I can't prove it, but I still think this is (partly) due to a recent EU regulation majorly backfiring.
I can't remember which one it was, but one of the recent regulations mandates that devices get updates for a certain period. Within that period a manufacturer must provide each update for all their devices in a short timeframe. The intention was to prevent flagships getting updates immediately and lower end devices having to wait months.
However, due to some (also well intentioned) wording about open source, the release of the source code is counted as the first release of an update and starts the timer.
I'm pretty sure Google is delaying public AOSP updates to give their partners (mainly Samsung I suppose) more time to finish building their updates on top of AOSP.
If this is the case, I wonder why isn't Google publicly saying this. Because right now, it looks like they've stopped publishing the sources just because they felt like it, which has understandably generated a lot of backlash, but I feel like all the backlash would go away if they pointed at the EU regulations.
I wouldn't be surprised if large corporations like Apple and Google intentionally use these tactics to pressure regulators through their European users. Siri AI is a prime example. While it's a complicated issue, I certainly wouldn't put such maneuvers past them.
It's funny that they keep trying, it has never once worked. I think US companies are projecting their dislike for regulation and keep being surprised that EU citizens don't agree. We do not love the EU government, but it sometimes does a good thing and we do like these, especially versus the anti-consumer crap that US companies like to pull.
I don't think this is any corporate conspiracy. The truth is probably more mundane: regulation is treated as obstacle to navigate around with minimal amount of effort, and not a reason to give up on practices that makes money.
we do not love the EU government because there are billions being poured into promoting the discourse that the EU is a bad thing by both private and state actors.
My problem is the lack of democracy through the too-indirect way that the commission is elected. Von der Leyen was an extremely unpopular and horribly incompetent (at least in charge of defense) minister in Germany, then somehow she became president of the EU commission. Her skill seems to be politicking with other politicians. That would not have gotten her elected in an election by the people.
There should be a rule that any assertion of conspiracy must at least have some evidence.
I worked at MS and was involved in several decisions to not ship in the EU because it just wasn’t worth the internal and external regulatory headache. There was no secret agenda, Satya never told me to stick it to the EU by withholding a feature in the hopes the masses would clamor for it and demand regulatory changes, which would eventually allow us to… ship the feature in a decade or so.
I’m super sympathetic to the EU’s intent, but their execution is so obviously self-defeating that it doesn’t take elaborate conspiracies to explain corporate response.
Giving their partners the time they need to finalise their releases legally seems like a... completely normal and correct thing to do? Why does everything have to be a big conspiracy?
They don’t have agreements with graphene so what do they care? Google owes graphene absolutely nothing.
They care about their partners and about following the law. Google is not being spiteful here like some commenters are saying; instead, they have changed the way they work to make it compatible with a new law that applies to them.
It’s tiresome to see the same kind of snarky comments in every thread because they are not interesting at all. They are just lazy, and begging for votes.
They're skirting the law and they're likely to be breaking it too - if not on cybersecurity grounds then almost certainly on anti-competitive grounds.
Even if we set legality of their behavior aside, they deserve scorn for how they've been managing Android for the past couple of years - every Android user is worse off because of them. They broke off productive relationships with grapheneos and other projects which contributed patches and reported vulnerabilities upstream, they're engaging in anti-competitive conduct and imposing limits on OEMs, giving Pixel devices preferential access to new APIs.
They're simultaneously putting their own customers (Pixel owners) at risk of known, exploitable security vulnerabilities. They do this to help other OEMs legally skirt (maybe) the 4 month timeframe for patches which is very lax to begin with. Thereby opening a whopping 8 month window where Android users can get hacked by known vulnerabilities.
How cynical do you have to be to defend their stewardship of AOSP?
> Google is not being spiteful here like some commenters are saying; instead, they have changed the way they work to make it compatible with a new law that applies to them
Read the second link I posted above, this is patently false.
No, not in an open-source project. Nor is it correct to build the project under the guise of open source and then pull the rug from underneath. Or any of the other anti-competitive, anti-consumer, anti-security crap they've been doing lately.
Correct? I suppose that depends on your definition. From a corporate perspective, perhaps. But from a consumer's perspective it's most certainly not the desired outcome.
It's an interesting theory. However, Samsung has already started to roll out One UI 9, which is built on top of Android 17 a month ago, so their clock has already started ticking.
I'm not familiar with the concrete wording of the regulation, but I would wager that the all the customization layers (like "One UI") that OEMs put on top of AOSP is the component for which the update clock should tick, and they should be unaffected of an underlying open source component (AOSP) being released.
Android 17 is old news, and OneUI 9 was what delayed the OS version bump for months, because Samsung planned to launch it with on new flagships first, during summer Unboxed event.
As far as I understand, most OEMs are not allowed to release QPR1 or QPR3 either (not that OEMs outside maybe Samsung would be able to). So part of it also reeks of giving Pixel benefits over phones of other manufacturers.
Since they are working with two OEMs (one for GrapheneOS support and one for getting embargoed security patches), I think they know what they are taking about.
Nothing of that has to do with OEMs being forbidden from shipping QPRs though.
Graphene isn't OEM so they don't get access to Android repository before AOSP drops. OEMs - like Motorola for example - do have access to partner repository and can ship QPRs if they wish to do so. Most often OEMs do not want to push updates (and it took years to make them push regular major Android updates).
> I think they know what they are taking about.
Err, if you look at that account you'll find that the person running it has a penchant for overexaggeration and selective truth telling when they feel aggrieved.
Nothing of that has to do with OEMs being forbidden from shipping QPRs though.
Are reading the same post?
“ The new APIs are currently exclusive to the Pixel OS and aren't available to other Android OEMs. […] Non-Google Android OEMs and AOSP-based projects can ship yearly and QPR2 releases.”
the person running it has a penchant for overexaggeration and selective truth telling when they feel aggrieved.
if that is the case then it should be brought to the respective overseen regulatory body, weather it is for them to clarify that this is not a valid interpretation of the law (it's at least clearly in conflict with the spirit of the law) and intentionally delaying public releases this way is a no-go or weather it is to amend the law to make it more explicitly illegal
either way if that is true it looks like a very intentional abuse/misinterpretation of existing regulations
It's not a CRA obligation, but a rule from ecodesign requirements for smartphones (Reg. 2023/1670)
> security updates or corrective updates mentioned under point (a) need to be available to the user at the latest 4 months after the public release of the source code of an update of the underlying operating system or, if the source code is not publicly released, after an update of the same operating system is released by the operating system provider or on any other product of the same brand;
Interesting theory. Is there a distinction between phone release and os release there? I would imagine the time starts when the model goes in sale, not when the os releases.
Otherwise I would expect Google would also wait with pixel updates
I posted about this 11 months ago [1]. The law you are referring to [2] absolutely makes distinctions between open/closed source. This is 100% why Google closed their source and now does security releases privately.
> from the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system;
> (b)
> the requirement referred to in point (a) shall apply both to operating system updates offered voluntarily by manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives and to operating system updates provided to comply with Union law;
> (c)
> security updates or corrective updates mentioned under point (a) need to be available to the user at the latest 4 months after the public release of the source code of an update of the underlying operating system or, if the source code is not publicly released, after an update of the same operating system is released by the operating system provider or on any other product of the same brand;
> (d)
> functionality updates mentioned under point (a) need to be available to the user at the latest 6 months after the public release of the source code of an update of the underlying operating system or, if the source code is not publicly released, after an update of the same operating system is released by the operating system provider or on any other product of the same brand;
> (e) an operating system update may combine security, corrective and functionality updates.
(c) and (d) treat binary releases as equivalent to source code releases, so that's rather the opposite of making a distinction between open and closed source. It would serve as an explanation if Google had started to release source code and binaries simultaneously, but it doesn't explain why the source code release is delayed even beyond that.
EDIT: I see that was already brought up multiple times when you posted about it 11 months ago.
It's Cyber Resilience Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/2847) - if there's a security patch that shows up in public, then the manufacturers are fined if they don't immediately roll it out as an update ("without undue delay").
I think that's the one that made a lot of OEMs pull back on opensource publishing, because their legal departments want to batch the CVE monitoring and reporting obligations into smaller batches.
Aren’t most OEMs in violation anyway because Linux (as in the kernel) gets regular security patches and most OEMs are on ancient kernel versions?
Also, major Android releases and QPR2s have many security fixes (anything not marked high/critical), yet OEMs are not rolling them out (QPR2) or very late (major releases).
Just to say that OEMs were probably violating the act already before Google started withholding source code.
I also think it’s an attempt of Google closing up AOSP more, otherwise they wouldn’t make it so darn hard to get updated Pixel kernel trees.
withholding security updates seems to avoid a law which requires rolling out security updates seems very much like something which needs to be fixed one way or another
This reminds me of the OpenAI hack against Hugging Face.
Regulators present an impossible goal to the companies to implement, instead of implementing the goal, the companies try to reward hack their way around it.
The end result is that they basically try to make it impossible to know about vulnerabilities because that would start the clock.
But doing timely security updates is not impossible. Apple does it, GrapheneOS does it, Google does it with Pixel, Samsung is nearly doing it on flagships.
But many Android OEMs are probably terrible at software engineering and have their attention spread across multiple SoCs, etc. It’s their own fault.
> But doing timely security updates is not impossible. Apple does it, GrapheneOS does it, Google does it with Pixel, Samsung is nearly doing it on flagships.
What does "timely" here mean? A lot of security patches for all these companies take ~weeks+ to actually make it to customers due to things like QA testing, carrier testing and release processes.
The time between disclosure and release can be rather long, months even for all of them. (I'm counting private disclosure here.)
I think it's mostly the "you need to monitor CVEs and write report within 24/72 hours" that causes OEMs pain and they prefer to have less work than more.
Also - the reality of what you think is ok and what a corporate legal department think its ok is... rarely the same -_-
nit: "without undue delay" does not mean "immediately" under any legal interpretation, only that the timeline should not be longer than necessary. This leaves a lot of wiggle-room in favor of the manufacturer, and mainly rules out that they go "eh, we'll look at all these in half a year maybe".
As long as they start the process and it is not absurd from an industry standards perspective, they should be good. They can have slow processes, including being a good bit slower than their peers, without running afoul of "without undue delay".
They have literal 24 hour and 72 hour deadlines. Obviously, they might put a blind eye to it if you are reliable but delayed the reporting by a day, but the 24 hour and 72 hour deadlines are a fact. You have to initiate the reporting immediately.
You are mixing unrelated requirements together here.
> The CRA requires manufacturers to notify actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe incidents having an impact on the security of their product with digital elements. They need to submit an early warning within 24 hours of becoming aware, and a full notification within 72 hours.
These deadlines are entirely unrelated to the availability of security fixes and delays in deliverying them.
Security flaws are discovered almost every day (now that they are automating it with AI there are a ton of reports), pretending the manufacturer releases an update in 1 day is nonsense.
Just building the code alone it would take a lot of time, and of course you have to test it at least a bit before giving it out to the end users, you can't pretend to rollout on a global scale a nightly build without first at least some level of QA risking bricking user devices.
And you have to consider that phone manufacturer doesn't work h24 and 7/7 of course to give out patches.
I think that we are fortunate if the whole process takes less than a month, not a day.
> nit: "without undue delay" does not mean "immediately" under any legal interpretation, only that the timeline should not be longer than necessary. This leaves a lot of wiggle-room in favor of the manufacturer, and mainly rules out that they go "eh, we'll look at all these in half a year maybe".
Well, the corporate lawyers think otherwise at those corporations, so I'm not sure how much your interpretation counts :)
I do not believe that any corporate lawyer would think that. It does not read like that in neither plain english nor legalese.
Maybe the misunderstanding stems from the related common misuse of "as soon as possible" as "immediately"?
A corporate lawyer would, however, always suggest to minimize/reduce/delay any legal obligations so as to minimize risk of liability, regardless of whether said obligation is easy to comply with or not.
From what I see [1] if you search for 'undue delay', it's only:
> an early warning notification of an actively exploited vulnerability, without undue delay and in any event within 24 hours of the manufacturer becoming aware of it
> without undue delay and in any event within 72 hours of the manufacturer becoming aware of the actively
> without undue delay and in any event within 24 hours of the manufacturer becoming aware of it
> without undue delay and in any event within 72 hours of the manufacturer becoming aware of the incident
"Sorry your honour, we only became 'aware of it' 2 years later, pinky promise ;)".
So any competant authority would have to prove when they 'became aware of it', whatever the test to pass that threshold means.
> due to a recent EU regulation majorly backfiring
And why should a regulation in EU affect rest of the world. Or for that matter, any US regulation. The arrogance of these nations and the ignorance of tech companies is ruining the entire Internet.
Because making things everywhere compliant is cheaper than having both a non-EU and EU versions of software. See also: Brussels effect[0].
It's simple economics. The companies are also allowed to either do special versions to comply with local laws or even to pull out of the market. They just choose not to for reasons.
Sure, American courts ask for age verification, the entire world needs to comply now. Then people wonder why so much surveillance. You can’t see past Brussels effects, because ignorance.
Oh, it’s 100% absolutely Claude. There are more tells than this.
At any rate, “developers are disassembling it to find bugs” sounds extreme, but this is something Claude will do almost spontaneously, in my experience. I ran into an issue last week where a library wasn’t doing what I expected, and asked Claude to sort out why; I came back a few minutes later to find Claude tearing apart the library’s disassembly to reveal a mismatch in struct sizes between the library’s expectations and my headers. And it did solve the bug!
We are already there and it is called Play Integrity (meets STRONG integrity) and Google is trying to get apps to use it to shut out competitors. They are succeeding to some extend (see the Volkswagen and IKEA Smart Home apps as recent successes for Google).
Google should not be allowed to abuse its duopoly position in this way. I recommend EU citizens to report every case they are (potentially) affected by to the EU DMA team.
> see the Volkswagen and IKEA Smart Home apps as recent successes for Google
Someone should make a complaint about ePD violation in relation to those. I doubt it's "strictly necessary" for those applications to read that information (if they even fulfill the "at distance" requirement).
I think that the EU shall render this practice (and the equivalent from Apple) illegal, stating that every citizen has a right to modify their own device without consequences, and that consequences shall include also having apps not working.
But to me big tech succeeded also lobbying the EU like they already did in the US, in fact they violate multiple EU rules (GDPR, etc.) without facing any consequence, and when they try to announce they would do something at the other side of the ocean they treat us that they will double or triple tariffs so...
> stating that every citizen has a right to modify their own device without consequences, and that consequences shall include also having apps not working.
iOS being so difficult to jailbreak means that most apps don't have any verification at all. Even most DRM doesn't even try to verify that the device isn't jailbroken in order to access the highest resolutions or whatever. But if we ever add a first-party option for the device to be modified, then we start running into the Android situation where every app has some invasive root/tamper detection thing. Some apps already have anti-debugging things, but the situation on iOS could be far, far worse.
A distinction without a difference - the purpose is to verify that the device on which the app runs hasn't been tampered with (for Play Integrity or AppCheck) from OEM state.
That's not true. Jailbroken devices have been tampered with, but the Secure Enclave is still fully functional. Device Check is designed to catch non-genuine hardware or non-genuine app binaries, NOT tampered software.
Trusted computing is fine and even good only if the owner (the person/company that bought the device) is in control, but it's not the world we live in.
> owner (the person/company that bought the device)
At this point I'm willing to argue that the owner of a device is whoever is legally allowed to log in as root. When I pay for server colocation, I'm the owner - and not whoever runs the building - because I decide what runs on the box, and if they tamper with it they can go to jail.
With phones it's the same, except that you pay Google for the privilege for keeping their device safe, charged, connected to the Internet, and walking it around every day with you, so they can collect better data. The only thing they can't do is snatch it from your hands, but why would they - you're doing so much useful work for them.
And of course if you try to root it, you're breaking a digital lock, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and $1,000,000, so the colocation analogy holds there too.
Is your theory really that closed source software will just stop being developed? I can't find another way to read that, but you can't think Google is just going to give up and shut down, right?
> But why invest time and money when your features get copied as soon as you publish it?
Because you still get money?
Nothing about getting copied means you don't still get money. It probably just means your legal team has some people to annoy into going away if you're a big company.
Look at spaces where ripoffs/copying are already rampant like mobile games. The result is a slop avalanche, rending the whole space commercially unviable for anything other than the most bottom-of-the-barrel dark-pattern shitware laden with scam ads and spyware because users don't care and won't pay.
That may well be the future for most commercial software (and software engineers) as margins collapse and AI tokenomics moves more power from labor to capital.
AI's pretty good at copying features even when it's closed, or online.
Not perfect, of course. All that hype about the vibe-cloned Adobe suite is, today, hype. Next year it might not be, though that depends on questions like "will investment bubble pop?" etc.
But we are at a level where, if you can describe a feature or process well enough to test it, an LLM can develop and optimise for that feature/process. That creates opportunities for businesses to have custom just-for-them business software, which nobody copies because nobody outside the business even bothers to learn exist.
You think open source never develops new features?
The only thing that made commercial software more innovative is most developers never had time to build and maintain a big open source project without support from their job. Now we have agents and it takes a lot less time to implement your ideas. That means slop filling up GitHub, but also that people who came up with good new features can make them real in their free time.
ReSkate is a good example, it's a project 90% coded by AI but the people working on it are passionate and most of them are experienced game modders. They know what made the old Skate games special and wanted to bring it back to the new one. Now it's better than vanilla Skate 4 and has tons of new features never seen in the OG trilogy. That project would never be possible without Claude taking care of the hard and boring RE work.
> Who beside the open source community develops new features if they can be easily copied?
But I guess they will also think twice if big companies can rip off the software with clean room AI implementation to circumvent the open source licenses
Google is doing better here than Apple. Most google devices have an unlockable bootloader.
I have old Chromebooks and Nexus Tablets that are EoL, but I can install linux on them and give them a second life.
The source code for my old EoL pixel phones is out there, it's just a matter of effort to port Ubuntu or PureOS or one of the other Linux phone distros to them.
It's Apple that is being as evil as possible when it comes to stomping down alternatives, they don't release iOS source code, they bricked most of my old devices when they EoL'd them by not letting me unlock the bootloader and install my own OS, they don't release drivers.
I'm deeply unhappy with Google's current direction, but they're still lightyears from the level of evil Apple inflicts upon us.
Yeah, while I am loathe to trust Google again, will never be buying another Apple hardware again too - I used an alternative map app on an old iDevice and wrote them a 5-star review for their good features, for being better than Apple and Google maps (in some aspects) and especially for still supporting older devices. A new update for the app was released and suddenly I couldn't install it because App Store reported that my ios was outdated and not compatible with the new release. So I revised the review for the app to 2-stars pointing out they had suddenly dropped support for older iDevices which was one of their main attractive features. The developers of the app contacted me asking me to reconsider the review. According to them, they had released the latest update for the app for the "outdated" ios version / older iDEvices too, but Apple deliberately sat on it without approving it for the App store. According to them, Apple hasn't clarified the issue. If the developers are being truthful (and I do believe them), this is a deliberate and malicious act by Apple to push planned obsolescence of older iDevices.
They exist. But they don't support Android apps that are unfortunately necessary. For example, any phone without WhatsApp or banking apps support is dead on arrival in Europe.
Which is why /e/ OS and Graphene OS adoption is higher than projects such as PostmarketOS (now Nura) or Ubuntu Touch, even if they are already quite mature. I daily drove Ubuntu Touch for two years in 2019 and 2020, and it's the need of Signal which made me switch to /e/.
The problem doesn't lie with e/OS/, nor any other alternative. Google locks down capabilities with "Play Integrity", effectively attestation for official Google approved operating systems only. If you aren't on the list you fail the checks, and apps (like banking apps) will fail to run.
But it’s banking apps that opt into that. It’s not like Google is saying you must use Play Integrity. It’s a feature that banking apps are more likely to use. The EU could require banks to make apps for other operating systems.
There is a mass market Android/iOS alternative, it's called HarmonyOS on 50 million devices. I expect that's not quite what you were hoping for though.
It's still Linux, though, the same way Ubuntu is still Linux despite carrying custom patches and security frameworks.
Termux has to work around security restrictions in a way not dissimilar to how you would need to work around an extremely securely configured SELinux setup on RHEL.
Ubuntu is GNU/Linux, you don't run Afterstep on Android via NDK, unless you rewrite X Windows or Wayland to run on top of OpenGL ES or Vulkan surface that is then hosted inside a AndroidView or JetpackCompose display surface.
Which is what Termux has to do, just like they have to call into specific Android services via JNI, as the NDK only exposes official NDK APIs, alongside the C and C++ standard libraries.
Yes, let's throw away a fully mature smartphone OS (AOSP) and replace it by something that does not even have proper app sandboxing. /s
The alternative are other AOSP-based OSes like GrapheneOS and Lineage. Once they are used widely enough and funded enough, they could fork AOSP when needed. In some sense they have already soft-forked in that they use major and QPR2 releases, but put a lot of patches on top to fix issues, improve security, etc.
GrapheneOS has an estimated 500,000 active installs now, apparently LineageOS has 1.4M active installs. Probably around two orders of magnitude more than traditional Linux desktop-based phones, which have been trying since, checking notes, Maemo in 2005?
Btw /e/ OS people have already shared that they were getting ready for a hard fork of AOSP looking at how Google is acting.
But to be fair the challenge is more around the hardware support than the OS itself, so in the end it will be the chip makers which will decide which OS can run or not. If they go the AMD way then great, if they go the old nvidia way where even basic reclocking is impossible then we are screwed.
I would be surprised if they have the expertise and manpower to do that.
They are mostly relying on LineageOS now and putting their own cloud, microG, and App Store app and branding on top of Lineage. Even now they are not able to roll out Android releases and WebView updates timely. Them maintaining an AOSP fork would probably end up in an outdated, broken mess.
My money is on GrapheneOS and maybe LineageOS to do it when needed.
I agree, nevertheless, Murena has 50 employees and is profitable as a company. Idk how much money lineage and Graphene have, hopefully the partnership with Motorola is going to provide them some funding.
> We need an Android alternative, something that respects users' freedom.
The more successful Android alternative - iOS - that people love so much doesn't do any of that and it's apparently even more secure and earns even more money.
We need a third option. Be it SalfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, Nura, or whatever picks up with a sizable community. We just need to start developing and investing in that one. It won't be perfect, but it will offer an alternative and control to the users.
There are plenty of alternative OS options. None are accepted by phone companies and shipped in orders of 100m devices worldwide.
Android has ~4b cumulative users, iOS 2.5b. Combined 1-2b phones are shipped annually, so phones are replaced over 3-6 years or so. Total production numbers of Sony PS2/Nintendo Switch are ~160m each, and there haven't been enough of those to be a viable alternative consumer platforms. China moves couple hundred million units per year of de-Googled phones internally(Google services are default banned in China except through Hong Kong VPN and such), and that doesn't seem to be changing situations much. Windows Phone was like few hundreds total.
The third option has to ship like 1000m - 1b units total and/or annually to be viable. Code quality... isn't going to matter, but it'll have to be literally 10-100x more popular than Nintendo. That is going to be the bar.
Bit of a hyperbolistic title. The core of the bug report doesn't require disassembly of the library. The bug author just went the extra step to do a root cause investigation, which of course requires light reversing work.
Given the current trajectory of all things, I think that the drawbacks will outweigh the benefits for a project like AOSP due to the changing economics. The reduction of SBOM (and therefore the attack surface) will be far more beneficial than the saving of work from hundreds of imported dependencies. The trend of vertical integration will likely happen in software sooner or later.
Good look with NDK issues, having the source code available would not help much anyway.
NDK seems to be handled like a 20% project in terms of allocated resources, I bet it has not more that like 2 FTEs, given its progress since Android 2.1.
Forking Android is not an option. Android is way too complex for any company or band of open-source developers to take up. The fork would quickly fall behind Google's implementation and become effectively useless.
What maintained forks of Linux are there that actually do their own general improvements and maintenance besides just following along upstream with a custom driver or two? I'm even going easy and only referring to the kernel, even though "Android" is a lot more than that.
8 out of the top 10 manufacturers are Chinese. Google has to be careful here, otherwise Android will end up as a Chinese consortium and their own version will just be available on Pixels.
Yes that's also a real possibility. The sanctions on Huawei were a terrible idea, it became a laboratory of what could be rolled out on the whole country if needed. Now this work has been done.
But Western consumers at large won't buy Chinese devices if they don't carry the Play Store. And many Western app developers won't want to deal with Google Play Services and it's APIs missing, which is what made porting to Amazon's Android fork annoying as fuck.
That's the huge, huge carrot that Google carries in front of everyone thinking to fork Android.
They don't want to deal with Google Play Services missing because it's pretty rare to have a mainstream phone without it, as soon as the Chinese manufacturers pump out millions of devices without it in the western market all at once, the developers will have to follow.
Google does have a card to play here, I don't disagree but they shouldn't overstate their hand either. The Google bits of Android are good enough to keep open-source ROMs and small manufacturers away but they aren't a silver bullet and won't save them if China stops playing the game.
You might as well say that the average smartphone is not unlockable because iPhones aren't. People who want the advantages of user control don't buy the average device. They buy the devices they can control.
You can install third party stores and apps on iOS without a waiting period (in places with decent consumer rights); confirming three popups is all you need to install third party iOS apps.
Unlike on Android, there aren't that many third party iOS apps, though.
Plus, even with Google delaying shipping source code, at least they ship the source code. The traces of source you get with the open Darwin code are nowhere near comparable.
It doesn't do app store reviews as far as I am aware. They do charge an installation fee (I'm baffled they haven't been sued over that yet), but there are free apps out there thanks to Epic covering that fee to spite Apple.
Seems that this €0,50 flat fee per installation has been replaced by a 5% commission on digital transaction made through sideloaded apps as of last August.
I can't prove it, but I still think this is (partly) due to a recent EU regulation majorly backfiring. I can't remember which one it was, but one of the recent regulations mandates that devices get updates for a certain period. Within that period a manufacturer must provide each update for all their devices in a short timeframe. The intention was to prevent flagships getting updates immediately and lower end devices having to wait months. However, due to some (also well intentioned) wording about open source, the release of the source code is counted as the first release of an update and starts the timer. I'm pretty sure Google is delaying public AOSP updates to give their partners (mainly Samsung I suppose) more time to finish building their updates on top of AOSP.
If this is the case, I wonder why isn't Google publicly saying this. Because right now, it looks like they've stopped publishing the sources just because they felt like it, which has understandably generated a lot of backlash, but I feel like all the backlash would go away if they pointed at the EU regulations.
> EU regulation majorly backfiring
I wouldn't be surprised if large corporations like Apple and Google intentionally use these tactics to pressure regulators through their European users. Siri AI is a prime example. While it's a complicated issue, I certainly wouldn't put such maneuvers past them.
It's funny that they keep trying, it has never once worked. I think US companies are projecting their dislike for regulation and keep being surprised that EU citizens don't agree. We do not love the EU government, but it sometimes does a good thing and we do like these, especially versus the anti-consumer crap that US companies like to pull.
I don't think this is any corporate conspiracy. The truth is probably more mundane: regulation is treated as obstacle to navigate around with minimal amount of effort, and not a reason to give up on practices that makes money.
Yes Us Companies Are doing this ofc
we do not love the EU government because there are billions being poured into promoting the discourse that the EU is a bad thing by both private and state actors.
My problem is the lack of democracy through the too-indirect way that the commission is elected. Von der Leyen was an extremely unpopular and horribly incompetent (at least in charge of defense) minister in Germany, then somehow she became president of the EU commission. Her skill seems to be politicking with other politicians. That would not have gotten her elected in an election by the people.
This was really lame cope ten years ago and it's really lame cope now.
It can't ever just be the fault of the regulation, of course.
They absolutely do this.
There should be a rule that any assertion of conspiracy must at least have some evidence.
I worked at MS and was involved in several decisions to not ship in the EU because it just wasn’t worth the internal and external regulatory headache. There was no secret agenda, Satya never told me to stick it to the EU by withholding a feature in the hopes the masses would clamor for it and demand regulatory changes, which would eventually allow us to… ship the feature in a decade or so.
I’m super sympathetic to the EU’s intent, but their execution is so obviously self-defeating that it doesn’t take elaborate conspiracies to explain corporate response.
Giving their partners the time they need to finalise their releases legally seems like a... completely normal and correct thing to do? Why does everything have to be a big conspiracy?
Why would that be a normal and correct thing to do? They're delaying releases for everyone else.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/115164133992525834
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946698
They don’t have agreements with graphene so what do they care? Google owes graphene absolutely nothing.
They care about their partners and about following the law. Google is not being spiteful here like some commenters are saying; instead, they have changed the way they work to make it compatible with a new law that applies to them.
It’s tiresome to see the same kind of snarky comments in every thread because they are not interesting at all. They are just lazy, and begging for votes.
They're skirting the law and they're likely to be breaking it too - if not on cybersecurity grounds then almost certainly on anti-competitive grounds.
Even if we set legality of their behavior aside, they deserve scorn for how they've been managing Android for the past couple of years - every Android user is worse off because of them. They broke off productive relationships with grapheneos and other projects which contributed patches and reported vulnerabilities upstream, they're engaging in anti-competitive conduct and imposing limits on OEMs, giving Pixel devices preferential access to new APIs.
They're simultaneously putting their own customers (Pixel owners) at risk of known, exploitable security vulnerabilities. They do this to help other OEMs legally skirt (maybe) the 4 month timeframe for patches which is very lax to begin with. Thereby opening a whopping 8 month window where Android users can get hacked by known vulnerabilities.
Their Android 17 QPR1 release was so buggy, it made many Pixel devices almost unusable and then they went radio silent. https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117372129125340408
How cynical do you have to be to defend their stewardship of AOSP?
> Google is not being spiteful here like some commenters are saying; instead, they have changed the way they work to make it compatible with a new law that applies to them
Read the second link I posted above, this is patently false.
So it is not normal/correct to have an agreement with a partner that excludes others?
No, not in an open-source project. Nor is it correct to build the project under the guise of open source and then pull the rug from underneath. Or any of the other anti-competitive, anti-consumer, anti-security crap they've been doing lately.
Normal? Sadly yes.
Correct? I suppose that depends on your definition. From a corporate perspective, perhaps. But from a consumer's perspective it's most certainly not the desired outcome.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not.
It's an interesting theory. However, Samsung has already started to roll out One UI 9, which is built on top of Android 17 a month ago, so their clock has already started ticking.
I'm not familiar with the concrete wording of the regulation, but I would wager that the all the customization layers (like "One UI") that OEMs put on top of AOSP is the component for which the update clock should tick, and they should be unaffected of an underlying open source component (AOSP) being released.
Android 17 is old news, and OneUI 9 was what delayed the OS version bump for months, because Samsung planned to launch it with on new flagships first, during summer Unboxed event.
As far as I understand, most OEMs are not allowed to release QPR1 or QPR3 either (not that OEMs outside maybe Samsung would be able to). So part of it also reeks of giving Pixel benefits over phones of other manufacturers.
the more I learn about how Google handles releases the more this looks like there being a need for anti trust actions
> As far as I understand, most OEMs are not allowed to release QPR1 or QPR3 either (not that OEMs outside maybe Samsung would be able to).
This is not true at all though. OEMs can release anything whenever they want.
I have read in multiple sources that OEMs cannot roll out QPR1/3. E.g. see this thread:
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576
Since they are working with two OEMs (one for GrapheneOS support and one for getting embargoed security patches), I think they know what they are taking about.
Nothing of that has to do with OEMs being forbidden from shipping QPRs though.
Graphene isn't OEM so they don't get access to Android repository before AOSP drops. OEMs - like Motorola for example - do have access to partner repository and can ship QPRs if they wish to do so. Most often OEMs do not want to push updates (and it took years to make them push regular major Android updates).
> I think they know what they are taking about.
Err, if you look at that account you'll find that the person running it has a penchant for overexaggeration and selective truth telling when they feel aggrieved.
Nothing of that has to do with OEMs being forbidden from shipping QPRs though.
Are reading the same post?
“ The new APIs are currently exclusive to the Pixel OS and aren't available to other Android OEMs. […] Non-Google Android OEMs and AOSP-based projects can ship yearly and QPR2 releases.”
the person running it has a penchant for overexaggeration and selective truth telling when they feel aggrieved.
Here we go again…
Well, Graphene's statement isn't true so not sure what do you want me to tell you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe their own source at OEMs lied to them? The QPRs are in the same repo they're getting their security patches from.
Except for phones preinstalled with GrapheneOS (unless you are Samsung)
if that is the case then it should be brought to the respective overseen regulatory body, weather it is for them to clarify that this is not a valid interpretation of the law (it's at least clearly in conflict with the spirit of the law) and intentionally delaying public releases this way is a no-go or weather it is to amend the law to make it more explicitly illegal
either way if that is true it looks like a very intentional abuse/misinterpretation of existing regulations
What makes you think it’s misinterpretation?
FAQ https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/12233... [PDF]
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cra-manufa...
It's not a CRA obligation, but a rule from ecodesign requirements for smartphones (Reg. 2023/1670)
> security updates or corrective updates mentioned under point (a) need to be available to the user at the latest 4 months after the public release of the source code of an update of the underlying operating system or, if the source code is not publicly released, after an update of the same operating system is released by the operating system provider or on any other product of the same brand;
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1670/oj/eng#anx_II
So by delaying AOSP releases by 4 months, Google is allowing OEMs to leave their users exposed to known vulnerabilities for up to 8 months.
Interesting theory. Is there a distinction between phone release and os release there? I would imagine the time starts when the model goes in sale, not when the os releases.
Otherwise I would expect Google would also wait with pixel updates
I posted about this 11 months ago [1]. The law you are referring to [2] absolutely makes distinctions between open/closed source. This is 100% why Google closed their source and now does security releases privately.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45911673
[2]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ%3AJOL...
> Clause 1.2:
> (6) Operating system updates:
> (a)
> from the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system;
> (b)
> the requirement referred to in point (a) shall apply both to operating system updates offered voluntarily by manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives and to operating system updates provided to comply with Union law;
> (c)
> security updates or corrective updates mentioned under point (a) need to be available to the user at the latest 4 months after the public release of the source code of an update of the underlying operating system or, if the source code is not publicly released, after an update of the same operating system is released by the operating system provider or on any other product of the same brand;
> (d)
> functionality updates mentioned under point (a) need to be available to the user at the latest 6 months after the public release of the source code of an update of the underlying operating system or, if the source code is not publicly released, after an update of the same operating system is released by the operating system provider or on any other product of the same brand;
> (e) an operating system update may combine security, corrective and functionality updates.
(c) and (d) treat binary releases as equivalent to source code releases, so that's rather the opposite of making a distinction between open and closed source. It would serve as an explanation if Google had started to release source code and binaries simultaneously, but it doesn't explain why the source code release is delayed even beyond that.
EDIT: I see that was already brought up multiple times when you posted about it 11 months ago.
It's Cyber Resilience Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/2847) - if there's a security patch that shows up in public, then the manufacturers are fined if they don't immediately roll it out as an update ("without undue delay").
I think that's the one that made a lot of OEMs pull back on opensource publishing, because their legal departments want to batch the CVE monitoring and reporting obligations into smaller batches.
Aren’t most OEMs in violation anyway because Linux (as in the kernel) gets regular security patches and most OEMs are on ancient kernel versions?
Also, major Android releases and QPR2s have many security fixes (anything not marked high/critical), yet OEMs are not rolling them out (QPR2) or very late (major releases).
Just to say that OEMs were probably violating the act already before Google started withholding source code.
I also think it’s an attempt of Google closing up AOSP more, otherwise they wouldn’t make it so darn hard to get updated Pixel kernel trees.
probably yes
withholding security updates seems to avoid a law which requires rolling out security updates seems very much like something which needs to be fixed one way or another
This reminds me of the OpenAI hack against Hugging Face.
Regulators present an impossible goal to the companies to implement, instead of implementing the goal, the companies try to reward hack their way around it.
The end result is that they basically try to make it impossible to know about vulnerabilities because that would start the clock.
But doing timely security updates is not impossible. Apple does it, GrapheneOS does it, Google does it with Pixel, Samsung is nearly doing it on flagships.
But many Android OEMs are probably terrible at software engineering and have their attention spread across multiple SoCs, etc. It’s their own fault.
Then they should leave it to others. Release specs and sources and let whoever wants, maintain the firmwares.
> But doing timely security updates is not impossible. Apple does it, GrapheneOS does it, Google does it with Pixel, Samsung is nearly doing it on flagships.
What does "timely" here mean? A lot of security patches for all these companies take ~weeks+ to actually make it to customers due to things like QA testing, carrier testing and release processes.
The time between disclosure and release can be rather long, months even for all of them. (I'm counting private disclosure here.)
I think it's mostly the "you need to monitor CVEs and write report within 24/72 hours" that causes OEMs pain and they prefer to have less work than more.
Also - the reality of what you think is ok and what a corporate legal department think its ok is... rarely the same -_-
Law: please do the minimum to protect users. Corps: screaming
nit: "without undue delay" does not mean "immediately" under any legal interpretation, only that the timeline should not be longer than necessary. This leaves a lot of wiggle-room in favor of the manufacturer, and mainly rules out that they go "eh, we'll look at all these in half a year maybe".
As long as they start the process and it is not absurd from an industry standards perspective, they should be good. They can have slow processes, including being a good bit slower than their peers, without running afoul of "without undue delay".
They have literal 24 hour and 72 hour deadlines. Obviously, they might put a blind eye to it if you are reliable but delayed the reporting by a day, but the 24 hour and 72 hour deadlines are a fact. You have to initiate the reporting immediately.
You are mixing unrelated requirements together here.
> The CRA requires manufacturers to notify actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe incidents having an impact on the security of their product with digital elements. They need to submit an early warning within 24 hours of becoming aware, and a full notification within 72 hours.
These deadlines are entirely unrelated to the availability of security fixes and delays in deliverying them.
This is impossible to happen.
Security flaws are discovered almost every day (now that they are automating it with AI there are a ton of reports), pretending the manufacturer releases an update in 1 day is nonsense.
Just building the code alone it would take a lot of time, and of course you have to test it at least a bit before giving it out to the end users, you can't pretend to rollout on a global scale a nightly build without first at least some level of QA risking bricking user devices.
And you have to consider that phone manufacturer doesn't work h24 and 7/7 of course to give out patches.
I think that we are fortunate if the whole process takes less than a month, not a day.
> nit: "without undue delay" does not mean "immediately" under any legal interpretation, only that the timeline should not be longer than necessary. This leaves a lot of wiggle-room in favor of the manufacturer, and mainly rules out that they go "eh, we'll look at all these in half a year maybe".
Well, the corporate lawyers think otherwise at those corporations, so I'm not sure how much your interpretation counts :)
I do not believe that any corporate lawyer would think that. It does not read like that in neither plain english nor legalese.
Maybe the misunderstanding stems from the related common misuse of "as soon as possible" as "immediately"?
A corporate lawyer would, however, always suggest to minimize/reduce/delay any legal obligations so as to minimize risk of liability, regardless of whether said obligation is easy to comply with or not.
From what I see [1] if you search for 'undue delay', it's only:
> an early warning notification of an actively exploited vulnerability, without undue delay and in any event within 24 hours of the manufacturer becoming aware of it
> without undue delay and in any event within 72 hours of the manufacturer becoming aware of the actively
> without undue delay and in any event within 24 hours of the manufacturer becoming aware of it
> without undue delay and in any event within 72 hours of the manufacturer becoming aware of the incident
"Sorry your honour, we only became 'aware of it' 2 years later, pinky promise ;)".
So any competant authority would have to prove when they 'became aware of it', whatever the test to pass that threshold means.
[1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/2847/oj/eng
So it's the regulator's fault that a trillion dollar company is acting against the public interest? That's some unproven theory indeed.
> due to a recent EU regulation majorly backfiring
And why should a regulation in EU affect rest of the world. Or for that matter, any US regulation. The arrogance of these nations and the ignorance of tech companies is ruining the entire Internet.
Because making things everywhere compliant is cheaper than having both a non-EU and EU versions of software. See also: Brussels effect[0].
It's simple economics. The companies are also allowed to either do special versions to comply with local laws or even to pull out of the market. They just choose not to for reasons.
[0]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect>
Sure, American courts ask for age verification, the entire world needs to comply now. Then people wonder why so much surveillance. You can’t see past Brussels effects, because ignorance.
One character: a plain compare loop. Correct.
Not surprisingly, I get slight hints of Claudism in the text.
AI "opening" the source of software is one of the best things I've seen going for it so far.
Oh, it’s 100% absolutely Claude. There are more tells than this.
At any rate, “developers are disassembling it to find bugs” sounds extreme, but this is something Claude will do almost spontaneously, in my experience. I ran into an issue last week where a library wasn’t doing what I expected, and asked Claude to sort out why; I came back a few minutes later to find Claude tearing apart the library’s disassembly to reveal a mismatch in struct sizes between the library’s expectations and my headers. And it did solve the bug!
Given they don't have the code, I think it's fair enough here. Sounds like with it, it would have been much easier to find.
Trusted Platform Computing in 3... 2... 1...
We are already there and it is called Play Integrity (meets STRONG integrity) and Google is trying to get apps to use it to shut out competitors. They are succeeding to some extend (see the Volkswagen and IKEA Smart Home apps as recent successes for Google).
Google should not be allowed to abuse its duopoly position in this way. I recommend EU citizens to report every case they are (potentially) affected by to the EU DMA team.
> see the Volkswagen and IKEA Smart Home apps as recent successes for Google
Someone should make a complaint about ePD violation in relation to those. I doubt it's "strictly necessary" for those applications to read that information (if they even fulfill the "at distance" requirement).
I think that the EU shall render this practice (and the equivalent from Apple) illegal, stating that every citizen has a right to modify their own device without consequences, and that consequences shall include also having apps not working.
But to me big tech succeeded also lobbying the EU like they already did in the US, in fact they violate multiple EU rules (GDPR, etc.) without facing any consequence, and when they try to announce they would do something at the other side of the ocean they treat us that they will double or triple tariffs so...
> stating that every citizen has a right to modify their own device without consequences, and that consequences shall include also having apps not working.
iOS being so difficult to jailbreak means that most apps don't have any verification at all. Even most DRM doesn't even try to verify that the device isn't jailbroken in order to access the highest resolutions or whatever. But if we ever add a first-party option for the device to be modified, then we start running into the Android situation where every app has some invasive root/tamper detection thing. Some apps already have anti-debugging things, but the situation on iOS could be far, far worse.
iOS has its own Play Integrity equivalent with DeviceCheck (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck) and banking apps on iOS use it widely just like on Android as well.
DeviceCheck is not about detecting if the device is jailbroken, it's about detecting if the app is being emulated or tampered with.
A distinction without a difference - the purpose is to verify that the device on which the app runs hasn't been tampered with (for Play Integrity or AppCheck) from OEM state.
That's not true. Jailbroken devices have been tampered with, but the Secure Enclave is still fully functional. Device Check is designed to catch non-genuine hardware or non-genuine app binaries, NOT tampered software.
If AI is good enough to find RCE in google code, maybe it can crack TPM
Maybe the TPM developer should be checking this using AI?
This ideea haunts me in my nightmares.
Trusted computing is fine and even good only if the owner (the person/company that bought the device) is in control, but it's not the world we live in.
> owner (the person/company that bought the device)
At this point I'm willing to argue that the owner of a device is whoever is legally allowed to log in as root. When I pay for server colocation, I'm the owner - and not whoever runs the building - because I decide what runs on the box, and if they tamper with it they can go to jail.
With phones it's the same, except that you pay Google for the privilege for keeping their device safe, charged, connected to the Internet, and walking it around every day with you, so they can collect better data. The only thing they can't do is snatch it from your hands, but why would they - you're doing so much useful work for them.
And of course if you try to root it, you're breaking a digital lock, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and $1,000,000, so the colocation analogy holds there too.
It could slow down progress.
Who beside the open source community develops new features if they can be easily copied?
Is your theory really that closed source software will just stop being developed? I can't find another way to read that, but you can't think Google is just going to give up and shut down, right?
"AI is going to lead to much less software being written" said no-one ever :)
Closed software publicly available. Internal closed software, sure.
But why invest time and money when your features get copied as soon as you publish it?
> But why invest time and money when your features get copied as soon as you publish it?
Because you still get money?
Nothing about getting copied means you don't still get money. It probably just means your legal team has some people to annoy into going away if you're a big company.
Look at spaces where ripoffs/copying are already rampant like mobile games. The result is a slop avalanche, rending the whole space commercially unviable for anything other than the most bottom-of-the-barrel dark-pattern shitware laden with scam ads and spyware because users don't care and won't pay.
That may well be the future for most commercial software (and software engineers) as margins collapse and AI tokenomics moves more power from labor to capital.
AI's pretty good at copying features even when it's closed, or online.
Not perfect, of course. All that hype about the vibe-cloned Adobe suite is, today, hype. Next year it might not be, though that depends on questions like "will investment bubble pop?" etc.
But we are at a level where, if you can describe a feature or process well enough to test it, an LLM can develop and optimise for that feature/process. That creates opportunities for businesses to have custom just-for-them business software, which nobody copies because nobody outside the business even bothers to learn exist.
You think open source never develops new features?
The only thing that made commercial software more innovative is most developers never had time to build and maintain a big open source project without support from their job. Now we have agents and it takes a lot less time to implement your ideas. That means slop filling up GitHub, but also that people who came up with good new features can make them real in their free time.
ReSkate is a good example, it's a project 90% coded by AI but the people working on it are passionate and most of them are experienced game modders. They know what made the old Skate games special and wanted to bring it back to the new one. Now it's better than vanilla Skate 4 and has tons of new features never seen in the OG trilogy. That project would never be possible without Claude taking care of the hard and boring RE work.
> Who beside the open source community develops new features if they can be easily copied?
But I guess they will also think twice if big companies can rip off the software with clean room AI implementation to circumvent the open source licenses
Why use proprietary software when there is opensource one ?
Some flavor of support/lifespan real or imagined.
The new Google motto seems to be "be as evil as you can".
We need an Android alternative, something that respects users' freedom.
Google is doing better here than Apple. Most google devices have an unlockable bootloader.
I have old Chromebooks and Nexus Tablets that are EoL, but I can install linux on them and give them a second life.
The source code for my old EoL pixel phones is out there, it's just a matter of effort to port Ubuntu or PureOS or one of the other Linux phone distros to them.
It's Apple that is being as evil as possible when it comes to stomping down alternatives, they don't release iOS source code, they bricked most of my old devices when they EoL'd them by not letting me unlock the bootloader and install my own OS, they don't release drivers.
I'm deeply unhappy with Google's current direction, but they're still lightyears from the level of evil Apple inflicts upon us.
> Most google devices have an unlockable bootloader.
But that's not the case for other manufacturers, including ones way more popular than Google. Especially Samsung.
On average, a new Android device is almost as locked as iPhone is.
Yeah, while I am loathe to trust Google again, will never be buying another Apple hardware again too - I used an alternative map app on an old iDevice and wrote them a 5-star review for their good features, for being better than Apple and Google maps (in some aspects) and especially for still supporting older devices. A new update for the app was released and suddenly I couldn't install it because App Store reported that my ios was outdated and not compatible with the new release. So I revised the review for the app to 2-stars pointing out they had suddenly dropped support for older iDevices which was one of their main attractive features. The developers of the app contacted me asking me to reconsider the review. According to them, they had released the latest update for the app for the "outdated" ios version / older iDEvices too, but Apple deliberately sat on it without approving it for the App store. According to them, Apple hasn't clarified the issue. If the developers are being truthful (and I do believe them), this is a deliberate and malicious act by Apple to push planned obsolescence of older iDevices.
Typing this from a e/os/ phone.
Alternatives exist. They just need signifiant adoption.
They exist. But they don't support Android apps that are unfortunately necessary. For example, any phone without WhatsApp or banking apps support is dead on arrival in Europe.
WhatsApp and my banking apps work fine on GrapheneOS (and /e/OS).
Which is why /e/ OS and Graphene OS adoption is higher than projects such as PostmarketOS (now Nura) or Ubuntu Touch, even if they are already quite mature. I daily drove Ubuntu Touch for two years in 2019 and 2020, and it's the need of Signal which made me switch to /e/.
Once upon a time WhatsApp had a j2me client…
Though I see signal usage creeping upwards. Maybe just my circle
Couldn’t the EU pass a law to require e/os/ to support WhatsApp or vice verse?
The problem doesn't lie with e/OS/, nor any other alternative. Google locks down capabilities with "Play Integrity", effectively attestation for official Google approved operating systems only. If you aren't on the list you fail the checks, and apps (like banking apps) will fail to run.
But it’s banking apps that opt into that. It’s not like Google is saying you must use Play Integrity. It’s a feature that banking apps are more likely to use. The EU could require banks to make apps for other operating systems.
IIRC EU was the issue?
"EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation"[1]
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1vds3jm/eu_age_ver...
Sailfish OS devices have good support for running Android apps.
No WhatsApp would be a feature
I wish we would all live in such a beautiful world; unluckily, the real world is not as nice.
How are /e/OS, GrapheneOS, or LineageOS alternatives?
Google can kill them in an instant, they need the AOSP source to survive.
Well the sources are open, Google cannot remove them. Google can stop to publish the new changes, but the current sources will stay open.
There is a mass market Android/iOS alternative, it's called HarmonyOS on 50 million devices. I expect that's not quite what you were hoping for though.
Harmony is just another closed-down ecosystem controlled by a single company. It's already worse than Android with its late source releases.
There's already an alternative, it's called Linux.
Though, as the narcs are quick to point out, Android 'is' Linux.
So really, the alternative is proper GNU/Linux (or as I've recently taken to calling it...)
It really isn't, it more like Inferno would have replaced its kernel with the Linux kernel.
It is as close to GNU/Linux as Inferno was to UNIX System V.
Which is why Termux has to work around what is actually available as public APIs on the NDK.
It's still Linux, though, the same way Ubuntu is still Linux despite carrying custom patches and security frameworks.
Termux has to work around security restrictions in a way not dissimilar to how you would need to work around an extremely securely configured SELinux setup on RHEL.
Ubuntu is GNU/Linux, you don't run Afterstep on Android via NDK, unless you rewrite X Windows or Wayland to run on top of OpenGL ES or Vulkan surface that is then hosted inside a AndroidView or JetpackCompose display surface.
Which is what Termux has to do, just like they have to call into specific Android services via JNI, as the NDK only exposes official NDK APIs, alongside the C and C++ standard libraries.
Android uses Linux but it has no consequences for users or developers. So this is practically irrelevant.
See also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50057296
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060611
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060215
Related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50051530
Yes, let's throw away a fully mature smartphone OS (AOSP) and replace it by something that does not even have proper app sandboxing. /s
The alternative are other AOSP-based OSes like GrapheneOS and Lineage. Once they are used widely enough and funded enough, they could fork AOSP when needed. In some sense they have already soft-forked in that they use major and QPR2 releases, but put a lot of patches on top to fix issues, improve security, etc.
GrapheneOS has an estimated 500,000 active installs now, apparently LineageOS has 1.4M active installs. Probably around two orders of magnitude more than traditional Linux desktop-based phones, which have been trying since, checking notes, Maemo in 2005?
Btw /e/ OS people have already shared that they were getting ready for a hard fork of AOSP looking at how Google is acting. But to be fair the challenge is more around the hardware support than the OS itself, so in the end it will be the chip makers which will decide which OS can run or not. If they go the AMD way then great, if they go the old nvidia way where even basic reclocking is impossible then we are screwed.
I would be surprised if they have the expertise and manpower to do that.
They are mostly relying on LineageOS now and putting their own cloud, microG, and App Store app and branding on top of Lineage. Even now they are not able to roll out Android releases and WebView updates timely. Them maintaining an AOSP fork would probably end up in an outdated, broken mess.
My money is on GrapheneOS and maybe LineageOS to do it when needed.
I agree, nevertheless, Murena has 50 employees and is profitable as a company. Idk how much money lineage and Graphene have, hopefully the partnership with Motorola is going to provide them some funding.
> We need an Android alternative, something that respects users' freedom.
You can support independent Android development (for example, GrapheneOS)
> We need an Android alternative, something that respects users' freedom.
The more successful Android alternative - iOS - that people love so much doesn't do any of that and it's apparently even more secure and earns even more money.
See post downbelow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50083579
So why? :)
sure if there are another corpo that want to funding it
We need a third option. Be it SalfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, Nura, or whatever picks up with a sizable community. We just need to start developing and investing in that one. It won't be perfect, but it will offer an alternative and control to the users.
There are plenty of alternative OS options. None are accepted by phone companies and shipped in orders of 100m devices worldwide.
Android has ~4b cumulative users, iOS 2.5b. Combined 1-2b phones are shipped annually, so phones are replaced over 3-6 years or so. Total production numbers of Sony PS2/Nintendo Switch are ~160m each, and there haven't been enough of those to be a viable alternative consumer platforms. China moves couple hundred million units per year of de-Googled phones internally(Google services are default banned in China except through Hong Kong VPN and such), and that doesn't seem to be changing situations much. Windows Phone was like few hundreds total.
The third option has to ship like 1000m - 1b units total and/or annually to be viable. Code quality... isn't going to matter, but it'll have to be literally 10-100x more popular than Nintendo. That is going to be the bar.
Bit of a hyperbolistic title. The core of the bug report doesn't require disassembly of the library. The bug author just went the extra step to do a root cause investigation, which of course requires light reversing work.
It'd be mildly amusing if this led to someone doing an AI-powered decompilation of AOSP.
Given that previous versions of AOSP have source, it wouldn’t even be that difficult.
Yeah, you could get 95% of the way there with binary diffing
Google not releasing won’t help now in the ai age….
Given the current trajectory of all things, I think that the drawbacks will outweigh the benefits for a project like AOSP due to the changing economics. The reduction of SBOM (and therefore the attack surface) will be far more beneficial than the saving of work from hundreds of imported dependencies. The trend of vertical integration will likely happen in software sooner or later.
AI is starting to successfully decompile binaries, unless the binary isn't purposefully obfuscated, I guess it's almost "open source".
Good look with NDK issues, having the source code available would not help much anyway.
NDK seems to be handled like a 20% project in terms of allocated resources, I bet it has not more that like 2 FTEs, given its progress since Android 2.1.
I wonder if they use already / what their experience is with "REA Reverse – Engineer Anything" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50028275).
It's time to fork it
I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung or Xiaomi eventually forked to make their own "developed in the open" Android.
Though given how little those companies have respected their users so far, I feel like this is a bit of a monkey's paw.
What makes you think Samsung or Xiaomi care about a “developed in the open” Android? Do they even open source any of their flavors?
What about OpenHarmony?
OpenHarmony is hardly an Android fork (anymore).
In a way, it's similar to Samsung's Tizen, except Huawei's OS sees actual use, though not so much in the ecosystem of the USA of course.
An operating system from a convicted and blacklisted Chinese company? Thanks, but no thanks.
It's only blacklisted in US, afaik
Forking Android is not an option. Android is way too complex for any company or band of open-source developers to take up. The fork would quickly fall behind Google's implementation and become effectively useless.
It is not that complex, and now that AI has gotten good it's gotten even easier.
This is so wrong. First off Linux. Secondly even among Android competitors, HarmonyOS.
What maintained forks of Linux are there that actually do their own general improvements and maintenance besides just following along upstream with a custom driver or two? I'm even going easy and only referring to the kernel, even though "Android" is a lot more than that.
Harmony is no longer Android, and it's closed source
Even the big guns like Amazon can't afford keeping up with Google's speed.
8 out of the top 10 manufacturers are Chinese. Google has to be careful here, otherwise Android will end up as a Chinese consortium and their own version will just be available on Pixels.
Or China will migrate to Harmony and drop Android altogether.
Yes that's also a real possibility. The sanctions on Huawei were a terrible idea, it became a laboratory of what could be rolled out on the whole country if needed. Now this work has been done.
But Western consumers at large won't buy Chinese devices if they don't carry the Play Store. And many Western app developers won't want to deal with Google Play Services and it's APIs missing, which is what made porting to Amazon's Android fork annoying as fuck.
That's the huge, huge carrot that Google carries in front of everyone thinking to fork Android.
Right, so the userbase is the true moat. Same stories as anything social.
They don't want to deal with Google Play Services missing because it's pretty rare to have a mainstream phone without it, as soon as the Chinese manufacturers pump out millions of devices without it in the western market all at once, the developers will have to follow.
Google does have a card to play here, I don't disagree but they shouldn't overstate their hand either. The Google bits of Android are good enough to keep open-source ROMs and small manufacturers away but they aren't a silver bullet and won't save them if China stops playing the game.
> as soon as the Chinese manufacturers pump out millions of devices without it in the western market all at once, the developers will have to follow.
I highly doubt that. People have far too much money already invested in Play Store purchases, that's a lot to give up for a marginally cheaper phone.
There's plenty of users who never spend anything at all on the Play Store, the various estimations I see online are about 15% of paying users.
Also, I don't necessarily think the phones will be marginally cheaper, just that the market will adapt.
Sundar Pichai will need to take a class from Dario in open source fearmongering.
corporate incentives turned into a laughing stock :p
Is it just me or Google has a lot of those silly bugs, where it seems nobody is thinking for 2 seconds on what they're actually doing?
just fork the android already, ffs
every generation of control freak eventually gets tired of Android as the features that actually have market traction get merged into iOS
just hang up the hat and never look back
At least for now, you can still install arbitrary APKs (after a 24-hour wait period). This alone still puts android leagues and bounds above iOS.
Even better, you can install your own AOSP-based OS that does not track you, will not have a 24 hour waiting period, etc.
That's device specific however. Pixels, yes, but say a Samsung device? Not any more - they nixed bootloader unlocking.
There are enough unpatched Linux exploits (known and unknown) running in the wild to make most phones rootable/flashable for years to come.
On average, a new Android device is no longer unlockable.
You might as well say that the average smartphone is not unlockable because iPhones aren't. People who want the advantages of user control don't buy the average device. They buy the devices they can control.
You can install third party stores and apps on iOS without a waiting period (in places with decent consumer rights); confirming three popups is all you need to install third party iOS apps.
Unlike on Android, there aren't that many third party iOS apps, though.
Plus, even with Google delaying shipping source code, at least they ship the source code. The traces of source you get with the open Darwin code are nowhere near comparable.
> You can install third party stores and apps on iOS without a waiting period (in places with decent consumer rights)
Doesn't apple still "verify" (and can decide not to allow) those supposedly 3rd party applications?
It doesn't do app store reviews as far as I am aware. They do charge an installation fee (I'm baffled they haven't been sued over that yet), but there are free apps out there thanks to Epic covering that fee to spite Apple.
Seems that this €0,50 flat fee per installation has been replaced by a 5% commission on digital transaction made through sideloaded apps as of last August.
https://developer.apple.com/support/apps-in-the-eu/
Until iOS lets me run a web browser that isn't WebKit, without geographic restrictions, I'm not interested. It's an absurd restriction.
Being able to have a fully functional version of KDE Connect would also be a requirement.
Fork them!