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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

I still remember the era when jailbreaking Android and iPhones was gaining popularity among less technical people. It was eye opening to watch how many people I knew would search for a random web page and then unquestioningly follow instructions on the screen to install software from the first link they clicked.

All of this to get custom fonts in their messaging app or some other little feature they saw on someone’s phone.

I started getting a lot of requests for help from people who had broken key functions on their phones or even bricked them entirely.

Even today there’s a culture of downloading Android builds from long forum threads on XDA developers and other forums and hoping they’re not compromised.

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> All of this to get custom fonts in their messaging app or some other little feature they saw on someone’s phone.

Yes, and this is normal and right. They're expressing curiosity, and in the process also actually exercising ownership of their devices.

It's how most of us here learned computers, too.

The only problem in this picture, really, is that we've allowed - or even helped - software and platform vendors to disempower regular users so much that "to get custom fonts in their messaging app" they need to do something high-risk.

Most of what regular people try to do is like this anyway - something that should be a basic functionality, that used to be basic functionality, but has been taken away from users for their "safety" or because "sekhurity" or such.

The Linux community settled very quickly on the model of a Linux distribution, distributed via FTP, as a safe place to acquire on OS. Some got very popular.

Is there anything like that in the Android world? I'd love an alternative Android distro the supports writing notes with the S-Pen from the lockscreen. Where does one find such a thing?

There are AOSP-based distros like grapheneOS and calyxOS with various "app stores" like fdroid that behave similar to package managers on linux. There are also just run-linux-on-your-smartphone distros like postmarketOS. I doubt stylus integration is good in either.

> Even today there’s a culture of downloading Android builds from long forum threads on XDA developers

I did that this month. I wouldn't do that for a device I use for anything sensitive, but I have a niche use case for my old Nexus 5, and it needed to be running at least Android 8.

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