poisonborz

Not true, at least not in this all encompassing clickbait sense. $25 buys you a hackable R36S with 4 core cpu, 1gb ram, runs Debian off dual microsd with dual usb-c for any peripherials, swappable battery, emulation perf up to PSX. There are many more cheap, capable options.

I'd say "retro console" in the linux handheld sense is the best value hobby gadget to buy for the HN crowd.

Cybersecurity compliance, but .xyz site built under a day to get something out fast to drum up engagement and "test the vibes on the idea". Makes one wonder what became of this industry.

You mean throw those billions, tens of thousands of man hours, shareholder attenton, industry power and mindshare to a mostly useless concept, just because he had the money? Why are those resources not better spent on 100+ startups and 100+ unique ideas that are immediately tested by the market?

See my reply above

Why is AOSP a wrong path? Why would it be "tainted"? Any large enough entity can fork. Hundreds already did, successfully. Even China couldn't do otherwise - via Huawei they mutated it to HarmonyOS (becoming much different from its roots, and incompatible to it, structurally becoming superior in many ways). Why throw away 20 years of development and a sea of dev experience?

But even if you insist on a non-AOSP way: Supporting any other, more well regarded projects and initiatives? Random top of my head idea: motivate Fairphone (Denmark) to adopt some non-android OS like Ubuntu Touch?

> Your standard is "succeed against Google and Apple within 13 years..."

Absolutely not. My standard is the many other AOSP-based ROMs communities and companies that were founded around them, having success within a few years - yes, they could lean on the ecosystem compatibility and didn't produce their own hardware, but maybe that's a more viable way to start?

"shoestring budget with no volume discounts" does not explain the points of criticism above.

True, but I also wanted to signify that I find any user trust (eg as a result of this new marketing campaign) is misplaced and steals air from a better alternative.

Jolla / Sailfish is a 13 year old project and through all this time they couldn't make a foothold, or even sustain some small motivated community around them. During this time:

- company folded and changed hand multiple times, including russian ownership

- the tablet scandal leaving users with lost funds

- closed source parts

- locked bootloader

- charging a $50 device reset fee

- not much change in Sailfish OS since ages

- buggy Android compatibility and near zero native devs, all jumped ship

At this point I think they are just one of the grifters preying on naive "EU first" supporters shoveling whatever they still have in a new casing.

I'd love the idea of a greenfield EU Linux mobile OS, but I don't think it should come from this company.

Valid and yes, but it's why I wrote it like

> blank page dev with no open source karma (or posing as such to stay anonymous)

The problem as I wrote is not technical. I'd use a video converter or a string parser - that are offline and "download once" - gladly from any OS project. For a chat app that I'd use long term to share private communications would require trust, more contributors, and some background info - not names or an address, but some About section and a sense that the whole thing doesn't rely on the motivations of a single person and that there is some mutual/community oversight.

This looks like a good faith project, and OP surely put in time (2y+) and effort. Yet I would have discouraged them to make such a project at this time. OP seems like a well meaning but young, at the start of their career. A proper modern messaging app takes a great technical effort (even while the core concept itself is extremely primitive and could be coded in 10m) and even with that in mind, for end-users it's not really about technology, but trust - on long, long term. And you can't gain that as a blank page dev with no open source karma (or posing as such to stay anonymous).

Putting in so much effort to chase the holy grail of a new concept of a messaging app is like a film student who wants to cram in all their ideas in life to make something epic in movie no. 1. There are some who can stroke genius on first try, but the current project doesn't strike me as such. Props for making a product that is coherent and looking useful on the surface level, but I wish you'd put efforts in something smaller in scope first (or contributing to something already existing) and gaining more of a foothold first before tackling a messaging project.

That and the russian ties, the partially closed source OS, the locked bootloader, the $50 device reset fee, the cheap underpowered chinese chipset. The company was sold more than once between investment firms. Yet it presents itself like a happy independent open source collective.

Other comments have links to more details, but in short: do not support this company.

It was to be expected that a lot of corps will want to milk the term "EU sovereignty" and good willed naive people who don't look inside the packaging.

I'd be more concerned for face unlock. You take an OS that goes to the extreme to prevent any external intrusion to your phone and you enable an option to unlock it for anyone by holding the phone to your face?

So these are the employees that ignore the hundreds of other atrocities their companies do against other countries, small firms, individuals, come out flags waving for some cherry-picked issues, and next day go back to their well paid jobs, vested stocks and office perks and lunch chefs to passively support these agendas further, even if they have the best career mobility across almost all industries.

I mean it's neat, but naive at best.

A much simpler alternative is a $25 R36S handheld console (more powerful 4 core cpu, runs both debian and android) and print a different case with a keyboard.

I agree with the article fully, but:

> These are the same people who would lose their minds if their city government told them they could only buy food from vendors the city had approved, licensed, and taxed

But it is exactly like this in the developed world, and not many would buy food from a trunk of a roadside car.

Read and think about what you wrote. How can an ai, completing specific scoped tasks, be in any way comparable to the scale of a human life? Maybe the same thing these execs forgot.

So the Pebble Duo was a one time thing based on the cache of old parts they found? Why... A lot of people would like a cheap small thin plastic watch. Most fans went after Amazfit Blips after Pebble went out for a reason.

How much loss did they accumulate until 2001? Pretty sure it wasn't the 44 billion OpenAI has. And Amazon didn't have many direct competitors offering the same services.

I believe less and less that scaling to hundreds of millions of user is not just a failure mode. There is a tipping point from which you only serve profits and shareholders/funders. Communities die by becoming too big.

Ask a very simple question: how would this generate profits, which high level manager would be motivated to do this? Sure, 15-20 years ago corporations would've made vanity/critics-industry appeasing projects like this out of pride alone. Those times are over.

It was an experiment to keep bright engineers busy with cool ideas to show off.Even back then they could have known that it is not a viable idea to make a tectonic platform switch with not much business arguments for it.

> keep all the revenue

Which revenue? Whatsapp is for free, those 3.3 billion people use it for free, the revenue is the reselling of user data and showing them ads. Which they would do less with a 3rd party client, and as such Meta fights it tooth and nail.

> You won't get enough people to pay you money to use your app

It might surprise you but people build apps just for fun, free and open source for others to use, just to make the world better. Which really would be in this case, that's also the intention of this law.

> obviously against their interests

Would love to know how it is "obviously" against my interest to make a chat app and have 3.3 billion users adressable instantly. Bad for internet health to be still tied to Meta, sure, but the damage was done and this is a way to reverse it.

Even the first announcement about this included BirdyChat and Haiket. Two completely unknown and yet unreleased closed source chat apps with a waitlist.

Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.

"Every web service that allows for communication should require personal identification to register"

You can also buy ready-made PhonieBoxes on some marketplace sites.

As probably guessable, the state of author is in has not much to do with the Cracked Android Phone, but that I assume he tries to find remote positions (already a hard find) in US from an African country (assumption, doesn't write details). For that to happen, you need rockstar credentials. No business can accept the risk of fraud, scams, sanctioned origin country, or a dev disappearing overnight.

I was hiring devs for a number of years in EU, and we never ever looked at education - more specifically, any degree was good, as it was only an indicator that the person can learn. I would never assume practical software engineering knowledge based on a degree.

Anyone in the same situation, what the author did is a perfectly good way - build up knowledge, get mentors, build up a portfolio, work for well-known entities. But then judge your market value realistically, and possibly be in the same region/country. Even if it could technically possible, remote work with such distances has too much legal liability.

TLDR: author only sees OSS as a sort of marketing funnel for paid tiers and business fame

Congrats to creating something you think is valuable. Do you see a risk that your business model is taking away income from an API provider that you 100% depend on - meaning the plug could be pulled at any minute while you have paying customers?