pay/

Basically it’s a passive variant of smartwatch payments: you can pay with a ring, or bracelet, or a mechanical watch. The cheapest option is this plastic thingy (currently out of stock): https://eu.k-pay.com/product/mavericks

I’m thinking about implanting one into my hand :^)

> I’m thinking about implanting one into my hand :^)

On the one hand, I approve of self-administered biohacking.

On the other hand, you might need a Faraday glove to prevent tap to pay shenanigans by folks with a mobile card reader who bump check you.

I would not do this type of biohacking myself, but if you go down this path, look into how NFC skimmers work, because that and compromised card readers and unauthorized tap to pay events on portable card readers is a threat vector. I have heard that Google and Apple are working to roll out tap to pay from card to phone and phone to phone, which could allow folks to skim your NFC device to run an unauthorized transaction.

It is possible, but very unlikely. You’ll need to know where my chip is (I guess for an average thief an implant is not the first idea of where to look for an NFC card), and then get quite close to me to pull this off. Even if you do, I think it’ll take about one chargeback to get your merchant account blocked.

> roll out tap to pay from card to phone and phone to phone

It’s already here! Stripe has supported it for a while now, and I’ve seen a bunch of other payment providers have it, too: https://stripe.com/terminal/tap-to-pay

> It is possible, but very unlikely.

Life, uh, finds a way, after all.

> Even if you do, I think it’ll take about one chargeback to get your merchant account blocked.

Well, someone's merchant account might be blocked, but carders don't necessarily use their own accounts; in fact, I would doubt that many do, but criminals are often underestimating risks and overestimating rewards. It's almost a truism at this point that folks who do crime are not usually acting rationally, but I don't want to stereotype.

> It’s already here! Stripe has supported it for a while now, and I’ve seen a bunch of other payment providers have it, too: https://stripe.com/terminal/tap-to-pay

Finally! This feature is going to help a lot of small businesses in isolated areas where mobile phones are the primary (or only) computing devices that are commonly owned. This can create virtuous cycles that are somewhat unpredictable, which should help make these markets more dynamic and competitive.

Thanks for posting that Stripe link. Here's some more tap to pay links I was able to find, eventually. The search terms match too much, so it is a bit hard to disambiguate legacy NFC payment flows that use traditional or modern terminals from the new device to device payment flows. I remember hearing about Stripe's work on this feature, but since I didn't hear much after that, so I wasn't sure if the feature had ever shipped. I'm glad that this tech is getting in the hands of end users.

Apple-specific roundup of apps and vendors that support the feature:

https://apps.apple.com/story/id1620226212

https://www.apple.com/business/tap-to-pay-on-iphone/

These two are available on both iOS and Android, in case that is important for folks:

https://squareup.com/us/en/payments/tap-to-pay-android

https://www.paypal.com/us/business/pos-system/tap-to-pay

My bank used to block VPNs “for security reasons.”

Now they very kindly just display a warning.

Gas station app I use asks to turn VPN off every launch (even when it is disabled)

Why does a gas station need an app?

Bonus/loyalty programm

More likely getting data on your usage in some part, or most likely, pushing notifications reminding you about the particular brand, so you'll keep spending the money there.

Then the app gets no notification permissions.

Also why does a gas station app need to send notifications? :)

To tell you the gas prices are low?

(Don't know for sure, wouldn't use one myself.)

More likely to tell you to come in and buy a half price slushie, and hopefully grab a bag of chips too. Which is probably where they make their real profit.

Yes, that's what a "bonus/loyalty program" is.

It’s likely incompetence than malice. Chances are they’ve had a lot of customer complaints because some popular free VPN interferes with their app, and adding a blanket warning about VPNs is easier than trying to figure out why it’s not working and fix it.

My bank blocks my mobile with Lineage OS, and it's not even possible to login to the web site without the mobile app. Absolutely pathetic.

Now I have to keep my 4 year old phone with 2 year outdated Android to access the bank application. Which deemed more safe then my mobile with latest security updates. Haha

last time I walked into the bank to do something, they tried to peddle their app. I giggled and said no, their developers don't understand security.

my phone is rooted and their app won't work.

Unfortunately, I can say with 100% confident, the customer service of my bank will not freaking understand what is a rooted phone, or LineageOS ...

And my bank's web app developer couldn't even fix their log in bug for several months. I realize, now, it's because they want to sunset their web portal.

Which is extremely annoying ... what if I don't have my mobile!!

Lazy, and greedy corporates, just trying to save their costing with shortcuts, never realizing security is never achieved by taking shortcuts.

They don’t care much about security as long as it doesn’t cost them much.

> I giggled and said no, their developers don't understand security.

Their developers usually understand security well enough.

The problem, especially for banks, is that they're zero-risk driven, their ideal world is the one where risk doesn't exist. So instead of mitigating it they chase risk elimination (!= reduction) at any cost, while middle management needs to report that they improved something for the quarter. This results in all these kinds of stupid policies, where a 6 year old mobile, unmaintained for 4, is considered more secure than the weekly build of the community-based custom ROM running with locked bootloader signed with user-managed keys with strong protection (these days it's almost infeasible).

EDIT: to be clear, it's normally not the developers thinking up these policies, I have worked in a bank.

> So instead of mitigating it they chase risk elimination (!= reduction) at any cost,

I don't actually believe that. They chase risk elimination at any cost to you. If there's a significant cost to them, they're going to be all about quantitative tradeoffs.

It's their security and not your security, don't mix up

and yet their website works fine on my desktop Linux using a browser...

'their security' in what way? Is an app more likely to be exploited than a web browser?

It's even better than that. Banks (for example Revolut) consider several years old phones, running ancient OS (last I checked they allowed A10) without security updates for some 7 years, so riddled with zero-click/RCE vulnerabilities, but they do not allow GrapheneOS, which is currently the safest OS in mobiles (on par/beating iOS, depending whom you ask).

Yes, banks* claim phones riddled with maximum severity security issues are secure. Also phones that are rooted but using magisk modules to conceal this fact, and use spoofed signatures from ancient hardware, but the most safe platform is not secure enough for them.

Go figure.

*not all, there are notable exceptions explicitly supporting secure platforms through the modern Hardware Attestation model.

These are the same banks that very often have no app-based MFA login, and refuse to do anything other than send me an SMS TOTP.

The irony is that they'd rather suffer losses from fraud if the fraud is less than the cost of setting up App-based TOTP and a campaign to get customers to use the app. Yet they suddenly get all in a huff about PCI compliance as CYA so they don't have to pay an app developer to figure out how to check "is phone rooted? Yes. Which OS?"

You do have the option to change your bank when they consistently do dumb stuff you don't approve of. Shopping around will probably get you a better savings rate anyway.

Unfortunately, not an option right now. Setting up foreign currency payout is difficult in my country, a lot of paperworks needed, we don't even have PayPal. Also, the previous autocratic government, that was forcefully expelled after a bloody movement, left most of the banks in ruin. So not a lot of options left.

There is also the issue that other factors can keep you tied to a bank. Like having a mortgage there and getting a discount on home owner insurance for it, as well as getting a discount on the mortgage interest for banking with them.

Changing banks is easy when it's just about cash in a savings account. Not so easy in other cases.

If you're going so far as to install Lineage, couldn't you take the small step further and download alternate browsers to change the user agent? (Unless the default Lineage browser can do this already.)

I run a Google'd OS for now but I haven't used my bank's terrible app in years and years. I use their terrible website via desktop mode instead.

Well, to add insult to the injury, this bank does not allow website login without the mobile app. Which is absolutely infuriating. I did mention that on my comment :-)

I have never heard of a bank that has a hard requirement of a mobile app. Certainly none of the major banks like Wells Fargo or Chase require one. I do not own a phone and managers at times have to come up with undocumented fallback methods, but there is always a way.

I cannot imagine a legal defense for forcing someone to accept the terms of service of Apple or Google to use their bank account.

> I have never heard of a bank that has a hard requirement of a mobile app

My bank's app recently started warning me that I should "Turn off developer mode" for """security""" on every sign-in. This warning doesn't stop me from using the app yet, but I'm sure it'll get there.

In Sweden we use BankID (there is a similar service with the same name in each Scandinavian country).

It's impossibly convenient to be perfectly fair with you, however I know that my bank has stopped issuing the "BankID Card" (which was a card and pin device that allowed you to generate challenge numbers)- and now forces you to use the BankID app -- which will not run on rooted phones of course.

It's even slightly worse as the App requires NFC; so I can't keep a backup on my iPad (which is what I was doing before).

BankID works great on GrapheneOS fortunately.

Really? I never even installed the play store because it didn’t work on LineageOS.

I guess I absolutely need the play store to get BankID on the phone- so I’ll try that now with my Pixel 7.

Yes.

The only issue I had on GrapheneOS was that I had to play with the location permissions a bit when I wanted to copy the BankID to GrapheneOS from another phone (I've got some pictures of that in this blog post: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2025/08/28/ill_only_buy_dev...).

All other Swedish bank accounts I've tried have also worked great (including Swish).

Interesting. Does this mean that it is using a lower level of Play Integrity API checking (ie not hardware attestation), or are they using the open hardware attestation API (which... exists but is almost never used)?

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...

I have no idea, but I've never gotten the "this app is using Play Integrity" warning with BankID so maybe it doesn't use Play Integrity?

It is quite possible that you still may be able to obtain it by annoying them - in some cases provisions related to supporting disabled peoples can prevent them from fully getting rid of it.

On the last change my bank made me call to their hotline (even though everything else is possible to be done online) to keep using a separate hardware device - which ended up being just "so, you don't want to do it on a phone?" - "yep" - "ok, should be with you in a week or so".

I nowadays consider my phones pretty much throwaway devices - I don't have full control, I can't fully trust them. Plus they could be stolen, break when I drop it into water outside, ... - so I think it's ridiculously stupid to tie anything important to a phone as main authenticator.

Overall the usefuleness of a phone has been declining steadily - the selling point of a smart phone originally was that I have an app, and because it's a reasonably trusted device it'll store credentials, and I can use the app without logging in every time. By now most of the apps are just repackaged websites, and because of that - and because they don't trust their backends - we now have quickly expiring tokens in use in the apps as well. Most of the apps I don't use every day - and over the last few months every single one wanted me to log in again next time I used it.

Adding to that the nonsense of "there's a new app available, download that first before using" which typically doesn't add anything of value to me, and we're now at a state that not only does the typical smart phone app not offer a benefit over just using a website - it now often is even worse than just using a website.

If you install the app then you are complicit in normalizing the requirement of signing terms of service and data sharing agreements to US technology companies in order to do banking.

Feel free to say you are a member of the Church of Cryptography and that installing proprietary corporate controlled apps is against your religion.

Never been asked to install an app for banking, but a health care clinic dropped me as a patient for not buying a phone that can install their app. I was the first case where a patient refused to conform. Found a new clinic who was willing to earn my business with phone and email correspondence. The original clinic escalated the case to corporate HQ when I filed a public medical malpractice complaint, and they ultimately responded by adding a webapp.

DEMAND the right to live your life without corpotech in your pocket. I am now 5 years without a smartphone working as an engineer and founder with an active social life who frequently travels and it can absolutely be done.

> I have never heard of a bank that has a hard requirement of a mobile app.

It shouldn't be a thing, but it is. In the Netherlands the newer digital-only banks are allowed to do this. No smartphone, no service.

The more established banks (systeembanken) do have alternatives, but realistically not using their app for login auth and transaction approval is a huge pain in the ass.

(My bank, ABN AMRO, has an app which thankfully works fine on GrapheneOS.)

That sounds like it's a hard requirement for checking your bank balance/etc over the internet. Can't you just not do that and phone them up or go in person or read the monthly sent paper balances? Or just keep track yourself... A bank without a physical location is something I'd steer well clear of.

I barely use my bank's website and could easily not use it at all and still have all the functionality that a bank provides.

Paper balances and visiting your local branch are mostly a thing of the past. Calling them is an exercise in extreme patience. My bank all but discontinued actually visiting them except for certain specific things.

In the Netherlands (and beyond) online payments (shops, Steam, etc.) are made via the IDEAL platform run by the Dutch banks collectively. That is a good thing, because payments are secure and easy, and no one needs a credit card. But that does mean using your bank's web service to approve those payments.

Using the bank's offline OTP hardware (where you insert your debit card and enter a PIN and the code generated by the bank's website for an OTP) is possible, but using the app is significantly less effort than that. There is very little point in resisting it. It's not a healthy situation, but it is the reality.

The point in resisting it is to waste their valuable time on whatever the worst appless methods are, so they are forced to improve the efficiency to keep profits high if enough people do it.

If you install the app then you are complicit in normalizing the requirement of signing terms of service and data sharing agreements to US technology companies in order to do banking.

Be the person that demands better. Be the squeaky wheel. Call politicians and press if needed. Stop this shit now before it becomes expected for school and healthcare too.

There are only so many things you can actively fight. I can choose to actively pursue a number of topics and be the annoying squeaky wheel there, but not everything. This is one topic I cannot invest more time in, and which won't yield any significant returns even if I did. There are a number of topics where my voice can still make a difference, I focus on those.

> I have never heard of a bank that has a hard requirement of a mobile app

My banks all require their own individual apps for authentication and authorization. I can use the website but to log in and authorize any transactions I need their app. Ironically this runs on my 8 year old Android 10 phone (used as a backup) so security can't be part of it.

In Europe there are, e.g. at least some subsidiaries of Societe Generale, which have closed their Web sites on which their online banking services were previously available, and which refuse to provide their mobile apps otherwise than through the Google Store.

I doubt very much that it is possible for this practice to be legal, i.e. to condition the services of an European bank of the existence of a contractual relationship with a third party, which is non-European.

Nevertheless, nobody has enough spare time and money to challenge legally such banks.

Now I do my operations mostly through other banks that still have browser-based online banking, but I have not closed yet my last account at such a Societe Generale subsidiary, because I have regressed to use an antique SMS-based substitute for online banking, which is good enough for that account, which I keep only for a credit card used mostly for shopping in supermarkets or the like.

Bunq comes to mind, I'm guess N26 and Revolut are similar, app first "fin-tech" banks.

> Why is it so complex to have a foss mobile OS.

In a way it's not. As you mention, we have several of them. But they won't have mass-market appeal until they can run the same sorts of apps that Android and iOS can run. And no, "just use the mobile website" is not an answer.

How do I deposit a check with my bank on my phone without the app? I can't; the mobile website doesn't have that functionality. How do I send someone money via Zelle without the app? I can't; the mobile website doesn't have that functionality.

How do I use contactless payments? I can't; the ability to build an app like Google Wallet or Apple Pay requires deep pockets and trusted payments industry connections that open source mobile OS developers will likely never have.

How do I use Google's productivity suite? I can't; the mobile websites aren't functional enough. How do I use Microsoft's? Ditto.

How do I use the remote-lock functionality of my car? I can't; that's only available through the Android and iOS apps.

I could go on, and on, and on, but I think you see the point. Many people who advocate for these alternative OSes don't get it. "Do you really need that functionality?", they ask. "Why can't you just do that stuff in a web browser on your laptop instead of on your phone?", they ask. "Just use a physical credit card like I do!" And then they wonder why their alternative mobile OS will never go mainstream.

People actually really care about those features and capabilities. It doesn't matter if the people who build these alternative mobile OSes don't care, or think they're stupid, or unsafe, or bad for privacy, or whatever. If you don't build what people want, they won't use your stuff.

Emulating Android sufficiently well enough to run Android apps is a decent start, but so many apps rely on Play Services and Play Integrity that it's a losing battle, or at best a cat-and-mouse game to keep things working.

On top of that, mobile chipset BSPs require financial commitments and being a Real Company. Most open source outfits can't cross that bar, and the likes of Qualcomm will be wary dealing with an organization that wants to do open source.

> Emulating Android sufficiently well enough to run Android apps is a decent start, but so many apps rely on Play Services and Play Integrity that it's a losing battle, or at best a cat-and-mouse game to keep things working.

This is where antitrust laws are supposed to come into play. Play Services are a pain but in principle you can implement alternatives to them. It's the attestation stuff which is aggressively anti-competitive -- literally setting up a system with the primary function of excluding competing implementations from compatibility.

We can't let corporations get away with the fraud that competing with them is a security vulnerability.

> But they won't have mass-market appeal until they can run the same sorts of apps that Android and iOS can run

Waydroid allows me to run Android apps on my Librem 5.

> How do I deposit a check with my bank on my phone without the app? I can't; the mobile website doesn't have that functionality

So switch the bank to one not forcing you into the duopoly?

> For mobile, we have PostmarketOS, Phosh, Ubuntu Touch. I really must try living in them, is it on me? IDK, our government even has an identity app for iOS and Android. I should not be using it, I should stick to web. But its so much more convenient. I'm just weak, aren't I?

Don't forget GrapheneOS, LineageOS and other de-googled FOSS Android Versions

These aren't GNU/Linux, they have to follow Google's development strategy. It's like fighting with Chrome by using Chromium.

Nobody was talking about GNU. Most don't care if the userspace utilties are gnu coreutils/libc or musl/busybox for example.

AOSP is free and open source software.

You can't run AOSP on any existing hardware. Except maybe Pinephone and Libem 5, and only in theory.

Also, you should read all the good arguments on HN why you shouldn't use Chromium even though it's technically FLOSS.

> You can't run AOSP on any existing hardware. Except maybe Pinephone and Libem 5, and only in theory.

What do you mean? I can run AOSP on Google Pixel devices for example.

It's not AOSP, it contains a lot of proprietary blobs.

Foss people are on the spectrum and so never understand the common man. Simple as that I guess.

Well the nice thing about the spectrum is that we are all on it and that we draw imaginary lines ourselves.

All wisdom aside... I think you're right. I takes a certain grit to start to appreciate the ultimate effect of software freedom culture and licensing. Never mind the the whole philosophy.

It's like explaining CRISPR (yeah I'm a biologist) to a normie... Ok, so lets start with what DNA is... proceeds to guide someone through a lifetime in the molecular biology field....

This is irremovable tension - FOSS in its ideals is democratic, yet it can never succeed in democratization. This is why I think preaching freedom and agency is a bad strategy for the FOSS, even if its members believe them.

Money

It's the ecosystem. Without an ecosystem there will be less adoption and consequently less investment in the OS. Where I stay, so many services offered exclusively through Android/iOS apps with no alternative. Even government services are slowly excluding the web and becoming app only. There is an implicit expectation from everyone that one will have either an Android/iOS device and this only becomes stronger with time.

I don't know how many people realize but what can result from this can be very dystopian and is scary. But the best possible outcome from this I hope is that some day a wise government realizes how much of daily life is dependent on two corporations and passes regulations to standardize app runtimes. You should be able to publish applications that can run on any OS. Only then we'll see competition in the OS market.

Interestingly, we are, and have been, at a point were you can publish applications that run on any OS for a while, with PWAs.

There are very few software examples, that couldn't be distributed as PWAs, including secure things like banking, etc. With WASM in the mix as well, theoretically the sky should be the limit.

Even more interestingly it hasn't happened - mainly because Apple and Google haven't got behind PWAs for obvious reasons, so the app ecosystem just doesn't exist. It's hard to see how this will changes, when mobile operating systems are dominated by two players, with very obvious incentives to make things worse for consumers but better for themselves, by grabbing as much control of the apps on their system as possible.

If banks were to offer PWAs, they would probably demand something like Google's Web Environment Integrity proposal - or would be convinced by Google that they need it.

Online banking in the browser is hardly a new invention. It works fine, today.

The only noticeable difference between most apps and websites nowadays is offline capability and deeper system integration.

Native apps have been dumbed down so hard there is barely anything left not taken care of by browsers.

> For mobile, we have PostmarketOS, Phosh, Ubuntu Touch.

Why are you only listing DEs and not operating systems? (You also missed SXMo and more.) There are many more operating systems [0] and two working GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone. Why people are ignoring them on HN?

[0] https://pine64.org/documentation/PinePhone/Software/

PostmarketOS is, as the name implies, an OS. And I don't think OP was trying to make an exhaustive list.

The point is, there's plenty of "competing" options, but hardly anyone uses them.

The parent started their message with "Why is it so complex to have a foss mobile OS", which is not wrong but pretty misleading, as there are many existing mobile OSes that work quite well.

Yep. My thoughts exactly. Seems like everyone here is forgetting about those two.

> Why is it so complex to have a foss mobile OS.

This is not too hard. What is hard is to trust it enough. A FOSS OS, by definition, allows to install whatever software, and allows for modification of itself. It is built to overcome limitations, not impose them. In this regard, it's a perfect tool for a criminal who wants to circumvent security measures, because these are limitations. It's the same problem as with cheaters in online games, only with more than games on stake. Banks and payment systems want guarantees of integrity and protection, including protection from user's actions.

A FOSS OS also assumes that the user values the freedom, and is competent in its technical aspects. This is emphatically not true about many users. They choose iOS because it's locked down and thus they cannot inadvertently do something they don't understand, and can't be bothered to learn. More importantly, their grandmother cannot do something she doesn't understand but scammers persuade her to do.

It's a bit like driving on public roads. If you want to drive yourself, you have to reveal your identity and obtain a license. If you want the hassle, take a bus, but buses only go along their routes. Letting unlicensed people drive cars where they see fit was found unacceptably dangerous for everyone eround. Maybe mainstream mobile software development will follow this model, too :(

All this is true about Linux on desktop, though my bank still allows me to log in to online banking.

At least for now.

I'm not aware of any major issues this has caused.

The trust isn't the issue. Google and Apple has made DRM easy for these companies to integrate, and therefore they do it. There isn't more to it than that.

>I'm not aware of any major issues this has caused

Decades of desktop malware used to drain bank accounts are not a major issue?

You'd need to make a case that proprietary OSes such as Windows or MacOS lessen the issue compared to FOSS OSes such as Linux. I doubt it considering that Windows is / was known to be the worst offender here.

In any case my bank has not banned the use of Linux to do homebanking. Why? Because there isn't a easy to plug-and-play API to do DRM and remove consumer rights. This is largely for historic reasons, but there is no reason a FOSS mobile OS couldn't work.

In all fairness, a FOSS mobile os does for the most part work. Banking is pretty much the only big mainstream acception here. Most other exceptions are games with aggressive anti-cheat, or app simply not distributed outside a closed down store like Google play.

> It is built to overcome limitations, not impose them. In this regard, it's a perfect tool for a criminal who wants to circumvent security measures, because these are limitations.

None of those limitations actually provide any security.

In order to use your bank's mobile app, you need your bank login credentials. It does not matter how secure a bank app on your phone is or whether it requires some kind of attestation because the attacker is going to get the victim to type them into a fake app or the attacker's web page which don't require any such thing and aren't even necessarily on the same device. And then it does not matter what kind of device you require the bank app to be installed on, because the attacker will get one of those and use the phished credentials in it.

There is no security value in requiring things that are useless.

> A FOSS OS also assumes that the user values the freedom, and is competent in its technical aspects.

This is not an assumption at all. The user is not required to write their own software or install anything from outside of a trusted repository. The value of the OS to such people is that someone else can write that software, and then as it matures it makes its way into the trusted repository.

But if mere mortals can't do that, if kids need an ID and a credit card in order to learn and experiment and hobbyists hit friction and spend their time on something else, then those things are killed in the cradle and never exist to begin with. And then instead of free software made by the people who wanted to use it, you're left with only apps made by predatory for-profit corporations and scammers that make it into the official store because their scams are profitable.

> It's a bit like driving on public roads. If you want to drive yourself, you have to reveal your identity and obtain a license.

It isn't a public road, it's your own phone.

> They choose iOS because it's locked down and thus they cannot inadvertently do something they don't understand, and can't be bothered to learn. More importantly, their grandmother cannot do something she doesn't understand but scammers persuade her to do.

For what it's worth scammers have zero problems scamming grandmothers with Apple computers and iphones.

Yeah, the idea that people using iOS can't do something dangerous that they don't understand is absurd. They get scammed all the time.

As Microsoft how is it so difficult to have a mobile os

Microsoft has the problem that nobody likes them or trusts them, which makes it hard to get people to use their platform in a context where they're not the default.

Windows Mobile was great and people loved it at the time. Most people I knew in 2007/2008 were laughing at how the iPhone was an expensive toy phone because you couldn't even install apps or use MS Exchange.

Of course, the problem for MS was that Apple (and Google) quickly closed those gaps, and they just simply had better overall products.

> Windows Mobile was great and people loved it at the time.

But that wasn't the problem.

The iPhone and Android became popular because they were, respectively, good and "good enough" but free, and both Apple and Google had a good reputation at the time. Users were willing to buy those phones and developers were willing to make apps for them because they didn't expect those companies to screw them. The screwing only happened after they were no longer the underdogs and the network effect was already established.

Microsoft doesn't cast as an underdog and everybody expects them to screw you as soon as they get the chance, so not enough people were willing to give them the chance.

They could have overcome that to their own benefit if they would have bound their future selves from enshittifying the platform. Don't make "Windows Phone" under a proprietary license, make an actually open source Android fork which is an open platform like Windows instead of a closed one like iOS, but provide seamless integrations with the Microsoft cloud services instead of the Google ones. Write code that makes it work as well with Windows PCs as iPhones do with macOS. Make two phones yourself: a $999 Surface Phone with iPhone-quality hardware and a $199 one with basic hardware but nevertheless 12 years of security updates to get the low end of the market, provide something for kids/students and make it cheap for developers on the fence to get a device with your platform and make apps that integrate with your cloud services. You're not trying to sell an operating system, you're trying to take Apple's margins on the high end hardware and Google's cloud services revenue from the mass market.

But that's not what they did, and getting people to trust them with a closed platform wasn't in the cards.

In 2007 or 2008, defining "users" in this context isn't that straightforward of an exercise.

Apple and Google might have had a good reputation with consumers who were using feature-phones at the time... but they both had bad reputations with most existing smartphone users at the time. Those users were primarily business business users or power users who had requirements that weren't met by most of anything that Apple or Google was putting out at the time. RIM and Microsoft were building the smartphones that were most trusted at the time.

The mass consumer market for smartphones really didn't exist until Apple took phones in that direction. Before that, they weren't entertainment or consumer-focused devices, they were productivity devices.

iOS and Android, by their second or third release, were already better products than Windows mobile 6.5, both for entertainment and productivity. That's the reason they won. Neither of them were "free" to users -- and in fact the devices that they ran on were more expensive than Windows Mobile devices. People were only willing to pay more for these devices because they were doing something entirely different than what Windows Mobile did. They were consumer smartphone devices -- a new category of device that didn't exist.

This is not to be confused with Windows Phone -- which failed because it was way too late to market, way too far behind in ecosystem support, and didn't solve any new problems.

As far as I am concerned a Raspberry Pi 4G/5G/LTE-edition would be 50% of getting there.

Because PC is an American thing but phones are not. Obsession for standardization, modularity, and cross-compatibility are rather unique American cultural traits that aren't nearly as strongly manifesting elsewhere. "Fits right in" is quintessentially American thing.

The entire unitized jet engines on Boeing aircraft drops right off and swaps right into another host, sometimes even to different types of aircraft. PCI soundcards come off a i386 PC and go straight into PPC Macs. AR15 pressure bearing parts don't merely interchange between examples from different time and place but its grip and stock mounting patterns are becoming a industry standard of its own. Early Tesla battery packs come apart into bunch of 18650s and could reassemble into new packs(though it's a big no-no due to RUD risks). Meanwhile, Prius power units or front seats are for Prius only; it won't go into dozen different Toyota models, at least without substantial parts changes, modifications, and reconfiguration. Bugatti Veyron uses its own custom tires that aren't even forward or backward compatible with their own successor.

Same for phones: .apk runs everywhere, Linux do not, cameras don't interchange, internal connectors don't fit together, LCDs specific to anything are default unobtainium. microSD cards works on everything, but the moment you look away, Huawei invents a new incompatible format for absolutely no reason. Apple "reinvents everything" every time but internal organizations of components are stable at macroscopic levels for few generations unlike most other manufacturers.

It's openness of PC that is unique and precious, not closed nature of everything else being odd and inconvenient.

Nothing says "obsession with standardization" like being one of only three countries on Earth that can't figure out that water freezes at 0 and boils at 100.

> Because PC is an American thing but phones are not.

I don't really understand what you're talking about here. Android and iOS are American companies. American culture is John Deere locking down their equipment. Anti-consumer laws, pushing IP laws onto the rest of the world by treaty, being overly litigious, these are all American culture. I think the culture you're thinking of is nearly dead in a shell of corporatism.

The PC was a pretty unique event due to a confluence of historical factors that all came together in a certain way. It wasn't the way of things before, and it's been slowly moving away from how it was, and it's not really got anything to do with being American or not.

OSI layer 4 and up of Android/iOS are pretty well standardized, below pioneered by Nokia-Siemens are complete mess. Phones before iPhone sometimes had apps. Most of them used Java and lots of them needed model-specific ports due to model-specific bugs and quirks in JVMs. Compatibility of Linux is entirely dependent on stability of PC platform, and Linux itself offers little compatibility or modularity, just source level consistency with past self, unlike predominantly American platforms such as Windows.

When Google does it, of course, same apk files and NDK binaries just run on every models of every make as if always worked that way.

American companies appear to be the worst offenders in the world when it comes to breaking compatibility and right to repair, and this isn't to say those anti-consumer changes are okay at all, but I do think the reality is that, you can't break something that never existed, and it exists a lot more commonly in American things than in things from elsewhere.

Because the baseband chipset protocols and drivers are extremely patent encumbered. Any FOSS project will have to rely on on proprietary blobs for this part, and licensing deals from the existing patent holders, Quallcom. Nokia, Ericsson etc. .

You can see this is sort of adverserial to the FOSS way of doing things.

The licensing should (in theory) have FRAND terms and so might not be impossible. Couldn't someone just create their own chips? In the worst case, could someone be able to come up with a new protocol and start a new network (assuming they had the money?)

You can create your own chips but you will have issues obtaining a license to use spectrum in some countries. Often, licenses for spectrum where the device is licensed instead of the end user, require the device itself to comply with spectrum use requirements....since the user isn't licensed.

> You can see this is sort of adverserial to the FOSS way of doing things.

Example of the real-word problems with creating a FLOSS phone: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/

On the cyberdeck note, I think the dawn of mobile computing is superseding smart phones and I rather move to flip phone + mobile Linux and keep them distinctly separated

Because it's actually your telco's phone. They're the one that has the license to run the baseband computer and RF transceiver. The 'pad' computer device is sort of yours. But there's no legal way to have ownership of a cell phone unless you yourself bid for and get the RF spectrum and set up your network in a way that accomplishes the FCC coverage and timing requirements. Then run your own telco for your phone. Basically, impossible.

Smart phones try to limit and firewall the interface between the two but tight integration is required for energy efficiency. So a smart phone, or a cell phone, can never be yours. They aren't good choices for doing computing and this legal reality is becoming more and more obvious with time.

"Why is it so complex to have a foss mobile OS."

What does "foss mobile OS" mean

(a) installed on a portable form factor,

(b) integrates with a cellular modem. or

For discussion purposes, assume "portable" means pocket-sized and battery-powered

When the RPi first came out I remember a blog where someone had rigged up a makeshift battery making RPi portable. At the time, HN commenters seemed impressed. Today, I connect a "phone" to an RPi running NetBSD^1 and use the phone as a battery

1. Linux provides wider assortment of drivers NB. I'm not using NetBSD to make phone calls

Today there are

non-portable VoIP phones with PoE, and

portable cellular modems running OpenWRT

Tomorrow, who knows

Convenience and control are mutually exclusive; this seems unlikely to change. Choosing the later over the former is personal preference. Every user is different

Trying to control a "phone" might be a waste of time, an exercise in futility, especially when it is running a corporate OS. Whereas controlling a gateway running an OS of the user's choice might prove to be relatively easy. Phones provide convenience, not control

The hardware and boot process for every phone is different, and some vendors block users from installing other OSes. Then most mobile apps are proprietary, and some of the apps only allow you to run them on official Google builds of Android, via attestation.

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...

You can buy a completely open RISC-V chip and debug to your heart's content. x86 is also completely open, with only special outliers like XBox/PS5 even half-heartedly trying to disable third-party access.

So the "Right to read" is still bonkers.

"You [technically] can" is not good enough to declare the victory here. The downsides are so heavy that nobody can actually do it.

In near future I’d expect locked down phones and pads become more prevalent than laptops/desktops and most people don’t even own something that is not locked down.

Even laptops can be locked down too.

Great justification for switching to Graphene OS, more secure, more control, and google has to ask permission to install things and the play store is optional.

Unless you're against giving your money to Google and depending on their hardware and software.

This is intolerable. You own the device. You must be able to run whatever you want on it. Locking or limiting your access to the stuff you bought is not only unacceptable, it's basically like saying you don't really own anything. You're basically leasing a device until the OEM decides you can't run anything on it anymore. Would people accept if a car manufacturer prohibited you from driving their cars in certain places?

Meanwhile: VW is already limiting horsepower when the yearly subscription is ceased to be paid

It's already happening. The greediness of vendors, the ignorance of users...

Do not forget the inaction and/or corruption of lawmakers.

Now is a time in history where any corporation worth its ill-gotten billions should take advantage of the government's whole-hearted encouragement to push through anti-competitve and anti-consumer decisions to dominate the market and the public.

Back in the 90s Sun sold you computers with X amount of space. There was an option to upgrade. If you took it, they sent a technician around to do the upgrade. All they did was making the already existing space available. Sun always sold hardware with all the space installed but gave you only what you paid for.

I wonder if such actions can become a reason for persecution. Let me make an allegory: if I sold someone thing that is designed to break on purpose, and then requested pay for fixing it, it would be a felony. Why the remote downgrading is not considered a felony?

Has someone ever tried this in the court? Only question is the definition of 'broke'.

What's crazy is I can buy a video game license on steam and am permitted to mod it. Leasing precedence seems hidden in there sonewhere

I used to run Shizuku for my phone to run Hail (an app suspension tool). Now that my credit card bank start checking for USB Debugging I stopped using the app (and now my 3DS OTP has to be over SMS). I believe there's only two banks left in Thailand that do not check for one and it is just a matter of time, because any time these banks could have hired any of those "security" people who will ask why don't we block that.

So I moved to Dhizuku. It's a bit hard to setup, but once I'm done it's felt like untethered jailbreak - I don't have to complicated dance to start Shizuku now. Dhizuku basically make your phone a company phone, except it report to you. To setup a "managed main profile" you'd need to remove all accounts visible in Android account system and type a long ADB command so I don't think it can be maliciously done.

I suppose this will be how we'll use F-Droid in the next year for enthusiasts.

Perhaps using the bank's website is an option?

I don't have a banking app installed on my phone. When I need to make a bank transfer I sit down at the computer.

Not the parent poster but my bank uses its own mobile app for 2FA. No app, no website.

Perhaps there's another bank you can switch to? Here we have a few mobile-only banks, but traditional banks with websites and physical MFA devices as an option too.

Sadly, traditional banks are very eager to get rid of dedicated multi-factor devices in favour of their own mobile applications. I have seen strong encouragement via nagging and some going so far as to start charging for physical multi-factor authentication devices.

Likely this gives them another way to milk information out of you, push their marketing onto to you, and saves them from having to manage physical devices. The obvious downside is of course a degradation in security and further cementing the duopoly and more or less forced participation in it that we as citizens have to endure.

Don't know if it's the same there, but where live (and I guess all of the EU) most banks allow you to use the website, but require the phone to authorize logins and transactions (as 2FA basically)

I live in EU and my bank also offers a separate MFA code generation device

My bank retired their online banking website in favor of their app.

Not only that, but many of their core services (national payment network) are now exclusively offered in their app and no where else (yes, they will not allow you to do them in person or through their ATM). Your bank _will_ disable their website when you are the only one left using it.

I am not exaggerating. There is no way for me to use these core services if I don't use their app and they wont allow me to use their app thanks to their google play policy.

Unless otherwise mandated, their website will go away and they will have their way with your rights and make you pay for it.

Don't shrug this off. Fight this while you still can.

It's not an option on most Thai banks due to Bank of Thailand's regulations.

They requires that for any transaction past 50k THB per day (not per transaction) you'll need to provide face recognition. This means banks need to develop its internet banking solution past Web 1.0 era. From what I know (and I didn't do much research) most banks simply just shutdown internet banking instead of complying with that, only business banking get a separate website. My bank they simply merge the personal banking and corporate banking into a new system, but you still need to approve the transaction on a push notification (and perform face recognition).

It doesn't help that I believe many online casinos and scammers are scraping internet banking and even mobile banking APIs. There was a bank that apparently you could find PHP classes on GitHub that emulate their mobile app, and when that was in the news people were saying that the bank doesn't have proper security even though to use the class you'd need to provide exact same information in the app itself. Scammers used those code to move money from mules to mules, obfuscating the money's movement. The banks doesn't talk to each other either, so once the money goes through a few banks the chance you could trace it is almost none.

There was a court case that the court have ruled that if you were to get scammed to install apps on your phone that scam you for money, the bank is at fault as they have improper security. So they're heavily incentivize to protect users from themselves.

As for facial recognition, disabled people sent letters to Bank of Thailand, as legally blind people are not compatible with the liveness checks, the bank apps do block screen captures and refuse to work when any accessibility services is on and all BoT says about that is "we already told banks to do something" and the disabled people just send a second open letter this week, as many banks did nothing, some banks probably have a backend account flag to bypass the checks but didn't train the branch agents to perform such changes on the account.

Also Thailand has move into cashless - most local people don't use cash now except for small mom & pop shops that are doing dodging tax. Of course credit card is not accepted (or with minimum) - Thai business owners doesn't like fee no matter how small it is.

It's your device and you should be able to do what you want. I do want to point out though that in your specific case, your use of such tools, whether Shizuku or Dhizuku does actually affect the security of your device and could easily be exploitable. And yes, even lending the DeviceOwner permission to another app temporarily is not great...

However, it's problematic if the banking apps also block regular configurations on something like GrapheneOS, e.g. by inspecting the initial call stack of an app. There are many such trivial to bypass ways of doing root detection and most are easily circumvented anyway.

It must be left up to the device owner to decide if they want to have side loading app of unverified developer disabled or not. Period. There is nothing more to it. If there can be setting on phone to unlock bootloader, then there can also be a setting for this.

The requirement of verification to side-load any app is fascist control. It is clear as night and day.

Shame on Google and Apple, it was always clear this was the end goal and next up is also your PC.

Right after will come the removal off apps they don't like and there is nothing you can do about it.

Stallman was right

I asked an LLM, so I think I get it but could you try to mention what is meant with "Stallman was right"? The reason I'm asking you and not posting the LLM answer is because it still feels a bit icky to post an LLM answer for everything I don't understand [1].

[1] Feel free to discuss this too, if you want. I'm developing my opinion on it.

Probably https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html , mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

I wish it was as absurd today as it was the first time I read it.

Richard Stallman has spent basically his entire career trying to convince people that all software should be free as in freedom, so that people truly control the devices that they own--preventing things like Google being able to lock users out of the ability to install applications on a device that they purchased.

Read up on the principles of the Free Software Foundation if you want all the details.

Stallman has a long history of being very abrasive and ideological. He is the kind of guy who makes zero concessions for practicality, and he insists on prioritizing user freedom because he has always feared that otherwise users will be locked out of having the ability to truly control their computers. It's always been kind of easy to laugh at his crusade because of how zealous he is, and how absurd the scenarios he warns about seem to be. The thing is... he seems to have been right the whole time. Companies really do want to lock you out of controlling the devices you own, and do so at the first opportunity. So... Stallman was right.

> He is the kind of guy who makes zero concessions for practicality...

Respectfully, this claim is incorrect. See this 2013 essay [0] for one example out of many where concessions are made to practicality.

Folks who are unfamiliar with Stallman's writing and the general philosophy of the FSF and/or the GNU Project might find spending an hour or so reading through some of the essays here [1] (perhaps starting with this 1991 essay [2]) to be informative.

[0] <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/is-ever-good-use-nonfree-prog...>

[1] <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html>

[2] <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html>

From your link 0:

> The question here is, is it ever a good thing to use a nonfree program? Our conclusion is that it is usually a bad thing, harmful to yourself and in some cases to others. If you run a nonfree program on your computer, it denies your freedom; the immediate wrong is directed at you.

That is most certainly not making concessions for practicality in my book. So if anything, the citation you provided is IMO evidence for my claim.

To continue with the text of the rest of the section (with the footnotes present in the original removed):

  If you run a nonfree program on your computer, it denies your freedom; the immediate wrong is directed at you.
  
  That does not mean you're an “evildoer” or “sinner” for running a nonfree program. When the harm you're doing is mainly to yourself, we hope you will stop, for your own sake.
  
  Sometimes you may face great pressure to run a nonfree program; we don't say you must defy that pressure at all costs (though it is inspiring when someone does that), but we do urge you to look for occasions to where you can refuse, even in small ways.
  
  If you recommend that others run the nonfree program, or lead them to do so, you're leading them to give up their freedom. Thus, we have a responsibility not to lead or encourage others to run nonfree software. Where the program uses a secret protocol for communication, as in the case of Skype, your own use of it pressures others to use it too, so it is especially important to avoid any use of these programs.
  
  But there is one special case where using some nonfree software, and even urging others to use it, can be a positive thing. That's when the use of the nonfree software aims directly at putting an end to the use of that very same nonfree software.

Thanks, I wasn't trying to cherry pick or anything. But I don't think that the full text changes the substance of what is laid out in the first couple of paragraphs. The FSF (and by extension Stallman) refrains from calling the user names if he chooses to use nonfree software, presumably because they recognize that freedom must include the freedom to run any software at all, even if they consider it harmful. But they are quite clear that they do consider it harmful both to oneself and others to run nonfree software, even if it is useful. That, to me, is very much refusing to make concessions to practicality within their ideology. The only concession they do make is an explicitly ideological one, not a practical one! So again, this piece seems to me to support my claim, not to disprove it.

Stallman himself was using a laptop with a proprietary BIOS before truly free laptops became available. I don't understand how this isn't a compromise.

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45025116

> But they are quite clear that they do consider it harmful both to oneself and others to run nonfree software, even if it is useful.

As we're seeing, time and time and time again, it is harmful. The benefits may outweigh the harms today, but unless the steward of that nonfree software is extraordinarily careful and forward-thinking (as it were), those relationships inevitably go bad and become coercive over time. As we know, Stallman is (and always has been) right about this.

> That, to me, is very much refusing to make concessions to practicality within their ideology.

1) The last paragraph of the opening section is a plain and obvious concession to practicality: "But there is one special case where using some nonfree software ... can be a positive thing. That's when the use of the nonfree software aims directly at putting an end to the use of that very same nonfree software."

2) I'm not sure how saying "We'd be sad and would all be worse off if you used nonfree software, but do understand that there can be compelling real-world reasons to do so. Please don't use nonfree software, or -if that's not possible- consider small ways to avoid using it whenever opportunity presents itself." is anything but a concession to practicality. A hard-liner that refuses to make concessions to practicality wouldn't incorporate such a thing into their philosophy!

Respectfully, are you sure you're not letting knowledge of how Stallman uses/manages/etc his personal computing devices influence your interpretation of what these essays and the FSF's philosophy are about?

> As we're seeing, time and time and time again, it is harmful.

It certainly is not harmful, in my view. I think that the FSF's position on this topic is ridiculous. No harm whatsoever is done by running a piece of closed source software on your computer.

> The last paragraph of the opening section is a plain and obvious concession to practicality

No, it's not, at all! It is ideological, not practical, to say that the only reason to deviate from one's ideology is if doing so advances the ideology even faster.

> No harm whatsoever is done by running a piece of closed source software on your computer.

So, I'm confused. What do you believe that Stallman is right about? If there's never any harm done by running nonfree software on your computer, then what's the problem? I must have misunderstood your commentary here [0] because this statement

> The thing is... he seems to have been right the whole time. Companies really do want to lock you out of controlling the devices you own, and do so at the first opportunity. So... Stallman was right.

certainly seems like you were claiming that there are harms inherent in the practice.

> It is ideological, not practical, to say that the only reason to deviate from one's ideology is if doing so advances the ideology even faster.

Not making a concession to practicality would be saying "There is no circumstance in which one should use nonfree software. Not even in the service of replacing that nonfree software with free software.". You're simply incorrect about this... especially when you also consider point #2 of the section you've quoted from.

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45036440>

But... It IS harmful. And we know it's harmful.

Because with each single person who decides to run a particular non free software, that's a tiiiiiny bit more vendor lock on, a tiny bit of control lost, of power, freedom, given up.

And when enough people do this, what happens? Look at Google. Look at the post you're on. You tell me - what happens?

He's not wrong at all - it's just uncomfortable. This is a side effect of capitalism or maybe humanity. Its nothing you or I can single-handedly solve, or cause. But we each contribute to it a tiny amount.

> He is the kind of guy who makes zero concessions for practicality

Didn't he give some wiggle room in GPL license ?

Inasmuch as the GPL itself is not Stallman's preferred state of affairs (he would prefer to see copyright abolished altogether, at least for software, and copyleft is just a compromise for now), I suppose so. Otherwise I'm not aware of any wiggle room, was there something specific you had in mind?

> [H]e would prefer to see copyright abolished altogether, at least for software...

Oh? From the "Finding the right bargain" section of this 2002 essay [0]

> So perhaps novels, dictionaries, computer programs, songs, symphonies, and movies should have different durations of copyright, so that we can reduce the duration for each kind of work to what is necessary for many such works to be published. Perhaps movies over one hour long could have a twenty-year copyright, because of the expense of producing them. In my own field, computer programming, three years should suffice, because product cycles are even shorter than that.

Has his opinion changed since then?

[0] <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...>

I find Stallmans views are best summed up by this quote from him:

“I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.”

In this case it worked out well as a rhetorical device to make you look it up and learn something. Sometimes leaving out something for the reader to wonder about is more powerful.

> next up is also your PC

Already starting on macos. Gatekeeper had setting where you could allow any app. Now it is removed. While still possible to allow individual app (you need to do it after every OS update), trajectory is now clear.

boot into Recovery, run "csrutil disable" and do whatever you want (not a recommendation)

How many people would be able to use this workaround?

> The requirement of verification to side-load any app is fascist control.

Even the language we are using to describe the situation is problematic. Why do we say "side-load an app"? It should be just "run a program"!

An OS that doesn't let you run programs of your choice is laughable.

> It should be just "run a program"!

More accurate would be "run a program not approved by Google"

I think I have an old comment about this, but there is an actual `adb sideload` command for installing an apk on your phone from your computer. Since it's from your computer and not the phone itself, it's sideloading and not frontloading, I guess. Weirdly, and wrongly, people have also started to use the term to refer to just installing apps from outside the official appstores, but that's not sideloading. It's just installing an app. It's a normal Android feature. You can just grab a .apk file with your browser and install it like you would a .exe file on Windows.

iOS on the other hand historically required a jailbreak for this. I think that's where the confusion started. Android doesn't need a jailbreak, it doesn't need root (privileges), it doesn't need a custom ROM. You can just install stuff, it's normal. I think iOS users don't realize how different Android is and they just start repeating words like sideload and root without knowing what they mean, assuming it's just Android-speak for a jailbreak. They don't realize there's no jail in the first place.

I am aware English is a living language, and if enough people are wrong for long enough, they stop being wrong, but it's certainly painful to witness.

Yeah, words just change meaning and it's frustrating because people generally change them in ways that make their usage more sloppy, less precise. I've had multiple arguments on HN about this with the term open source, but unfortunately you've already lost the battle with sideloading, at least according to Wikipedia.

> When referring to Android apps, "sideloading" typically means installing an application package in APK format onto an Android device. Such packages are usually downloaded from websites other than the official app store Google Play. For Android users sideloading of apps is only possible if the user has allowed "Unknown Sources" in their Security Settings.[1]

I always used "adb install" to install programs on my phone from my PC. I never heard of the "adb sideload" command, but my search results [1][2] indicate that the second command is for installing things from the recovery mode, when you don't have the full Android system running. So "install" is the command for installing programs under normal circumstances using the Android installer.

[1] https://android.stackexchange.com/a/84248

[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/how-to-use-adb-android-3260...

PC only turned out open, because IBM never saw it coming, and when they tried to get control back it was too late.

Yep. PC openness is totaly a bug and not a feature of the capitalism. We should cherish this situation and fight for it because it really feels like the other long term alternative is techno-fascism.

I'm all for calling out fascist behavior when it is spotted, but let's not muddy the waters further. This word is already denatured enough.

This is not fascism, this is just a rational move from Google in a market economy. It feels like every time something like this happens, Americans rediscover what capitalism is and implies, then blame it on "human nature", "greed" or "fascism".

Google's stated reason for doing this says nothing about it being for market reasons, but rather for "security".

As they always do, you should know better than to buy it.

> This is not fascism, this is just a rational move from Google

Google is not very separable from the US government, and they use illegal monopoly everywhere without any oversight.

One day people on the internet will learn what the term „fascism“ entails. This is just plain old government overreach.

"Government overreach" by a private corporation? Let's see what wikipedia has to say about that:

> A fascist corporation can be defined as a government-directed confederation of employers and employees unions, with the aim of overseeing production in a comprehensive manner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Fascist_corporatis...

Google goes even further than that: they do not only control and oversee all production via the Play Store, they also control all usage of their products. And while it may currently not be government-directed, they certainly are government-protected as long as they're allowed to run the only app store in town.

I'm absolutely against this and for similar reasons have boycotted Apple for my entire life on hard ideological grounds, but not everything is "fascist" lol. Don't misuse the term.

In any case, I hope this blows up in Google's face hard, ROMs like LineageOS become as popular they were back in their heyday, and root hiders get extra attention too so banking apps etc work seamlessly as on non-rooted phones. Requiring some developer ID crap is essentially as bad as Apple has it, reason for which I've always considered developers having Apple phones quite unserious.

They're not going to publish device trees for pixel phones, so what hardware will you use?

Commercial apps and services will require passkeys and device attestation, so you'll only be able to use open source software even if you have a device to run it.

The walls are closing in, and it's not just mobile. It's only a matter of time before passkeys are used to block Linux users from the commercial Internet as well.

I did manage to run banking apps, and after some work, even Fortnite just for principle (they had a crazy anti hacking system) on my rooted Oneplus 7 Pro. I do want to believe if there's a will there's a way. Google has really overstepped here.

There’s a feedback form, in case anybody wants to tell Google what they think about all this: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfN3UQeNspQsZCO2ITk...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45030967

Presumably this won't apply to Chinese OEMs, since even though their devices do ship a disabled by default Google Mobile Services (without the user facing Play Store APK), it obviously would not be suitable to require Google involvement for developing internal apps. The OEMs could set up such a debug licensing service themselves, but each of them would have to do it themselves, and then it would be impossible to debug Google-based apps on the devices.

Many Chinese OEMs are not Google certified, so it won't for sure apply to them. Some (Huawei) even had to implement their own app store and replacement for Google services. They are basically de-googled devices, though, sadly, often loaded with spyware from the other camp.

But some, like Oppo and Vivo are--they ship with a Google-OKed copy of GMS, and redistribute the Play Store on their own app store as a way to install it (ostensibly for use when traveling outside the mainland, though it can also be used with a VPN). So clearly they are on some level Google certified.

However, they also contain switches to disable background GMS, which makes them almost de-googled. All of them, not just Huawei, have their own app store/updater, and have some sort of push notification to replace Firebase Cloud Messaging (as I understand, Tencent provides a one touch service so devs don't need to hardcode each OEMs notifications). Otherwise, it would be impossible to get apps or notifications without a VPN/proxy.

There goes one of the main arguments why I've been using Android over iPhone

I also remember the early war between Androids and the iPhone. The main argument was that you don't need Google's permission to run applications.

Can Google be sued for misleading and defrauding phone owners?

Yes, and that may be something Google does care about in the end. If Android becomes as closed and as controlled as iOS, why Android??

Because most of us live in countries where an iPhone is two months salary at least, or a contract bound to several years before it can be cancelled, while Android is usually half of that, with the freedom of pre-pay.

If anything, this is even worse than what Apple does. iPhone users frequently argue that the inability to install arbitrary software is a feature in their eyes, one of the things that attracts them to the platform. I disagree with their argument, but in fairness I must admit Apple has never pretended that an iPhone is a device you control. They have always been very up front that it is a curated experience, their way or the highway. It's distasteful to me but they're honest about it. What Google is doing is a bait and switch to so many users who chose their platform specifically because it was open.

Those questions may make some users uncomfortable, but it's wishful thinking to believe they would make Google uncomfortable. Google doesn't care in the slightest about these issues.

Agreed. PR departments are paid specifically to weasel around questions like this. If anything, it's in Google's interests because it gives them something to claim they're cooperating with.

I wonder if this would give Epic cause against Google?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple

If Google controls verification, then Google - not Epic - controls who can distribute Android apps on the Epic store.

That case is why I don't think Google will actually roll this out in the US (and the EU for different reasons).

But I was wrong about them even ever attempting something like this so who knows.

I'd guess that the main reason Googel has done this is to prevent side-loading of messenger apps, such as Signal, with true end-to-end encryption. Such messengers would be very difficult to surveil at scale. You might ask why not to simply install these apps from Play Store? The reason is Google demands signing keys for all apps, so it can impersonate the developer, inject any spyware, rebuild the app, sign it and make it look untampered. Side-loading bypasses this entirely.

Google doesn't demand your signing keys, and transforming your app in that way is easily detectable by the developer.

Individual privacy and anonymity matter substantially less when Governments are basically decent and play by the rules, and so it seems there is a tendency to value convenience and utility over privacy and anonymity.

When Government goes bad, suddenly we are faced with the utmost need for privacy and anonymity, but we may by then be in a situation where privacy and anonymity are difficult to obtain, with all the consequences that then flow from that.

Yeah, that's what a lot of us have been saying for decades.

But notice that Google is doing this as the government in its home country is going bad (or at least getting dramatically, qualitatively worse than it has already been).

Some people see features where others see bugs.

> To Google, these questions might be uncomfortable.

Not really, there is no discomfort from something they can easily ignore.

>The developer of ICEBlock disclosed his identity. In addition to receiving threats of federal prosecution over the app, the developer has faced other backlash, including his wife being fired from a federal government job.

This is the sort of thug behavior you see in CCP China. If the govt can't directly detain overseas dissidents or other "undesirables", it goes after their families back in the mainland.

This is the most terrible thing that I read in this year.

Android is no longer open-source, with a move like this. In the past few years, it has become obscene how emboldened the corpos have gotten with how far they are willing to push to mine every last crumb of data, eager to sell it to dangerous government bodies.

You americans are strange. Your government makes arbitrary arrests, illegally searches phones, massively de-funds science and health projects, and only a handful of people demonstrate.

Now a company wants the identity of the companies it works with because it distributes their software, and it looks like a massive "scandal". Well at least I am realistic that the "scandal" is only within certain circles.

Google always knew the identity of companies whose software it distributed (via Google Play), now it also want to know the identity of software developers it has nothing to do with. Get your facts straight next time before writing a snarky comment!

They know the days of the app-store monopolies are ending so they are now implementing apple-style notarisation - which they could have done years ago, but never seemed to need to until now...

IMHO, thats is them still having an unfair control over the android market so the EU will come for them eventually - and no doubt they will implement some other devious bullshit.

Ideally the world will wake up and realise multi-sector megacorps simply should not exist and split them all up accordingly - but I'm not holding my breath.

So no F-Droid?

Fdroid signs builds with own key, so it shouldn't be a problem if they pass this verification.

It won't be a problem. . . until Google revokes their accreditation for some reason they won't explain.

As far as I understand, verification is tied to the package name (or at least the prefix). Since F-Droid packages thousands of applications from different developers, I don't see how they could reasonably get verified.

Did you actually reach out to Google?

Trying to get hold of the correct person to get proper answers is a bit harder than you think.

The hard part is who does it, not that the process is complicated.

If you have an influenctial social account with lots of followers, Google reaches out to you. They only react if something has a potential to hit their PR.

So in order to get in contact with Google, you reach out to influencers, not Google itself.

Very good questions, and hope that they can get answers to them.

Maybe we can finally spark an omarchy style user driven linux mobile OS ala DHH?

Or are users just going to face network bans and additional tracking like with grapheneos?

Omarchy is just a set of defaults for an existing software stack. The problems here are at a much more fundamental level: getting devices that can be unlocked, getting device drivers/firmware that are also updated on a regular basis, supporting hardware attestation and getting app makers to support it without Google's support (assuming an Android compatibility layer), getting a healthy app ecosystem (if there is no Android compatibility layer).

Currently probably the best route is basing the OS on Android (so that you can benefit from all the existing apps), making a non-hostile reference device, and getting regulators' attention (the EU is probably the most likely to succeed) to break Google's monopoly on attestation.

This is largely what GrapheneOS is currently trying. I think what we can do as users is install GrapheneOS with sandboxed Google Play and for any apps that do not work, contact their developers. If GrapheneOS manages to get millions of users and get on the radar of app developers, that's the best shot I think.

But it feels like the window is closing quickly. So if you care at all about any of this, today is the day to get a GrapheneOS device and make yourself heard.

While I am against the policy, Google only publishes developer's full legal name and email address if the app is monetized [0].

If the app is monetized, then the full mailing address is shared.

If money is involved, it’s fair for users to know who they’re dealing with. Developers who want to hide their personal identity can still do so legally with a shell company.

Taking it a step further, if I am going to run your code on my device, I want to know who I'm giving access to my data/cpu/hardware.

Just like with offline transactions, customers should know who they are giving money to.

----

> Google will display your legal name, your country (as per your legal address) and developer email address on Google Play. If you decide to monetise on Google Play, then Google will display your full address.

[0] - https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

Small developers need to be easy to contact. Meanwhile Google is notorious for being difficult to get human support. Seems fair.

All of those are fine things to expect from Google Play but the point is moot because this verification would also apply to apps installed from external sources where they shouldn't have any jurisdiction.

Google, just like Apple, should be free to enforce any kind of verification they deems necessary on Google Play, as long as they allow third party stores to be on equal footing, which they don't.

I agree. we should be able to install apps we want to install. But if you're installing them from the Google Play store (which is what is discussed) then you should be allowed to know who you're doing business with.

> But if you're installing them from the Google Play store (which is what is discussed)

Maybe there's been a miscommunication somewhere but Android Developer Verification (what this thread is about) applies to all apps, even those installed outside of Google Play store.

I understand. The author is critiquing a specific part of this policy: forcing developers to identify themselves. Their main point is not about allowing app developers to sideload.

I know I risk being down voted remorselessly but I have to put this in context. Where in the real world is anonymity considered ok? If I only put a flyer through someone's letterbox here in the UK, I have to identify myself. If I sell a physical product I not only have to identify myself but take on serious legal liability. An author can take on a pseudonym but only via an identified publisher.

In fact that latter example might provide a solution. Set up a company willing to publish apps whilst hiding the actual developer's identity.

The thing is that so many people are used to doing whatever they want from behind the safety of their screen and are now able to do a lot of things they don’t want anyone to know about. Now the law and common sense is catching up and we’re starting to see things we take for granted in the physical world are coming to the digital world. And I think a lot of people are scared of not being able to do what they used to or being found out for doing it.

Plus, and doing what you suggest but in a country where board directors don’t need to be public really solves it.

Yea, cus when I write a fanfic I should show my id to the company that owns the printer I purchased and own, before I print out a copy to give for my friend, ffs. Does that analogy make sense to you?

No because you purposefully crafted one that is not BB anywhere near similar to what was being discussed. Being obtuse generally means you’re wrong and know it but don’t like the truth.

> Now the law and common sense is catching up and we’re starting to see things we take for granted in the physical world are coming to the digital world.

Your concept of "common sense" is repulsive, as is your submissive attitude.

Haha yea me disagreeing with folks like you is submissive

> Where in the real world is anonymity considered ok?

I am allowed to invite guests into my home even if their identity isn't pre-registered with my landlord.

Personally I'm a big fan of not registering with the police every time a use a public restroom.

It's for security, like showing your ID at the airport! Airports have public restrooms, after all.

(/s)

Quick, show me your ID. That way if you get scammed I know know it was you that got scammed!

But guests can't stay over night without registering them in many countries

Fortunately I don't live in one of those.

Tell you what: Sign your post with your full legal name and address, and we'll talk.

That's not even true for physical products. I can give away stuff anonymously at hackspaces, or in many other settings.

Identification is only required if I want to sell stuff, at large scale.

Google's plan would also utterly destroy fdroid and similar projects.

A coin-op vending machine is anonymous too. As were pay phones.

I don't think anyone is saying Google must allow anonymous apps on their app store. Nor is there anything wrong with giving the user of a phone the option to only install apps which have been vouched for by some trusted third party. The problem is, Google wishes to take away my choice to install apps that don't follow their rules. And that's bullshit. It's my device, which I own. Nobody except me should be able to restrict what does and does not run on that device.

> If I only put a flyer through someone's letterbox here in the UK, I have to identify myself.

Has the UK gotten rid of public postboxes? Do you have to present government-issued ID to post a letter, flyer, or other mailpiece? Do the UK post-handling companies check the sender's claimed name and address on the mailpiece and toss it in the trash if it doesn't correspond to a registered combination of name and address?

> Where in the real world is anonymity considered ok?

Tons of places in the US, and I expect most everywhere else in the world... including the UK. (Or has the UK prohibited things like anonymous food pickup and late-night back-alley dalliances?)

If one is selling computer software, it makes some sense to keep track of the receiver of those funds... if for no other reason than to know who to go after if taxes on the sales aren't paid. However, if someone is giving away software perhaps on an AS IS basis and especially with NO WARRANTY, there's no reason to proactively keep track of who is offering that gratis gift. If some sort of legal problem ever arises because of the contents of that gift, go call the cops in and they can investigate after the fact.

I've been paying some attention to the conversation about Google's proposed policy for the past several days, and I've not seen anyone talking about the significance of the set of countries where this is rolled out to first: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. Perhaps there is no connection, but I haven't seen anyone asking what relevant repressive policies these four countries might have in common.

It's weird.

> I've not seen anyone talking about the significance of the set of countries where this is rolled out to first: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand

This was really interesting and somewhere there was a comment/quote that these countries are affected most with the malware distributed with side-loading, I can't find this comment now. But while trying to find some information, I found the info about 2023 Alphabet/states $700 m. settlement. It came mostly unnoticed on HN [1] (two posts, 2 comments), but there is interesting timings coincidence in the settlement text ([2])

  ...6.9.2 For a period of at least four (4) years from the Effective Date, Google will maintain the following functionality in Android version 14+ for Mobile Devices:
  (a) Google will support APIs that enable sideloaded app stores that have received User consent to install apps to avoid automatic updates taking place while the User is using the app....

2023 (settlement) + 4 years = 2027 (mentioned for other countries). This can be related to apps like F-Droid, this ruling might prevent Google from making F-Droid comply if the US was announced to meet the new rules earlier (before 2027). There are other formulas that might end up 2026/2027 when calculating so to be on the (legal) safe side, Google probably made US join later. Probably those countries are also for beta-testing both in the technical and legal sense.

The settlement might be interesting in other other respects also. Even the forces (the states, U.S Attorney) that drove the suit in 2021-2023 might join here though during this admin it's really questionable.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38691926

[2]: https://www.oag.state.tx.us/sites/default/files/images/press...

> Where in the real world is anonymity considered ok?

It should be everywhere, no matter the place or the platform.

That was my answer as well. Anonymity is not only "considered OK", it is a fundamental human right that must be guaranteed and protected unless there's a real need to violate the person's privacy.

The fact the question was phrased in that way is disturbing. How far the loss of personal freedom has been normalized. Like the term "side loading", it's an insult to general-purpose computing.

> Where in the real world is anonymity considered ok?

You've listed commercial activities. The vast majority of non-commercial activities don't require any sort of registration or identification.

Installing an app that your friend or internet stranger developed in their spare time is not a commercial activity and people shouldn't be forced to publish their personal information in order to do so.

I'm a nobody, but let me answer these questions in 60 seconds.

1: None, no anonymous accounts allowed. 2: None. Civil what?. 3: It's the Google's company policy, don't use our products if you don't agree to it. 4: If devs write apps for this nearly impossible to develop Mac AppStore ecosystem, I don't see even a slightest problem here. 5: Just change package IDs.

Thank you for listening, see you again next time.

Do you work for Google?

No, but I was a developer of an app for iPhone, so I know the thought process.

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