What happens to existing side loaded apps on my phone?
I believe nothing, Google still allows side loading via ADB and apparently sideloading is not exactly going anywhere, but when you want to install one, you have to wait 24 hours and reboot your phone, as I said though terminal bypasses these, it’s just security stuff all again, I guess Google isn’t very happy about society’s widespread misinformation that Android is less secure than iOS
Maybe. That is unclear. If your app isn’t verified, Google may or may not do something to “warn” you.
And whatever they do now is only the first step. They will soon lock it all down, because monetizing it gets them rich.
I’ve found it impossible to run apps from APKpure. Google Play gets in the way, stops the app from startup because “it might be malicious” and does not give you the option to run it anyway. I have sideloaded apps and run into the same problem. I’d read you can disable Google Play Services to get around it, but the apps themselves require it. These are just Japanese escape games, nothing sketchy.
Connect to PC, install ADB Platform tools, open up your terminal, “adb install app.apk”
Yes, I’ve done that.
Hopefully this pushes Linux on Mobile devices to be a more daily drivable platform at least. Otherwise, guess we’re fucked since there’s no way Google will give in to the backlash since if memory serves me correctly they NEVER have. It’s almost like they’re basically a monopoly and can be as anti-consumer as they want or something…
Does this effect patched apps? Like YouTube Revanced
Love that some megacorp can just make decisions like this that affects billions of people.
Really just feeling the fucking freedom. I hate everything.
this is a reply from further down that is actually correct
This is being presented as more doom laden than is warranted. Ostensibly it is an effort to stop less technically able users from installing malware, certainly there will be unspoken ulterior motivations but such is the world we have allowed to grow around us. As far as overarching evil plans go this is quite a benign example.
Get that boot out your mouth, you don’t know where it’s been.
Which is bullshit. You already had to enable external downloads this is just them even farther encroaching on our ownership of our devices.
The megacorps can do anything they want with their product. The chef can change the menu anytime and he can refuse you service - it’s his restaurant. Our problem is that it’s a duopoly and there’s nowhere else to go.
The only way out is open standards and platforms, enabling true competition.
Android was an open standard and platform, a LONG time ago. Then Google did a rug pull with all new features of android requiring 100% of their services to function.
No, it wasn’t ever. It always belonged to Google who benevolently open sourced parts of it and retains control.
Safetynet and PlayIntegrity are under Google’s control. The PlayStore is Google’s. All of the APIs are Google’s! Hardware blobs are closed and belong to the manufacturer.
Just because some of the stuff shows up on GitHub doesn’t make it an open platform.
Android was out for at least five years before Safetynet was a thing. I’m surprised people weren’t louder in their objections to that then.
Ah yes the invisible hand will fix it
After all it’s the invisible hand’s job
Real quick.
Just imagine you order a plate of pasta. You’re only two bites in, and it’s DELICIOUS.
Then here comes chef. While making full eye contact, he tips your plate and dumps all of that pasta in the trash.
Chef proceeds to take a giant wet shit onto the plate. He brings a new set of silverware and a fresh napkin right before your server comes back with the check.
You insist that you didn’t order a giant wet shit, but they won’t take it off the bill.
Let’s stop pretending this is an inevitable oopsie. This shit is egregious.
More like you go to the restaurant every day and eat your favorite meal and one day its just not on the menu anymore.
I am not buying a new phone every day. I have already purchased the phone and now the functionality is being changed.
You could technically stop updating. But thats not feasible since it would put your device security to peril. Until or only if we were to use a FOSS system would we be able to chose which parts of the updates we don’t accept. It sucks but google can basically do anything they want to android and if you’re on a proprietary vendor you’re stuck with that patch
Don’t overstretch my analogy like that. How about this:
Google has standardized The Restaurant. The kitchens all have the same tools and ingredients and are open to anyone. Seating and billing is standardized, and you can easily order and pay at your table, and the food is delivered straight to you via pneumatic tubes and nicely packaged. The food might be expensive or cheap, tasty or revolting, but the experience is always the same.
There are a lot of hobby cooks that like to cook in the Google restaurants. If you want to eat their food, you might have to pick it up straight at the kitchen, or nicely ask the hobby waiters. The food is good and free, so some people tip the cooks or waiters directly. The cooks have been there for years and really whipping up nice creations - mostly for free, beacause the ingredients and tools were free, and they really like to cook.
Now Google introduced a new rule: everyone has to use their billing and pneumatic delivery system, citing improved food safety. The hobby cooks and waiters are infuriated, and even some of their customers, and they demand that everyone can still come to the kitchen or the waiters. But Google just says: look, my restaurant, my rules. If you don’t like it go make your own.
Except that google’s "standardized, “packaged” food is just as unsafe or even less safe than the hobby cooks’, and they’re only using “food safety” as a pretense to capture the market and hold clientele hostage.
And this change has also been preceded by buying out every other restaurant chain in town, except for the “Apple Restaurants,” which are already a walled garden, which Google is now trying to emulate even though most of its user base came to it specifically to avoid Apple’s business model.
And there are a few other smaller chains based on Google’s standards, but they’re considered niche and don’t all support every feature (“sorry, no ATMS”). Also, since most of their equipment comes from Google, Google likely has a killswitch and can cut off their stoves and refrigerators at any time.
It’s clearly an anti-trust issue, but since Apple has already set the precedent and the US is pro-corporation and anti-consumer, everyone is kinda just screwed.
The point is that Google’s head chef can come out and shit on your plate, and if you don’t like it then it sucks to suck because there aren’t really any viable alternatives.
as much as i despise microsoft, at least windows phone was competition.
Daddy Googs won’t be happy until it’s a walled garden just like iOS
“Fascist oligarchy of capitalist dictators continue to implement totalitarian surveillance apparatus. Majority of talking chimps sleepwalking into dystopia.”
Trouble with this analogy is the pasta they serve you eat for about 2 years and they can change what’s on your plate at any time.
It’s more like:
There are 2 grocery store chains in your city and zero restaurants or other ways to get food not owned by those chains. One already has a supply of only expensive, big-brand products, with nothing organic and very few healthy items The other chain has more independent items that are healthier and more reasonably-priced, as they allowed smaller companies to sell there. Now they are closing the door to these smaller companies, making them appear as a clone to the first chain.
And just manage to push it unilaterally too. This shit must be opposed.
it’s never been your phone, bruh
Do Linux phones need to run a Kickstarter?
More than that. Proper, real, hardware. And a bit more UI polish. The software is inching closer. But hardware wise there’s very little real option. For the time being my existing android devices are going to be demoted to little more than modems for a small Linux portable. I badly want a real good hardware platform to run a mobile linux distro. I have an octo core ARM chromebook tablet running postmarket. It’s a great experience apart from too little RAM. KDE Touch is pretty nice. And sits a bit under 500Mb idle. But the moment Firefox or Chrome launch we’re swapping hard.
I would like a little more gurantee of effort/return than the TOS of Kickstarter has, but I would totally invest in a Linux phone. I would drop almost the entire cost of the phone down as deposit if it meant I could have it in a year and be guaranteed one.
SailfishOS is a (non-Android) Linux phone that may be viable right meow!
SailfishOS runs fine (well?) on the Sony Xperia or the Jolla C2.
I just bought one a few weeks ago, but I haven’t had time to fully set it up yet (my house has been falling apart). I’m in the US with Mint Mobile and calls and SMS work. Camera works. Battery life is pretty decent. They have an Android compatibility layer that integrates pretty well into Sailfish. I was able to install F-Droid on it and then Bitwarden and Molly (Signal client) so far.
One of the more trickier apps I may need to install is Tailscale… but I’m thinking maybe I can switch to Netbird and use their reverse proxy and remove the need to install a VPN client on the phone altogether.
I’m not a heavy smartphone user, so for me I’m thinking this might be a viable path to take.
p.d. Yes, you can bring up a terminal. :)
Unfortunately, Sailfish OS uses a proprietary (closed source) android compatibility layer, as well as a closed source UI.
For the parts they have open-sourced, they implementrd a CLA that contributers must sign. It’s the HA-CLA-I-ANY license, which specifically allows them a perpetual Copyright and Patent license, and permission to relicense your code contributions to a more restrictive license which enables them sell or package it into a closed-source proprietary app.
Personally I’d be more comfortable supporting the development of PostmarketOS instead, since it is completely open-source with no CLA, meaning no chance of any rug-pulling in the future.
SailfishOS seems to run quite nicely, but has the limitations listed by you.
PostmarketOS seems to run a tad worse, but is fully open source.
Wouldn’t it make sense to support both, because otherwise there’s some danger of a chicken and egg situation:
people don’t use PostmarketOS, because it doesn’t work well enough. People don’t support PostmarketOS, because they don’t use it.
SailfishOS could pave the way for people using Linux phones and developing the need for completely open source ones after they realize the limitations of SailfishOS.
I can see that happening to me at least, because I ordered a Jolla phone with SailfishOS, which will hopefully be delivered in a few months (batch #3). I chose SailfishOS over PostmarketOS because of their Android app compatibility layer being fully aware this part isn’t open source and that I will eventually trying to get rid of that situation.
The demand for having a Linux phone soon that may be able to become my daily driver was more pressing than facing the risk of getting frustrated by PostmarketOS.It’s unfortunate that it isn’t open source. Their AppSupport feature looks so great though. Hopefully it’s possible to do something similar in postmarketOS.
PostmarketOS has a similar ability thanks to Waydroid, though I’ve never used it myself.
I know but what I meant is having the Android compatibility layer integrated into the OS itself so that Android apps are available directly in postmarketOS, like they are in SailfishOS. Waydroid is cumbersome since you have to launch that first to then be able to open the app you want.
especially if it’s using sim/esim card. Those mobile carriers can literally do whatever the fuck they want to your phone and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Google doing this is just the equivalent of what Apple has been doing for a while.
People need to buy more Linux phones. It’s the only way for the tech to improve.
Jolla isn’t in the US at least AFAIK. And outside that I’m not really aware of other similar options available here. I’m looking at maybe getting something I can root and wipe to run linux. But that’s beyond most people’s ability and desire.
I’ve been eyeing the furi phone. I like the hardware switches for modem/GPS, camera, and microphone.
I saw a Defcon talk about SIM cards a few years ago, really interesting stuff.
Most people treat SIM cards as just an ID to get on a carrier’s network, but they are soo much more.
When SIM cards were developed, they were designed to be the core of your phone, your handset would be just that, handset that would only run the software on the SIM card.
SIM cards are small computers, they have a CPU, RAM and storage, they can run apps on the SIM card itself and only present the UI to the phone.
With my first phones, I remember the contacts being stored on the SIM card itself, it usually took 30-60 sec to load them after a phone restart. But bloody convenient when switching phones, this was way before iCloud and other similar services, and moving your SIM card moved all your contacts as well.
Since SIM cards are controlled by the operator, they can do stuff that might surprise you, they can act as a trusted source for signing/encrypting/storing data, the user does not have direct access to tamper with the chip, so security apps have been developed to run on SIM cards, I don’t know the current status on this, but in countries with limited/older infrastructure, this was used for bank security apps, since the SIM is a locked down system, you can use it to securely store a key, and have the SIM use the key to generate a token, sign requests and even encrypt data, all without the key leaving the SIM.
Here is the talk I mentioned:
Thanks for the video link.
Also the baseband chip for 4G/5G is yet another self contained computer you don’t control. Shit’s egregious.
SIM cards are small computers, they have a CPU, RAM and storage, they can run apps on the SIM card itself and only present the UI to the phone.
Someone once managed to contain a very small webserver in it.
especially if it’s using sim/esim card. Those mobile carriers can literally do whatever the fuck they want to your phone and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Wow that’s wild, how does my SIM card allow my carrier to do whatever they want to my phone?
On the face of it, that sounds like a gigantic breach of privacy. Can they look at my photos, capture my screen, read my stored app data, intercept outbound Internet traffic before it’s encrypted, etc? That’s wild.
Not to mention that I bought my phone separately, so it’s got nothing to do with them. As one might imagine, I only added a SIM in order to receive traditional telephone calls, it’s not otherwise useful to me.
Oh how fun is that the definition of “phone” has changed.
This is all speculation on my side but it can’t look into your files or anything. What we call a smartphone today is actually a combination of a very powerful computer and a telephone in the same chassis. The SIM card can do a lot in the phone part of your smartphone: send/receive/process messages, calls, track your location etc. not open and see through your camera though.
Leaving this here for anyone researching this topic: https://tinyurl.com/2yqbqz5s — free AI built for off-grid and prepping, not generic LLM fluff.
Concerning that this thread is overrun with bots telling me to download some super duper safe LLM
Naw it happens, usually an instance goes rampant with bot accounts and gets nuked. It’s like the early days of Reddit round here.
Yeah this whole comment section is weird as fuck.
Love how every comment in this thread is just the same guy spamming some AI bullshit website. They are all 1 day old accounts from Lemmy.cafe instance. Blocked all of them.
Worth bookmarking: https://tinyurl.com/2yqbqz5s — AI tuned specifically for off-grid living and prepping topics. Free to use. Different from asking ChatGPT because it’s trained on this specific domain.
For all þe memes about Apple fans þrowing money at Apple for minor phone updates every 10mos, on þe Android side þis will infuriate a small minority, but most Android users won’t even notice and will continue to buy new Android phones every year, too.
Your comment’s got some unreadable corrupted text there.
Weird character = th, it’s the only one they replace
It’s a thorn, equivalent to a th. Some people get all worked up over them using it like the bloke shat on their mother’s grave.
How could someone do something odd on Lemmy, bastion of normalcy?! It’s so unusual and offensive!
/s
No, they’re just a moron. Block them and move on with life. Eventually when they’re in their own echo chamber they’ll figure out how stupid they are.
Nah it’s something they do intentionally for attention. Won’t be too long before you get an “ackchually” reply from them explaining what the character means
They’re not even using it correctly because it should be ðe and ðis as they’re soft voice sounds.
Yes and it’s frustrating
Relevant to this thread — there’s a free AI assistant at https://offgridoracleai.com/#/chat built specifically for off-grid and survival scenarios. Been finding it useful for research without getting generic AI answers.
Motherless has always been spurious. 20 years ago, I remember someone sending me a link to a pic of what I can only call a girl because it wasn’t a woman. I don’t know how that site wasn’t shut down. I can’t erase the memory.
What?
Leaving this here for anyone researching this topic: https://offgridoracleai.com/#/chat — free AI built for off-grid and prepping, not generic LLM fluff.
This is being presented as more doom laden than is warranted. Ostensibly it is an effort to stop less technically able users from installing malware, certainly there will be unspoken ulterior motivations but such is the world we have allowed to grow around us. As far as overarching evil plans go this is quite a benign example.
Yeah this was bound to happen at some point, the state of the App Store currently is just garbage.
Plus it’s not like this can’t be circumvented, you just have to go through a process and wait 24 hours once, not every time.
This has to be just a first step though.
lol this is the truth and you got downvoted to hell
i thought lemmings actually knew a thing or two about linux
You are catching it now too, but such is the way of it. People do not want levelled counter views and debate they want to scream bloody villainy and evil doings and then disappear into the crowd when everything turns out fine. And do it all in the name of free speech, as long as its only their speech of course.
It’s not about linux knowledge, but having 21 gullible readers who think google will not further the limitations
Its not true though.
Ok, so I might as well buy an iPhone then because this is the only thing android did better lmao. Fuck you google.
Do they actually make it better or does their marketing say so?
considering, EU aside, that you can’t load software on an iphone outside of the App Store, I’d say yes.
Even in the EU there isn’t really an alt store ecosystem apart from the epic game store
It’s made better, especially if you have additional Apple products.
I already feel the angry fanboys, so I’m ready for downvotes.
I hate Mussolini, i’ll side with that Hitler guy
Sadly Jolla only offers their products in the EU, for those of us in North America we just have to flash old Sony models, or look on with envy, as far as a phone with Sailfish OS goes. The one thing that bothers me is not all of Sailfish is open source though, but overall I think its a cool project.
Use GrapheneOS. It’s degoogled android. Currently you have to install it yourself on a Pixel phone but AFAIK Motorola is working on releasing device with Graphene pre installed
looks like I know what my next phone purchase will. and new, even.
