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Comment by qurren | Hacker News Reader

If they hard fork, a lot of apps that are generally "necessary for the average person" (e.g. Uber, banking apps, Gmail, Whatsapp/Wechat/Line) might stop working.

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Sure, but what could graphene do in the meantime? It's either make it work for the moment or stop those apps from working today.

I'd like to see them lay more ground work for web apps but it's a tough spot and the easiest choice at the moment is to continue with AOSP.

I mean we privacy nerds all love webapps but the reality is the people actually in charge of S&P500 companies hate them. They really, REALLY want to fingerprint your device and use it as a verification and tracking mechanism.

Until that changes, webapps aren't going to sell.

Even Google tried multiple things to "sell" the idea of webapps (e.g. Polymer project) in 2011-2015 and failed.

Funny enough, Wechat kinda succeeded at webapps in China because there's a strong user preference to stay inside one monolithic "everything app".

I find, as a user primarily of free and open source software, it’s really the opposite: native FOSS apps have minimal tracking and analytics that defaults to off or is easily disabled, while most free and open source webapps are behind Cloudflare, blocking access to them until I turn off my VPN and disable the anti‐fingerprinting features in my browser.

I don't want to see more groundwork for web apps. GrapheneOS is meant to be secure, which means running trusted apps on-device. My messages are less secure if they permanently are stored on a server.

Yes, but there is no alternative other than giving up. Starting a new OS from scratch with zero apps is a much worse starting point compared to a platform where 99.9% of apps work (minus those relying on Play Integrity with strong integrity) which may have its rug pulled in the future. The race here is about getting to a big enough market share that GrapheneOS cannot just be ignored as completely niche but has to be treated as a small but not insignificant minority.

> Yes, but there is no alternative other than giving up.

Of course there is. Sent from my daily driver Librem 5.

Disclaimer: It is less secure than GrapheneOS, according to the GrapheneOS threat model.

It's not ideal, but in the case a hard fork happens, they could implement the same APIs and most apps will probably continue to work. Similar to how microG is a replacement for Play Services and still works for most apps (not as well as sandboxed Google Play of course).

Above that, not much would change for a few years anyway, because apps still target ancient Android versions.

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