> Google simply regrets android being open source.
But they won't learn that on their own. They are breaking the deals. So we move. We force their hand
What do you have in mind?
This is the message that Firefox needs to push: Hate ads? Use Firefox.
Also, switching browsers is trivial. I do it on my parents' machines and they don't notice
The GPL is worth nothing if nobody is enforcing it aggressively.
Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
Many people argued that 'customarily used for software interchange' is worded-as is to always be relevant to the times when the license is applied and that providing access to a Git repository is customary nowadays. In fact:
- The upstream Linux tree is distributed through Git.
- The relevant Pixel kernel sources used to be distributed through Git.
IANAL, so I am not sure how this part of the license will hold up in court, but the spirit is clear. Providing a Google Drive link is not customarily used for software interchange.
Also, I think it is fairly clear that the procedure is put in place to make everyone's life difficult, given that the relevant source used to be distributed through Git.
With something like a browser (engine), I'm totally okay with someone saying "I'm an expert and I'm trying something with my own vision/priorities. I don't want input from random people that I have to spend time evaluating."
Only GPL is somewhat immune, because Stallman was always right.
This is why they are developing their own kernel.
I've been using it for more than 20 years.
I don't know why either of use loled though
I’m not doubting they added some ai junk somewhere. But whatever they did seems very easy to ignore.
A simpler, better time. I miss it :(
IOW:
Don’t threaten to stop using Google Chrome if they do one more evil thing. Start now.
If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then you wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
Not at first. Yet over time the work increases as one must differ more and more from Chrome. I believe that's why so many forks are giving up on Manifest V2.
Under the hood, what the MV2 uBlock can do and Lite can't is at the least stripping tracking parameters from links and block 3rd party trackers that are cloaked in a subdomain of the originating site.
The thing is that most of this is invisible to people who already live within Google’s bubble which is probably why they don’t get called out for it. The promotion is visible mostly to those of us who don’t, and it gets irritating.
Chrome was better than competition pretty much all its lifetime and there's plenty of historic articles to prove it, no matter how much your emotions refuse to accept the history.
We were there and we didn't install Chrome via some made up toolbar installer, but because it was significantly better than what Mozilla and Internet Explorer offered.
https://www.osnews.com/story/25184/adobe-tricks-users-into-d...
https://www.labnol.org/software/chrome-with-adobe-reader/201...
https://forum.filezilla-project.org/viewtopic.php?style=246&...
> nearly 10 % of the installers came with a third-party browser (e.g. Chrome)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016740481...
Actually, use it now.
The actual maps are much better in osm than in Google.
That reminds me, place reviews using ATProto. Kinda surprised that no map client jumped on that when it's the exact thing you need to replace a centralized service. A lot of people use Google Maps to find businesses more than directions.
Because of their enshitification we do have alternatives that were developed.
At this point the their only services I'm using are Maps, Translate and Keep Notes and it is mostly due to lazyiness as all of those already have alternatives.
Edit: forgot about YouTube, which is ironic, because that one is a toughest one because the value comes from creators, but I'm doing my part and using GrayJay[1] so I can follow them if they switch their platform.
Playing at their table is a losing game, the house always wins.
Android is even more of tragedy, given how all relevant NDK game development APIs are also available on GNU/Linux.
The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation. Each phone manufacture wants to build their own experience and building on top of AOSP is how they do so.
Is it really a losing game? Building a new OS from scratch is not worth it. Why throw away an entire app catalog for your device? Consumers want access to existing app catalogs when buying a phone. If anything is a losing game it's building a new mobile operating system over forking Android as a base.
Technologists need to aggressively reject solutions which don't spread freedom to ordinary users as well.
AI generating code changes the game significantly, though there are issues with that. A new OS would have taken several millions and multiple teams, but can now be done for far less. The problem is hardware to run it on. Who'd pay $2,000 for a shittier phone with less features when a $500 used one with GrapheneOS is right there? So the market, (in)efficiently, hasn't come up with a new phone OS. Not because it isn't warranted, but because the free market isn't a perfect system.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wfpydl/i_asked_c...
No, the reason is that AOSP doesn't even include a functional keyboard nor a functional call manager nowadays.
AOSP apps were abandonned around Android 11, you can't just keep them as is for real users, it looks amateur.
Even the open-source ROMs came to the same conclusion eventually and developed their own.
No one was using those apps so it didn't make sense to spend time on them.
Don't be a prick.
This is what empire-building middle managers say to rationalize their boondoggles, but in actual fact most customers can't even tell the difference between two different vendors' Android skins, definitely can't tell the difference before they buy one, and the way they actually differentiate phones is on real hardware differences that show up in the specs like the camera or performance.
The hardware company's idiosyncratic fork of the software is irrelevant at best and annoyingly irregular in the common case.
You forgot about one thing they care about above all others — cost.
And the easiest way to keep costs down is through "alternative revenue streams", which involve your own tracking, your own app bundling deals and your own App Store, which you're pushing on users constantly. And if you do that, you may as well get the branding win from doing the custom skin too.
Assuming you can get a hardware vendor to support your fork.
Android has always been a weird blend of proprietary BSPs wedged together with the core AOSP project - we used to have an entire team whose full-time job was merging the Qualcomm BSP into our AOSP fork. At the time you didn't even get access to that BSP without inking a deal with QCOM...
It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.
It should be the users choice how their browser renders, it's their damn browser. Instead, browsers are built to follow standards that mostly favor the developers preferences above those of the person who actually own the device rendering it.
The modern web is user hostile by design.
A lot of websites back in the 90s were just made up of images that were clickable using image maps. It was not a fun time.
I get what the parent comment is saying, though, and it's why I use Gemini (the protocol[0], not the AI). It doesn't align with corporate interests, but for now I consider that a good thing.
Think "an interactive visualisation for choosing a seat when buying a concert ticket." That's not a "traditional" webpage, should work on whatever device the user is currently on (so native is unsuitable), and shouldn't require the user to install anything.
People clearly want web pages to be exactly this; we're on iteration #3 of the idea now. Iterations 1 and 2 were Java Applets and Flash, not necessarily in that order, and they were massively popular despite their shortcomings. Clearly, if we somehow deprecated the web as it is now (which is an utterly ridiculous idea, which makes me really curious what comments like yours are exactly trying to achieve here), as long as we keep it an open standard, users will choose browsers which offer this capability in some form. We should appreciate that the current iteration is an open standard which anybody is free to implement, instead of some proprietary blob that you need to license from Oracle or Adobe.
So do hackers. A big chunk of the open standards revolve around sandboxing malicious code, and given the amount of tracking happening anyway, fail at it.
The biggest thing standing in the way of this is actually Apple, since they don't allow competing browser engines or equivalent so you can't make something like this for iOS whatsoever.
Doing that in Safari doesn't work twice. First, if Safari doesn't already expose whatever GPU primitives you need to do things efficiently, you can't get them. And second, your API implementation (which is likely to be large) would then have to be distributed by anyone using it instead of being part of the browser they use for all sites, creating a >100MB dependency for a <50kB web page.
As for the styling and fonts - it's all a bunch of low-key trade-offs here. The businesses want to exercise total control over the end-user experience, for sales/marketing and branding reasons. At the same time, going off the beaten path quickly makes development costs skyrocket.
Flash was a good choice back when all visitors were using a PC and there were like 3 different screen resolutions to choose from. Once laptops gained popularity, this started to shift, then pre-iPhone mobile briefly became consideration, and Flash stopped being sufficient; then iPhone came out, killed Flash, and started an era where every visitor has a different screen than the previous one. "Responsible web" became the cheapest option, and you can see its evolution as a trajectory towards giving more and more control over experience to developers, and less and less to the users.
Otherwise, explain Flutter.
If AMZN couldnt make their fire whatever it was called fork of Android really grow, what chance has the community got ?
Difficulties maintaining a sufficient number of contributors to keep the project viable have persisted for several years. In January 2015, the project reported a lack of active developers and code contributions.[49] There have been continual problems providing timely fixes to security vulnerabilities since 2015.[50][51][52][53] In September 2016, OpenOffice's project management committee chair Dennis Hamilton began a discussion of possibly discontinuing the project, after the Apache board had put them on monthly reporting due to the project's ongoing problems handling security issues.[54][55][56]
Sounds like AOO is effectively dead, so this example is a fail to my challenge.
OpenSearch & ElasticSearch both seem alive, as well as OC & NC.
Neither https://github.com/privacyidea/privacyidea or https://github.com/eduMFA/eduMFA say either is a fork of the other.
I think you failed to share 3, 2 seem to valid examples of my challenge but the other 2 are questionable.
You didn’t ask for examples where both projects are alive!
NetBSD -> OpenBSD
To some extent I would argue that Linux is a spiritual fork of Minix and Unix.
But I think it’s also worth pointing out that these were in vastly different times where a single person or a small group of people could maintain an OS. An OS or browser is vastly more complex now.
BSD is a killer example of that point, too. Using a BSD Unix got to be pretty difficult after Linux containers became hegemonic.
Safari started as a fork of KHTML, and Chrome started as a fork of (the open-source parts of) Safari.
I think they're fully aware of this. They just don't care, because the goal of "get market share super high" has been reached, so now they have no need for it to continue being open.
I don't disagree about what that means we should do; I just don't think we should assume they're being naive here. It's like writing a program to play chess; you should select your move assuming the opponent is smart and will make the optimal counterplay rather than assuming weakness, and then if they end up being less smart than that, you're still in a good place.
A lot of the people now in charge of large organizations have never been down in the trenches. Or even near them.
They operate in an abstract world with very little connection to reality.
Google needs to be broken up.
You do care about the market and aren't just angry because a corp doesn't listen to your orders, right? RIGHT?
It’s search. And ads.
So yes, I do think they are being naïve. The stance is myopic. It is only a good move in the short term, and barely even that. It is under the false belief that we operate in a zero sum game.
Also in the last century most software was commercial, and thanks to business friendly licenses we are back to demos, PD, Shareware and co, only with new names for a younger generation.
Google will do just fine.
I’ve seen many open source contributors deflated because they wanted to share their code/solutions with other individuals and the world to learn from only to have their work sold as a service by a big cloud vendor without seeing something back for it. Or maybe even getting more work back to support the cloud vendor for free.
So I’m not surprised at all that licenses that allow commercial use up to a point and above that require seperate license or contributions back. It is still open source in a lot of ways. Can still be part of other open source distributions that themselves make no profit etc. And only companies that are more than able to pay must pay something.
If companies avoid using software governed by such licenses then the overall impact is negative in my opinion, because it will lead to competing and diverging clean room clones that just split the community and the ecosystem.
Correlation is not causation.
What I lived through, was Linux taking off like a juggernaut, and IBM embracing it as a result. Large corps came along for the ride, they didn't drive it and at best paid for some gas.
DEVs being paid is simply what it is. The entire scsi/sata stack was originally re-authored by 3ware for example.
Why?
To sell stuff, and the guy was an advocate too.
It's always been this way, under the great wonder of the GPL, blessed be it.
You must have a good source of information for such a statement.
Do you want examples why Solaris was selling so well before the .com crash?
There is no conflict in "linux was growing without the big boys' and 'it started with small market share'.
And yes, you can find exceptions to the rule, although regardless, do you see me saying "exclusively"? What does someone using Solaris, have to do with Linux only growing due to external help?
There certainly were mailing lists, usenet, forums, all of an all-encompasing scope. But there were also very local user groups, and pockets of wildly more and less usage depending upon region. The Internet was young, and many made decisions predicated upon what they saw around them.
The best way to be sure you had support, was a local healthy community of hackers around.
Famously IBM did eventually buy Red Hat, but not for another 20 years. The fact is, Linux was alive and well and growing as far back as the late 1990s, and devs were getting paid. You could literally buy CDs in a box of an installable Linux distribution at an ordinary retail chain bookstore in 1998.
And for whatever it’s worth, the reason Linux took off the way it did when it did was because the Dot Com Bubble helped pump smaller companies like Red Hat or SuSE up, and they were certainly selling floppies and pressed CDs at a margin like Shareware as well, since most people didn’t have the time or hardware to download and burn ISOs until the early/mid-2000s when P2P music took over the world.
(I remember. I was there. I guess I’m old now…)
Granted, we know Android would not be where it is today without open source contributions.
But the parts of Android that are majority outside developed is still available as the Linux kernel. I have my doubts that the uniquely Android bits of the userland and system services have many outside contributions.
When Android launched, making it open source (ish) was the right competitive decision. It got phone makers and carriers on board and accelerated the ecosystem’s development. Today it being open source (kinda) is a met negative for Google. So, yeah, they’re changing that.
Well-run companies aren’t zealots. They adapt to changing conditions. If a company’s actions happen to align with your personal preferences today, it doesn’t mean you’ve found a lifelong philosophical soulmate. Ditto if a company’s actions run counter to what you want today. Either can and will change, and there’s nothing morally concerning either way.
companies exist for the sole reason to make money - not to make the world better - that's a side effect.
but unfortunately a lot of people wanna see the world as they wish it to be, not the way it is.
just like the USA at it's founding - deliberate actions were taken etc that were counter to the normal. & going against the wind takes a lot of energy.
at a certain point in time - you run out of energy or you've to keep keep reinvesting to not run out otherwise barbarians are knocking down at the gate.
Costco, specifically, I have a good story about. Jim Sinegal spoke at my MBA program, and he talked about when they were starting and the challenge was a value prop of “buy bulk, lower cost” contrasted with bulk actually being more expensive than small quantities, therefore needing to target higher incomes.
Part of the solution: wider parking spaces. Make people feel like their expensive cars are safer, it’s easier to get in and out of the car (especially for older people, who have more wealth), and differentiate from typical stores.
Now, you tell me: would you be just as happy with cramped parking spaces because the larger ones are profit-driven? Does motive even matter here?
It's profit driven in its own way, but against the grain of modern corporate strategy.
A lot of people get the wrong impression from reading Dodge Brothers and think companies are legally required to put profit first. What really happened is Friedman and Reagan planted the idea of shareholder supremacy, convinced schools to teach it and now generations of business majors think it's a sacred truth they have to enforce anywhere they go. Never let a MBA take over.
Companies that don’t do a good job of making profits tend to go away, thus there exists natural selective pressure to put profits ahead of other concerns. Note that none of the above has anything at all to do with morals or ethics.
This is why a healthy, society-aligned regulatory regime is impoetant, to set incentives. If you make more money being decent than you would being abusive, companies will adapt. They are more like corals than they are like people.
Companies are not sentient beings in themselves: they are made up of human beings with wills. If the human being(s) make moral choices the result will be companies that do moral actions.
> companies exist for the sole reason to make money - not to make the world better - that's a side effect.
That is one interpretation on the purpose of companies (and a relatively recent one):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
There are others:
* “Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.” ― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._O%27Reilly_III
* “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”[72] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics
Or going back a few decades:
> In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”
* https://law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-history...
> American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither for-profit nor nonprofit in today’s parlance but rather, served a multitude of municipal, religious, charitable, educational, and eventually business purposes in early nineteenth-century New England. The purposes of early American business corporations—rather than maximization of profit to private shareholders— were often overtly public, involving development of local transportation, finance, and other much-needed economic infrastructure. With the rise of factory-based manufacturing, railroads, and other capital-intensive industries in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the advent of general incorporation statutes, the purpose of the American business corporation shifted fundamentally from public to private. By 1860, the stage was set for the modern firm.
Self-reply: see also Boeing company ethos pre-McD acquisition versus post-McD acquisition ethos:
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55994102-flying-blind
They exist to make money but not by all means.
Companies are allowed to make money because it’s a net benefit for society.
If that changes companies lose their reason of existence.
Setting on "companies exist for the sole reason to make money" as the only motivating factor just makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's another when they say they're going to do one thing, you align with them, and then they do another later. That's generally frowned upon morally because it's considered to be deceptive/untruthful.
It's not surprising, but that doesn't mean people should be ok with it, especially when other businesses get by fine making more ethical business choices, or at least avoid outright lying for their own benefit.
They stay away from those.
What license was KHTML again? Checked: LGPL.
They absolutely are zealots; the zealotry focuses on profit.
Why these types of stories are so jarring to some is that they serve as a reminder that your pet technology or project will get fed into the wood chipper if enough bloodless “Ex-Bain, Ex-Mercer, I Love LinkedIn” types tell the ceo it’s a profitable idea. And you and I are just as expendable.
Just because you know there's a chance of being punched in the face, doesn't mean it still isn't a bit painful actually being punched in the face. Even if you brace for it.
But yes, that's the beauty of open source. The ability to take your ball home if and when the maintainer breaks the social contract. It's a contingency plan for this exact scenario.
>and there’s nothing morally concerning either way.
There's many moral concerns. Whether or not the company cares does not expel the concerns itself.
With the way Firefox is heading, that might not be the best idea. Nowadays Mozilla seem more focused on riding the AI-hype wave than actually making an excellent browser people want to actually use.
If your competition is attracting the worst kind of users, do you really want to get in their way?
As for the excellent browser that people want, that raises the question of what people want. There are likely as many answers as people.
My biggest pain point at the moment (entirely subjective mind you) is not even the AI nonsense, but how disjointed and alien the Firefox UX and general feel is to Apple platforms (what I use, at the moment). I don’t want Firefox to mirror Safari 1:1 but I do want the Firefox UI and UX to feel polished, well thought out and thoroughly in line with system HIG specs—given that I spend a lot of time in a browser, it shouldn’t feel like a stranger in a strange land amidst my other desktop applications.
Aggressive UI improvements would go a long way to restore some faith in the incandescent fox‘ mission—at least for me.
Every other browser aren’t using macOS native UI therefore are wrong in this environment. But right on their own in being the same everywhere.
If my OS says windows and tabs close on the left, then I expect every single app to be a good platform citizen and not make me relearn default controls just to operate simple functions. Windows and tabs close on the left. End of story.
And despite what many people here like to think: these things matter. UX improvements compound exponentially, and so do UX problems. Firefox has an opportunity here to be a first-class citizen on every OS it runs on. It has the opportunity to be the browser that respects your OS choices no matter what, but alas, Firefox seems rather content carrying its “ah yeah I remember using it back in ‘06” reputation.
Firefox is not a bad browser by any means, but it feels like Firefox is the browser equivalent of the “how do you do fellow kids” meme. An out-of-time experience pretending to blend in under the guise of “AI”.
It is also worth noting that the macOS UI/UX isn't anywhere near perfect. It is a hodgepodge of design decisions that go back to the origin of OS X or, in a few cases, the origin of the Macintosh iitself. Padding and margins may help achieve visual balance, but it's Windows management paradigm is an absolute functional mess.
Then again: while I believe bad UI/UX is a thing, I don't think there is an ideal. Different people think in different terms, or have different preferences. Some forms of interaction are better in one domain than another. There are undoubtedly many other reasons.
As for Firefox taking things into their own hands, that's the developer's decision. I have already given two reasons why that may be the case (users may expect consistency across platforms, and it may require too much effort for too little return).
Maybe you’re too preoccupied trying to discredit valid criticism as “fanboyism” to realise how important UI and UX are for products such as browsers.
Besides, Chrome itself is already an absolute mess of conflicting and downright distasteful UX choices and patterns. Firefox seems to be stuck in the past but Chrome seems to actively DESPISE being available on Mac.
Very puzzled why there isn't more love for Firefox, even on HN.
There is also a layer of hypocrisy when people beg for Mozilla to generate greater revenue diversity, but then an immediate scoff whenever they try anything unrelated to Firefox -- where there is no money beyond search deals since Mozilla can't go down the Brave crypto route.
Google is not the same company Mozilla partnered with decades ago. You can listen to retrospectives from Mozilla engineers, and you sense a desire to bite the corrupted hand that feeds.
However, for Mozilla to be the bold, it needs funding diversity, and that isn't going to come from a browser alone.
I have not agreed with everything Mozilla has thrown against the wall, but I sincerely hope something sticks. We need it to.
What would be the point of a browser compatibility matrix then?
Which for the large majority of companies means Chrome and Safari nowadays.
Thanks to Apple's stance on iOS, otherwise it would be only Chrome, as younger generations apparently never got the IE history lesson.
Mentioned as "one customer" in the PDF.
Edit: spelling
Yes, and now that they've achieved market saturation, it's time to pull up the ladder.
Thanks for all the free work, suckers!
I mean, FOSDEM full of Apple laptops on the corridors, the message was really lost.
Now that the chromebooks are also Android, it feels like the slide is only going to grow ever more fearsome.
Implying I ever left Firefox in the first place.
Just point out how that hurts security or privacy and we’re with you!
Advocating for chromium to do what?
So we move. We force their hand
Remember this upcoming Christmas that the ye oldie tradition of fixing PCs clearing awful exploiting phone apps (and cancelling subscriptions) should also include the "fix my browser" again, instead of Internet Explorer being replaced by Chrome, our collective duties is to replace Chrome with Firefox, plus its useful extensions to block ads and improve the web experience removing trackers etc.
Your call to arms today is to ensure all your tech colleagues join the movement, and then we can see Google's management views on "market growth"; they forget they made Chrome, we sold it - its our fault we forgot the "infinite growth of shareholder value"...
This is correct but rarely in practiced.
During firefox DRM/HTML5 issue, I know many people from Free software foundation Europe absolutely telling in their blogs, talks etc please stop Mozilla from implementing this DRM or that... but finally when I spoke to these in private they told --- ya, whatever - I need to see this series in netflix etc- so I have another device with chrome etc to watch it. (Indeed Firefox did implement it)
This behavior is the reason average Joe gives up...
(This is also why we should be be vary, and quite sceptical of, Canonical's new Rust-based port of GNU CoreUtils too. Apparently, Canonical plans to replace GNU CoreUtil completely in Ubuntu with this port. The original GNU Coreutils are licensed under the GPL, but the Rust based ports are not. This means that Canonical will now have the ability to stop distributing the source code of its CoreUtils port in future Ubuntu Oses).
I never left. The only thing I don't like is that I can't directly donate to fund Firefox, only towards the Mozilla Foundation in general.
As the cash cow, it will always receive what it needs, but it will also act as the vehicle for funding possible avenues of diversity.
Mozilla is never going to be independent off of Firefox alone -- that revenue simply doesn't exist.
I wish Mozilla had taken Proton's approach, but regardless, I hope they manage to throw something that sticks.
A fully financially secure Mozilla would truly allow their organization to shine.
Pre-7 was just not an operating system that anyone except the geekiest of geeks wanted to use.
Windows Phone is a case study of missed opportunity.
Android won because it was available "right now" and easy to hack. Vendors could get a BSP (Board Support Package) from a chip manufacturer, slap Android userspace on top of it, and ship a phone within half a year. It was a glorious mess for a while.
Google then slowly tightened the reins and made the ecosystem more ordered.
I'm interested and wishing to see a future mobile OS that does not pander to the "attention economy" like Android/iOS are, but with billions now addicted and trapped by it, I'm realistic that it won't be an overnight success.
Android is not a Linux desktop or server distro. It is not about you getting to put what you want on the hardware you bought for free.
Operating systems are hellaciously expensive to maintain and that only gets worse in markets with rapid hardware improvements, as the smartphone market was up until maybe the late 2010s. Google is not a charity. SV did not come into national prominence for making investors $0. There is no money in giving maybe one in one-hundred smartphone users (and that's being generous) a bunch of code, for free, so that they can put it on their gizmo and talk to their nerd friends at their hacker meetup.
When they pitched Android as "open", they meant that carriers and device makers could load it up with all of the revenue-enhancing bloat that they wanted. In return, Google got a device that would let them hoover up all of the data they could ever want in order to build better ad service profiles for those using the devices. That is, after all, their business.
For a while, this could coexist with us screwing around with a real-life tricorder. At some point, though, the free stuff turned into a revenue opportunity that had to be exploited. And so, it will be.
Wish I could upvote you twice for that line alone. It perfectly sums up what I always wanted Android to be. Alas, the closer we are to this in hardware, the further away we are getting in software.
(Did they fix that whole "store contacts in a linked list" problem in Android already?)
Intel used to do the same with their anti theft technology aka Intel theft deterrent on their classmate PCs, so students had to enter unlock codes from an IT admin every 3 months or every say 200 boots to prevent the computer from being locked at the bios level preventing it from booting an OS, and there was an update which disabled that functionality permanently. And you would be warned when you had around 50 boots left to get the unlock code.
With a 6 digit code cracking it will take close to a year on average. With your screen pattern example it's around 100 days. That's more than enough time for the owner to notice and turn on anti theft features. Maybe even for the police to find and return the phone.
I would say pins are even less secure because people usually set it up as something like their birthday and thieves also often simultaneously steal some id card in a wallet which has exactly that.
I think we're all more surprised by how long it took for Google to make these bad moves. For a period of time in the 2010s we actually started thinking maybe Google was alright.
This is to extent that some carriers still insist that they design phones and phone manufacturers are just factories. People need to understand that power dynamic before blaming those "mere factories" for not making Linux phones.
There has to be like an SVP of SoandSo Wireless pushing like three pillar approach of iOS, Android and Linux. Otherwise the pitch decks for any alternative phones just go straight to trash(or into a motorized shredder if it is still physical).
Only in the USA.
Edit: September update for 8a has a kernel build from July. I believe it's still vulnerable but the exploit will need its offsets adjusting etc.
It'd be interesting to see which one is happening here.
GrapheneOS is often around 4 to 6 months ahead on merging Linux kernel LTS releases. We used to handle this ourselves but switched to the Android GKI LTS branch maintained by Greg KH. Unfortunately, it was often struggling to keep up even before the absolutely massive increase in Linux kernel security patches this year. AI models have rapidly accelerated vulnerability discovery and it's an ongoing crisis for the Linux kernel. We want to be on the latest LTS revision within days and want to be using the latest LTS branch within months of it being released. We're not at all happy with how Android is handling things and plan to fix that ourselves. We'll get things back to how they should be.
We also ship all the AOSP userspace patches months before Pixels due to shipping all of the security preview patches as soon as possible. There are sometimes minor regressions but we find and fix them ourselves downstream. The security preview system has a terrible design especially considering that frontier AI models can reverse engineer the patches. There should at least only be a source embargo for around 24 to 72 hours rather than pretending as if it can work with the patches available 2 to 6 months in advance.
Perfect is the enemy of good. What's better for privacy, an old but inexpensive smartphone running Android 11, or the same smartphone running an up-to-date third-party rebuild of Android 16 or newer with as many privacy-improving bells and whistles as the hardware can support?
> Soon there will be two different phone brands which you can install it on.
...will they be available in my country (Brazil)? I don't think I've ever seen a Google Pixel phone in person.
Not sure if you have any experience with eBay. I looked it up and people had problems selling to Brazil [1] but there are various listings that offer to ship. So maybe not a great option.
KaBuM!, Intec Store, Performance Solutions all charge significantly more with a 10a being more than double than from Google.
Motorola officially sells the Signature in Brazil [2] at the same price or cheaper than in the UK. It will be supported by GrapheneOS in 2027 on the 2027 version. From then on, hopefully Qualcomm brings MTE to the non-flagship chips and Motorola and GrapheneOS support budget or midrange devices.
>perfect is the enemy of good
I don't consider that relevant when users deserve ≥ security than an iPhone. GrapheneOS is not purpose-built to avoid big-tech's services although it does that more completely than any other alternative mobile operating system, the focus is privacy.
GrapheneOS on the state of privacy and security for their ethos: https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2044440381803069778
[0] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=google+pixel+9
[1] https://reddit.com/r/Ebay/comments/1d92pyn/
https://community.ebay.com/forum/shipping-57923/topic/diffic...
[2] https://www.motorola.com.br/smartphone-motorola-signature/p?...
Do these phones have ANATEL certification? Because if they don't, they will be rejected by customs. It's not simply a case of the item being held until you pay a 60% import tax.
I see your point, but it would be very misleading, since the phone would still have a lot of known holes. Only the OS would get updated, typically not the drivers, driver firmware, possibly not the kernel. The phone would still be easily compromised through all the known RCEs. So you tie up non-profit projects in a lot of extra work to get an improvement that does not really matter.
This is a mess created by the OEMs and they will continue to create this mess until people will stop buying from OEMs that only give lip service to security updates (roll out Android Security Bulletins to show a high patch level, while in reality the phone the phone has many known CVEs).
Android Security Bulletins set a very low bar since the AOSP patches are available to ship by OEMs 2-6 months prior to the bulletin being published. It's also only High/Critical severity patches being listed. Due to a recent policy change, it's also officially only a subset of the patches for AOSP. That's visible through the Android platform components having patches in the Pixel Update Bulletin for September 2026 despite those being applicable to other operating systems. It's because they no longer want to backport all High and Critical severity patches due to the high volume of issues discovered by AI models. It's similar to how they stopped backporting any Low and Moderate severity patches years ago due to high volume.
You understand that just having a firewall is a big step for security?
Whould you recommend using a Pixel 6a in 2026 even though it has no hardware memory tagging (MTE)?
Enough to know that it is as fingerprintable as any other phone. Disabling Javascript JIT will not change that.
When Patrick Pichette left and Sundar became CEO both led to massive culture shifts.
Google is a lawn mower, stop anthropologizing them. This goes the same with Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, ...
The Motorola transition can't come soon enough, IMHO
They're not treating GrapheneOS very differently from other vendors, except that Graphene isn't relevant enough to sign a contract with because they don't make phones (or money, really).
Google should be putting out the code and patches like they used to, but the constant badgering of Google on this issue feels off. I don't see anyone complaining that Samsung isn't supporting their security-focused fork enough, or complain that Apple is delaying the bootloader unlock process by a day.
Despite their very worst, selfish intentions, Google is the very best vendor of commercial open source software. While Google's open source project collapses, there's plenty of space for other vendors to step in.
We should bemoan Google's fall from grace, but only because they're on the way to becoming just as bad as every vendor but Librem if they keep this up another decade.
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/fw/firmware-librem5-nonfree
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/arm-trusted-firmware
I hope I'm looking in the wrong place.
But I agree with the other comments out there. It will get ugly and they will loose. I am convinced there many heavy weights just waiting for the right time to hit google hard on this. While I don’t know all of them and don’t like the ones I think I know, I will sing and dance when it’ll happen.
And no, Apple is no better.
Could Google backtrack on this if they wanted? If they suddenly decided to stop releasing public code updates, what would they be violating? I can guess: Anti-trust maybe. probable at least contractual commitments Or is there some stronger forcing function?
> Google simply regrets android being open source.
Of course, it does. Google is no longer afraid to spit on open source. People happy to use Chromium features better remember this. You are renting everything and your landlord will soon come demanding it back.
What? Google is advertisement business. Not a software house. They sell ads. It all makes sense to build a walled garden. They are effectively a monopoly for half of the personal devices _in the world_. And they _will_ return their investments into the opensource. By locking Android and Chrome and showing ads to everyone.
Like the old days shitty TV, full of ads.
It only doesn’t make sense if you’re assuming conspiracy.
It makes a lot more sense if you assume they just don’t give a shit.
Can we just stop saying "Google" as if it's same faceless org? No, it's not Google, one or two asshole execs are behind this policy.
Bigger problem is HarmonyOS and similar devices, compatible with Android. Opensource threat from china!
And no NSA backdoors or honeypots!
Otherwise there's no need for NSA backdoors (as Cellebrite matrix shows) :)
lmao
Not particularly relevant but the lawful spying implemented in the telecommunications system by our own government has been abused by Chinese hackers as well.