It is a disgrace how Google has managed this situation.
To recap the storyline, as far as I understand it: last August, Google announced plans to heavily restrict sideloading. Following community pushback, they promised an "advanced flow" for power users. The media widely reported this as a walk-back, leading users to assume the open ecosystem was safe.
But this promised feature hasn't appeared in any Android 16 or 17 betas. Google is quietly proceeding with the original lockdown.
The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using). If installing a basic APK eventually requires a Google-verified developer ID, maintaining a truly de-Googled mobile OS becomes nearly impossible.
If this finally pushes adoption of truly open Linux phones, then this will end up being a good thing, and the greatest favor that Google could do for the open source community.
Tragically, Linux phones have languished and are in an absolute state these days, but a lot of the building blocks are in place if user adoption occurs en masse. (Shout out to the lunatics who have kept this dream alive during these dark years.)
Have a look at this post
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723594 from Emre @emrekosmaz
It is a smartphone that runs Android, launches Debian, and dual-boots Windows 11
Actual link https://nexphone.com/blog/the-tale-of-nexphone-one-phone-eve...
It won't though, because there's a ecosystem of banking/insurance/whatever apps that have bought into the android/iphone lockdown mindsete that people will simply be locked out of. Open alternatives can grow when there is a viable means of slow growth, and cutting off the oxygen to such things is the implicit intent.
Until Android is crippled it will continue to take resources away from Linux Phone development and companies that will launch phones for it
Even if you have linux, there are still third parties that have control over your hardware. Even if you're using graphenos, you can't block the sim or the cellular radio stack, and likely other modules on the SoC, from at-will access to every sensor on the device. You can at least protect your files, unless there's a mitm or other vector that graphenos can't cope with. And at worst, they can simply clone all your encrypted bits and wait on Moore's law or sufficient cubits to go back and crack the copy, on the off chance there's anything they want with your data in the first place.
For me as a desktop linux poweruser, I find this potential transition pretty intimidating, I've never flashed a phone with a custom rom let alone switch to a completely different OS, and I am not sure if the phone can even be reset to its original OS, if things go south.
It's relatively easy. It's basically a command for each step you want to do and it tends to fail gracefully nowadays.
If you can install a linux distro you can flash a custom rom on a well-supported phone.
If it were more mainstream I could see GUI apps to manage all this for people, if they don't already exist. Idk I just use adb.
It's also high risk. I've bricked two phones doing it.
I flash phones almost every other week. And tablets. I have been flashing since Androids came out. But never bricked. But maybe that is why I don't have any problems.
I've been flashing phones for over 2 decades and have never bricked a phone. How did you manage that?
Same here. Just follow the LineageOS steps.
Are you seriously implying that flashing phones doesn’t risk bricking them or you’re not aware of that risk are you serious?
> Are you seriously implying that flashing phones doesn’t risk bricking them or you’re not aware of that risk are you serious?
Yes, that is generally the case. As a general rule with an Android phone reflashing the OS itself or the bootloader carries no risk of bricking the device (meaning making it impossible to recover without specialized hardware and/or opening up parts that were not intended to be opened).
There are plenty of ways to "soft-brick" a device such that you might need to plug it in to a computer, and adb/fastboot can definitely be a pain in the ass to use (especially on Windows), but if you have a device with an unlocked bootloader it's very rare to be able to actually brick the device while doing normal things.
Now, if you're doing abnormal things like reflashing the radio firmware you can absolutely brick some devices there, but you don't have to do that just to boot an alternative OS and generally shouldn't be doing it without very good reason and specific knowledge of exactly what you're doing.
I'm not going to say there are no devices where the standard process to flash an alternative OS is dangerous, but none of the relatively common ones I've ever owned or used have been built that way because OEMs don't want their own official firmware updates to be dangerous either.
tl;dr: It is sometimes possible to brick a device by flashing the wrong thing incorrectly, but the risk of doing that if you are just installing an alternative OS through a standard process is basically zero.
Potential for a brick varies massively depending on phone model, doesn't it?
That describes relatively easy for you, but not for the average person who can’t even be bothered to change the default ringtone.
The challenge I've found when looking for instructions for flashing one of my old phones is the assumption of knowledge some rom builders have, or perhaps an assumption about their audience. This seems like it has the potential to bit someone in the ass because if they're relying on other sources like the lineageOS wiki or forum posts elsewhere for example there's no guarantee it'll stay available, complete, or relevant to their variant over time. It's an added burden for what is a gracious volunteer role, but it's a handicap if they want more people using the fruits of their labor.
Expecting Google to give up control of one of the only alternative operating systems is right up there with believing in the tooth fairy.
What you're saying should happen, but it will only happen when the government legislates it happens; which frankly they should be doing (along with nationalizing a few other software projects to be fair).
A trillion dollar transnational corporation with massive monopolistic tendencies will never ever do the right thing. Expect to force feed it down their throats.
The limitation of linux phones is hardware. I have been watching the progress of postmarketOS on the fairphone 4, and looks promising.
> If this finally pushes adoption of truly open Linux phones...
It won't.
Good thing restricting side-loading isn't legal in the European Union! Not a problem here. Apple had to enable side-loading on their EU-based phones and so will Google if they restrict it.
Yes it is, and no they didn't. Apple has to allow (heavily restricted) alternative app stores, and I'm not clear on whether any actually exist right now.
My understanding is that how Apple is restricting the alternative app stores is also illegal in EU, so I don't thinkt this is the end of this story.
It's almost two years and they are still doing it. So they are moving mighty slow if that is the case.
How specific is the law? What if side loading requires a "trusted" signed certificate where trusted means from Google Play?
Not even playing devil's advocate, just wondering how many loopholes actually exist.
The kind of "side-loading" of notarized apps outside the manufacturer's app store that Apple allows in the EU is exactly what Google proposed to do for all its Android builds. We don't want that.
Personally I'm excited about the death of Android, now resources can be put toward mainstreaming and maturing the Linux Phone ecosystem
Hopefully 2026 or 2027 will be the year of the Linux Phone
Strong disagree. Linux, its permission system and its (barely existent) application isolation are lightyears away from the security guarantees that Android brings.
Desktop OSes and their derivatives are woefully behind in this regard, and unfortunately the will to bring them up to par is incredibly weak. Of those in mass use (Qubes OS is neat but its user base isn’t even a rounding error), macOS probably does the most, but it’s still lagging behind iOS and what’s been implemented has come with much consternation from the technically inclined peanut gallery.
I understand some amount of reticence with commercial OSes, but there’s no justification for being against it on open Linux based desktops and mobile OSes. We really need to get past the 90s-minded paradigm of everything having access to everything else all the time with the only (scantly) meaningful safeguards coming in the form of *nix user permissions.
> We really need to get past the 90s-minded paradigm of everything having access to everything else all the time
I do agree with that, and I strongly believe that the iOS and Android security model is way ahead of Desktop Linux. But what I observe is that nobody seems to care about the security model. A recurrent complaint I see against anything AOSP-based (including Android) is that people "want to be root".
Allowing the owner of the device root access doesn't necessarily break the security model. It just means that the user can grant additional privileges to specific apps the owner has decided to trust. Every other app still has to abide by the restrictions.
The fact that Android complains and tells any app that asks whether the owner actually, you know, owns the device they paid for is an implementation detail.
A Linux distribution that adopts an Android style security model could easily still provide the owner root access while locking down less trusted apps in such a way that the apps can't know or care whether the device is rooted.
Fun fact - on most Linux distros any user program can see almost any event, yes including key presses, by reading from the right /dev/... file.
This is not surprising. The desktop Linux community reacted with hostility to the well funded security efforts (selinux, apparmor, grsecurity, etc)
Security is a tradeoff (fucking always...)
It's the same reason I choose to keep my front door unlocked basically all the time - I know my neighborhood, the risk is really low and the convenience is high.
Further... practically everyone agrees that they don't need bank vaults as front doors. It makes zero practical sense: The cost is incredibly high, and the convenience is very low.
There are ALL sorts of wonderfully cool things you can do on a system where applications are allowed to trust each other, and the system is permissive by default.
You can customize behavior more easily, you can extend software more easily, you can add incredibly detailed & functional accessibility support, you can create incredibly powerful macros and commands.
This is so important that fundamental OS design from the early 90s actually prioritized and catered to exactly this style of open, trusted, platform (ex - all of COM in windows...). This is what made personal computing a reality...
All of those fall flat when you try to impose "well funded" security efforts.
Those efforts have a place, in the same way that bank vaults have a place. Whether that place is a personal computer is a different question.
Implying those folks are hostile for no reason is... at best a woeful misunderstanding of the situation, and at worst a malicious mischaracterization.
Aren't all the necessary pieces for something better essentially in place now that unprivileged namespaces are well-established?
They've for sure had more than their fair share of security issues, but those are bugs, not fundamental design problems as far as I understand?
Not lightyears. About 20 years, which is how long it took Google to pile on the mountain of complexity and inefficiency to accomplish this.
This assumes that the mentioned systems are the only security considerations on a Linux system. Clearly this is not the case so I am unsure why you omit other security-related aspects of Linux here.
Android, being based upon the Linux kernel, has all those and its own app permission system built on top. Linux on its own comes nowhere close to this.
I understand why mobile/tablet OSs are so crappy compared to desktop; in the past these devices had no resources cpu and ram wise and had to heavily watch battery consumption (the latter is still true mostly, but that should be up to the user), but my phone is more powerful than my laptop and yet runs crap with no real usable filesystem and all kinds of other weirdness that's no longer needed.
However, I have 2 Linux phones and Linux on phones is just not there. Massive vendors (Samsung, Huawei, etc) would need to get behind it to make it go anywhere. Also so banking etc apps remain available also on those phones. We can already run android apps on Linux, Windows apps, so it would be a bright future but really it needs injections and support for large phone makers.
I hope the EU/US mess will give it somewhat of a push but I doubt it.
I.. don't think it will happen. For several reasons too. It is not that I don't think Android will change substantially, but the following constraints suggest a different trajectory:
- AI boom or bust will affect hardware availability - there is a push on its way to revamp phones into 'what comes next' -- see various versions of the same product that listens to you ( earing, ring, necklace ) - small LLMs allow for minimal hardware requirements for some tasks - anti-institutional sentiment seems to be driving some of the adoption
I think adoption will hinge on whether existing Android apps will just run on it with something like waydroid/anbox or not.
Gaming on Linux took off with Proton. Linux on phones might go the same path.
> death of Android
death of personal computing freedom, sovereign compute, and probably soon our ability to meaningfully contribute to the field as ICs?
A lot of really bad things are happening to our field, and Google is one of the agents responsible for much of it.
The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using).
I don't think this is true, right? An AOSP build can just decide to still allow installing arbitrary APKs. Also see this post from the GrapheneOS team:
https://mastodon.social/@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social/116103...
You can’t really do that long-term as Google will change code that will not match however you are not enforcing this policy
So at the very least you’d have to keep patches up to date.
Long term divergence could be enough that’s it’s just a hard fork and/or Google changes so much that the maintainer can’t keep the patches working at the same pace
I couldn’t read your link as it asks to join mastodon.social
All distributions involve maintaining patch sets. The question is what the marginal burden of this particular patch is.
Doesn't require me to sign in or create account...
The patch set for graphene is substantial, this is a relatively minor change.
I like it, because more and more people see Google as what it is: a ruthless, selfish and extremely greedy mega-mega-corporation. The less we depend on it the better.
Who could Android be possibly recommended to at this point?
I know iPhones aren't affordable for the layman in many countries. But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android? All the "customization" things I cared about when I was on Android are either doable on an iPhone now with better implementation, or something I don't care about.
I was a die-hard until I went through enough cycles of Google deprecating and reinventing their apps and services every year, breaking my workflow/habits, that I got sick of them and moved to Apple everything. And all the changes I've seen since then are only making me happier I got out of the ecosystem when I did. Unlimited Google Photos backups with Pixels are gone, Google Play Music is gone, the free development/distribution environment is gone, etc.
If people can't even develop for the thing without going through the Google process, they're really just a shitty iOS knockoff.
But this thread is about the option to install apps on your device regardless of OS vendor approval, and that's not possible either with iOS nor is iOS open source. And that's what this is all about. If you don't care about open-source and user freedom, then this change wouldn't matter to you anyway.
I switched back to Android in large part for KDE Connect. You can get continuity esque features that work with any desktop operating system. I also get to use real Firefox instead of a Safari wrapper. I still use as few Google services as possible, pretty much just Maps.
KDE Connect works just fine on iOS.
It "works" but it is significantly less useful. Notification mirroring doesn't work, you can't read/respond to text messages, it can't reliably run in the background.
These are all due to limitations imposed by Apple.
At this point, I wouldn't recommend Android other than enjoying the much steeper discount with the headset. For me, the only thing that is keeping me on Android is easier access to commas on the keyboard.
I love the Java/Kotlin userspace, even if it is Android Java flavour, and the our way or the highway attitude to C and C++ code, instead of yet another UNIX clone with some kind of X Windows into the phone.
In the past I was also on Windows Phone, again great .NET based userspace, with some limited C++, moving into the future, not legacy OS design.
I can afford iPhones, but won't buy them for private use, as I am not sponsoring Apple tax when I think about how many people on this world hardly can afford a feature phone in first place.
However I also support their Swift/Objective-C userspace, without being yet another UNIX clone.
If the Linux phones are to be yet another OpenMoko with Gtk+, or Qt, I don't see it moving the needle in mainstream adoption.
> But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android?
How the heck this is true?!? iOS is just bad.
Its usability is bad, its interface is bad, its apps are just a ton of crap, and it _will_ keep getting worse.
I'm not even talking about its "walled concentration camp" app model.
you're a really vanilla user then.
wake me up when there's an adblocker on an iphone.
There are several that plug into Safari, and Pihole just works. Does Android have ad blockers that do more? It's been a few years since I switched.
I can run proper uBlock Origin in Firefox on Android. Sure something like Pihole works, but I am often on mobile data or other WiFi networks.
Thankfully you don't really need an adblocker for apps on an iPhone. Your browser could use one, but thankfully those do exist :)
That said, I want off the iOS ecosystem, but Google has basically said guess what? We are going the way of Apple, so we don't care about you either.
So right now there isn't really anywhere else to go. I'm going to keep trucking in iOS for now, but I hope I find something better soon.
> Thankfully you don't really need an adblocker for apps on an iPhone. Your browser could use one, but thankfully those do exist :)
uBlock Origin on Firefox Mobile is significantly better than any Safari adblocker I've been able to find. (1Blocker's the best I've found for Safari.)
> Thankfully you don't really need an adblocker for apps on an iPhone.
That's for me to decide, thank you very much.
who is talking about app adblockers. power android users get their apps from fdroid. You relly are out of touch.
And you know very well, There are only meme adblockers for the browser on IOS.