Posted by robtherobber 8/31/2025
However, the crusade against the word and concept of "sideloading" is really weird. Yeah, installing from the repo is normal, and all the windows-land "download an .exe/.msi to invoke an installer" ways that then may or may not update the app are unusual and apart from an ordered process of system management.
The proper alternative to Google Play is F-Droid, not downloading/baking .apks.
Note how the term 'side loading' is already weighted against you doing it, it is supposed to make you feel you're doing something that is borderline illegal even if it is still possible and that you are bypassing safeguards that would stop you from doing this stupid thing if you only took the proper route.
Because that's what it is, despite the extremely successful campaign to paint people who want admin access on their mobile computers to be painted in the same light as pirates.
This was before it had a download manager or file manager and using your computer to manage your phone was the norm.
The term predates Android anyways, goes back to the 90s I think.
Hell, people used to use iTunes to manage the apps on their iPhone and organize their Home Screen.
Then with the windows mobile world, you could install manually, or use activesync which really sucked. Same with Palm. I don't recall Blackberry.
In fact on the iPhone Cydia existed before the app store ever did. Apple had decided that web apps were the way to go.
On my computer, I can choose to containerize applications I run with something like docker, flatpak or snaps; run them in a VM, under a separate user, in a chroot... or, not! I can get them from the Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/... archive or... not! Or I might compile it from source and run it directly or... not!
Based on source of the app I decide how much I trust it and thus decide on the encapsulation strategy for it (sometimes, none).
Yes, I understand having full control of your system has some minor downsides (you can mess things up more easily), but you can usually do that anyway (just fill up your phone storage with photos and see how your phone behaves).
Especially after people paying so much money for the devices, it's ludicrous that they are not allowed to make their own decisions and install what they want. Ownership, user rights, and privacy have been kicked in the face. If you can not install whatever software that you want, then people should be signing only rental agreements.
It is also more the reason to push Linux smartphones[1]. Android is not doing anything special, that people could not get or create for Linux phones.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...
While not as powerful as root access, your user rights are almost completely gone.
You buy a $1,000 phone and $1,000 on a service plan which is not an insignificant amount of money for many, then take away every semblance of ownership.
Right to repair? Warranty void. Want to run language models Google doesn’t approve? Not anymore. Want to run your favorite VPN? Too secure, unavailable. Want to audit the security and scan the device you carry everywhere and stores your life’s data? Unapproved. Want to compete with anything that dents Google’s profits? Papers please developer.
Just because your nose is already caved in and you’re dazed from the repeated blows, doesn’t make it less of a face kick. It’s more of a curb stomp.
Which is why we should always applaud and support those who do care enough to sacrifice something in return: they are the ones ensuring at least _some_ things we disagree with do not come to fruition.
Also your comparisons to “kicked in the face” “curb stomped” “being in jail” are seriously over the top at this point. Continue making them only if you don’t want to be taken seriously.
Google has dramatically altered that deal, and now shows much longer, less-likely-to-be-skippable ads, with much higher frequency.
Calling it "a prety reasonable subscription" is only reasonable if we forget that this wasn't the deal originally offered
Furthermore, this is a massive corporation closing up a project that got it's start by selling itself to geeks as Open.
It is Google's OS, and it is Google's app, but closing up the Open project to advantage their own app sure as hell feels like poor form
YouTube would not be effectively the only game in town if Google hadn't underpriced their product to drive out competitors
In short: If Google had played fair from the beginning, I would have the option to watch streaming semi-pro video elsewhere.
It also allows you to patch other apps to make them work the way you want.
(editted to add repository and package manager points)
The amount of legalism that's been brought in by both sides, Apple/Google and the regulators, layered in lies (we need to approve the software, register the developers, to protect the user from software), is divorced from the reality of the hardware-software relationship. This has led us down a path where everyone is debating the topics that Google, Apple, and revolving door regulators choose rather than the underlying reality.
There is a simple solution to all of this: Google and Apple should no longer be allowed to operate any sort of "App Store" or software distribution channel.
The Atari 2600 was an immensely popular home computer for a decade(ish), but it didn't exactly spark the personal computer revolution. Why? Because it used the iphone software distribution model. You could only buy licensed software (in the form of cartridges) even though technically it was of course a programmable computer. So it was as open as an iphone.
All the actual progress happened on Apple ][, C64, the Radio Shack computers and later the IBM clones. Because, obviously, anyone could write and sell any software they wanted so the market growth went exponential.
A lesson to society, there.
In fact just the opposite. Activision was one of the first third-party game manufacturers and Atari tried to sue them into the ground for it.
It's widely believed that the massive glut of 3rd party games (with effectively zero quality control) for the 2600 partially contributed to the video game crash of 83 [1].
It's also one of the reasons Nintendo learned from this mistake and enforced everything from limitations around the total number of games a company could produce per year, to the seal of approval, etc. on their Nintendo Entertainment System.
Also having grown up with the Atari 2600 - I don't know anybody who would have described it as home computer. It was a video game console first and foremost. Are you possibly thinking of the Atari ST line? [2]
The 2600 just sucked as a computer.
This is because the EU is not a citizens advocacy platform. They're an economic platform mainly built to smooth the cost of doing business in Europe for multinationals. They don't have our best interests at heart. They care more about a big neoliberal common market.
The European project started well but mid 90s it got hijacked by hard neoliberal interests, especially the commission.
“Simple” solutions can produce unintended outcomes.
You want to take a device that is targeted for “everyone” and not just tech savvy people and provide no control or standard to what can be loaded on it? The very idea of it is horrifying to me.
You have apparently never sat down on an elderly persons PC in the early ‘00s and tried to sort out all manner of shopping toolbars, coupon widgets, and crapware that has caused their pc to slow to a crawl. It’s literally bad enough with the poor performing apps in app stores but it could be so much worse without it
No thanks.
Yet instead, we are getting increasingly fewer phones with unlockable bootloaders and root access available. What gives?
I've also checked out my mom's phone a year or so back: she had so many crappy apps from official store that it was barely usable. Stores do not really help.
I’m “tech savvy” and I would never click that box. Frankly I can’t think of something more risky than installing some random piece of software on a device that I need and use everyday.
You could be installing random crap from the store, or not from the store. Or you could not be installing random apps from either.
I don't feel any more protected by device restrictions. Yes, containerization helps, but I like having root on my device (eg. I backup different .sqlite files from different apps through ssh to my phone). My phone has FDE, and is probably not at all less "safe" than yours.
No one outside of a tiny group of techy tinkerer types really cares.
Other manufacturers offer it as well — these options continues to exist, and while it's certainly not a high percentage of the market, some of these phones sell because of openness.
Niche manufacturers usually focus on "stronger" openness (Librem, PinePhone, Fairphone...) — but they provide subpar hardware compared to mainstream top-end. Eg. most recent release in Volla Quintus (https://volla.online/en/volla-phone-quintus/) uses SoC that is half the speed of Google's Tensor G4 in both single- and multi-threading benchmarks: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-mediatek_dimensity...
So I generally go with phones which can get their bootloader unlocked and which can be rooted, to ensure I have full control of them. I did, in the past, use Ubuntu Phones (Meizu MX4, Nexus 4), HP/Palm Pre Plus and 3 (webOS with full root access), Nokia N9, Motorola A1200 etc — all as my daily drivers. I did get PinePhone, but that thing is sloooow. Since, I've switched to plain Android phones which allow you full control.
There are plenty of devices you have full control over but they're not called phones for that reason.
Were you horrified by the Apple ][?
The Apple II was never used by “everyone” and nobody expected it to be, even towards the end of its quite long life.
No question, it was a stepping stone to where we are today but you can’t compare an enthusiast/early adopter product from nearly 50 years ago to contemporary Android and iOS devices that are intended for “everyone”, in the way you’re attempting with your comment.
I think it’s more a reflection that people mostly use other devices, like phones and tablets, for tasks they might have used a PC for 20 years ago - at least outside an office environment.
That’s not to say the PC experience hasn’t improved - certainly Windows is at least more secure - but that it’s not the only factor, and I don’t think it’s the biggest factor either.
One data point for you: the last company I worked for, when I joined in 2017, already >50% of external users were accessing our service via mobile devices.
Ok, then.
This is a fine distinction. And it will happen and should happen because there are always gaps. Without a way to fill them, you're left with a subpar experience.
And while many people are fine with it on their iPhones, I can't really imagine not having ReVanced apps, Molly, or a dozen other little fixes.
Who gets to decide what the main channel is?
For a lot of people here, F-Droid is their main way of installing programs on phones.
If you don't see the patterns of absolutely pathetic authoritianism, which most people cheered on during covid policies times, you're not going be very effective at opposing this crap.
I wish Android supported more profiles (for even better compartmentalization, like it would be nice to have a similar isolated profile for banking and such). But as-is Work Profile was a pretty great discovery on Android (for me) a year or so ago and a feature I think more people should play with.
There's an app called Shelter that builds off the Work profile plumbing to add support for even more profiles. I forget why I switched to using Work profile directly... I think I just wanted to see how the built-in stuff worked. There's other stuff about the Work Profile that I don't remember Shelter providing (with Work Profile you end up with copies of the app with briefcase icon to tell them apart and separate intent handlers, I remember liking that but I don't remember if Shelter supported that sort of thing)
The only downside is that free Apple accounts must renew their certificate in AltStore (while connected to their computer's home network) once a week, or else it'll all be deactivated and you'll have to reinstall AltStore and YTLitePlus from scratch. But you can pay $99 for a year-long developer account, set a recurring reminder to renew, or worst case YTLitePlus makes it easy to export your settings so you can quickly restore it after reinstalling.
Yes, it blocks ads but it also skips sponsored segments and other chaff with a SponsorBlock integration. Then it fixes all the little UI annoyances across apps, for example letting you filter out low-view videos and live streams from your TikTok feed.
It turns mass market apps into something that an HN user would make for themselves.
It is actually pretty hypocritical they’re adding such tech to their apps while fighting so hard against people that want to block the ads they serve…
And Maemo/MeeGo were basically normal Linux distributions. Right now, SailfishOS is a worthy successor. It runs on a fairly decent number of devices and is quite ready for daily usage. Following the Nokia tradition, offline maps are outstanding. There's also a proprietary Android emulation layer that works really well for most applications, in case that is needed.
SailfishOS and Jolla could challenge the duopoly if a critical mass of developers migrated to the system. Right now, there's a fairly small technical userbase that has nonetheless produced lots of great indie applications. I can't believe I had Linux in my pocket with the N770 in late 2005 and, right now, mainstream options are so locked down.
There are of course caveats, but with a larger userbase things would get ironed out. Still, in the Sailfish forum there are American users that employ their devices as daily drivers.
(Never mind clunkier but more straightforward solutions like a libre device/OS using wifi from a mifi)
Nokia was dead man walking since the first iPhone dropped and Nokia employees of that time will tell you the same as they also wrote here before.
Even before Microsoft took over, Nokia's corporate structure, culture and management was too slow, bureaucratic and cumbersome to modern SW development, to be able to turn the giant ship around and catch up with what Apple and Google have already launched, let alone overtake them. It was game over for them already, Microsoft or no Microsoft.
But the company treated it as a side project due to internal politics. They didn't want to bother Symbian.
A classic innovator's dilemma problem. Then Microsoft (Elop) came in, killed the N9, and shifted to Windows.
Says you, not the market. You are free to disagree, but history proves you wrong. If N770-N9 were such good devices for the gen-pop, they would have beaten iPhone sales to the moon and show Apple that they were wrong, but they weren't. The average user is not your tech savvy HN user who likes to tinker with mobile FOSS Linux devices, and iPhone's success proved this.
>[...] due to internal politics.
That's exactly what I said. Having better tech is useless if your corporate management, product execution and marketing is shit. That's why Apple and Google won, and Nokia, Motorola, and et-al lost on the free market.
Maemo/MeeGo could have >10% marketshare in some EU countries, just like desktop Linux does right now. The N9 was a very elegant device, ready for the masses, and good enough to become a third mobile platform.
The N9 was incredibly elegant and easy to use. The hardware was well crafted, and the card-based UI was outstanding. All applications were well integrated. For example, any messaging application would add its protocol to your contact list, instead of having everything fragmented in apps. Offline maps were second to none. It took a decade for iOS and Android to catch up.
It shipped with native support for a variety of VoIP protocols, including Google Talk (Jingle) and Skype. The OLED screen was stunning on the dark mode UI. Mozilla provided a great mobile Firefox port, and there was a native terminal just in case you wanted to ssh to machines or do something from your phone. Tethering or even using Linux running on your phone from a bigger screen worked really well, in 2011.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review
Who cares, is nobody bought it? You need sales to make money because you need money to pay wages and shareholders. Otherwise you're preaching to the choir. The graveyard of history if full of great products and great ideas that didn't catch on for various reasons related to sales, timing, marketing and execution.
It doesn't matter if the N9 was good or not in the minds of the tech savvy HN crowd, what matters is that the iPhone beat them on the free market.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent" and Steve Jobs understood this better than anyone.
The N9 was sold out in Scandinavia, and it was outselling Lumia (Windows) in Q4 '11. That's fairly good for something that had no marketing and it had already been labeled as a dead platform. Around 2 million N9 devices were sold. That's on the same order of magnitude as any Google Pixel generation.
What could have happened if the device had been phased out is something we can only hypothesize about, but I don't think it's fair to claim it was a fringe device nobody cared about.
If only Scandinavia was as relevant as the US, UK, Asia and rest of the EU for a product to stay in development and in production to remain internationally relevant and competitive to the iPhone.
>Around 2 million N9 devices were sold.
My LLM research says 1-1,5 Million MeeGo powered Nokia N9 devices were sold by 2011, versus 93 Million iPhones and 237 Million Android devices out of which Samsung had 94 million, similar to Apple at the time. The N9's 1,5 Million wasn't even close, it was orders of magnitude less than Apple or Samsung.
So the writing was on the wall by then. How can you even think that they had a chance to be competitive after the numbers of 2011? Based on those numbers they were right to pull the plug back then at the time, the finances spoke for themselves, there was no way for Nokia to turn the ship around in their favor. The line was just going down and even more down.
HP Pre 3 was a similar situation where it was pulled after it was shipped to retailers and operators, but before it went officially on sale — they still sold well even with unsupported system.
There were many rugpulls like these, and while they technically make these products flops, they were also not given a fair chance either.
Yes, previous management messed up before that point too (they did not ship N700 with GSM chip and marketed it as "internet tablet" so as not to jeopardize their Symbian phone sales, only adding it to N800 and beyond, and then Apple turned their iPod Touch into iPhone and stole their lunch), but they finally figured out a great phone, and then... pivoted.
Your point was that Nokia had nothing that could compete with the iPhone. You have now been shown this to be patently untrue and that Nokia was killed by an incompetent board bringing in a MS transfuge.
Stop trying to move the goal post. You are just wrong. That’s ok, you will survive. Everybody who lived through it could have told you by the way. The first iPhone was a pretty poor device and it wasn’t before the 3 that things started to improve. There was plenty of space to compete.
Apple didn't invent walled gardens, and walled gardens are not illegal unless you do what the EU did and change the law.
What is going to bite Google on the ass here is selling users an "open" platform and then using anticompetitive tactics to yank those supposed freedoms away.
Look at Microsoft's Xbox platform. It was created, advertised and sold to the public as a walled garden with no legal repercussions at all, because walled gardens are not illegal.
On the other hand, Microsoft created Windows as an open platform and sold it to the public as such. When Microsoft tried to use anticompetitive tactics to maintain control of the platform they sold as "open", they were found guilty of antitrust in jurisdictions around the world.
Google made the choice to sell Android as open. "Sideloading" apps was the only way to install apps at all for the first couple of years. The decision to sell Android as "open" only to yank those freedoms away will have legal consequences again here.
The problem here is that the people who announced the "open" platform option were lying to everyone in order to gain market share.
You can still lament the wider societal scale impacts of increasing controls. If both Google and Apple become walled gardens, then what exactly is left? And people need smartphones to get through daily life, interact with banks and government offices.
And I bet Windows is going to head down the same path. ID-verified-by-default, only government and corporate-approved apps installable, AI surveillance running in the background analyzing your every click (for your safety) etc. You see, we need that to catch the bad guys.
The solution is to force Google to keep the promise that they made to consumers, which is the job of the courts.
I would expect them to lose yet another antitrust case over this if they don't back down.
Does Google want to have Android and Chrome stripped from their control?
That would be amazing but it's not going to happen.
And the EU will back their sideloading validation because they want to spy on all of us anyway. This will be done with a backdoor in each chat app, meaning they want to be able to block unsanctioned apps.
I'm actually pro-app store as long as it's helping apps to be malware-free. But I'm 100% against shutting out side-loading. Side-loading was never common let alone a common vector for malware, at least not that I've ever heard. But what it is, apparently (or we would not see these Google shenanigans), is a long-term threat to Google's own app store.
Some idiot executive decided this.
Except that it isn't. Epic v Apple proved this on the Apple side.
The fact that (according to Google) only 50% of Android malware comes from sideloading should also make you question where the other 50% is coming from. (Hint: a lot of it is from the Play Store)
The only similar claim I can find is they said is you're 50x more likely to encounter malware from internet-sideloaded sources than from the Play Store, but that's rather different.
Was the iPhone the first device to come with that concept?
on the original iphone the only "apps" you could have were websites, as apple hated the carrier approach
Far from it.
Before Apple, carriers and handset makers 100% controlled what you could install. "App stores" like Verizon's Get It Now, BREW, and Nokia’s operator portals existed, but they were fragmented, clunky, often exploitative, and comparatively laughable in scope and scale.
Apple did what seemed impossible at the time, which was to persuade/cajole/force carriers and handset makers to give up their roles as gatekeepers. They created a single global marketplace with mostly-predictable rules and simple discovery, which finally allowed indie developers to reach users directly just as easily as global behemoths.
Verizon wanted you to have to pay a fee every time you used their software to transfer an image from your phone to your computer, or vice versa.
Can you not do this on Samsung phones? I was considering buying a used s22 ultra as an iPhone user to explore more freedom and pirate apps, etc. Is andoid really this locked down now? I have heard that quite a bit, but can't you sideload or install any apps you want on Android? Why do you need to unlock the bootloader?
Sideloading doesn't require rooting the device.
And yeah majority of phones simply won't let you do that anymore
Disagree entirely. Google Play refused to download some app on my phone because it thought the specs weren't good enough for whatever reason even though it worked fine on my previous weaker phone.
I found the APK, I downloaded it, and just installed it. Why would I want to first download some other middle-man to deal with any of this shit? Ideally there would be no "store" at all on my phone.
Editing to add this from the front page of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082595 (F-Droid site certificate expired)
Wait, let me take out my word 97 CDs to read the "sideloading instructions" booklet. Oh wait, what was considered a normal install Same on mobile phone in symbian era. It's not "sideloading", it's a "normal install".
oh, those things you literally load from the side? :P
/s
Dont get me wrong, im not accusing Pixels of being "quality". In my experience, they're not quite as good as a free phone from a MetroPCS store.
As for calling me a troll, fuck right off, asshole.
You wanna pay someone else, feel free- vimeo, and a zillion other platforms exist - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms
I'm not sure what you want.. You want access to their service, they offer a premium.
You don't want to pay, at the same time you are not will to boycott them for moral reasons, so you instead you attempt to circumvent it by using ad blockers..
Though personally I watch very little YouTube. I have no patience for long vids and even if you pay for premium it's unwatchable without sponsorblock. If i need to start blocking I might as well go the whole way.
And no I don't feel bad for Google. This is not some old shop owner trying to make ends meet. It's an evil mega corporation trying to control and monitor our every impulse and enriching their already wealthy shareholders. Nobody will eat a spud less over this.
LMAO. Nope they won't. They'll go to tiktok or some other platform where you'll surprise pikachu face have to watch ads. Ads powers internet. Someone has to pay server cost at the end of the day- either pay with your dollar or your attention. There's no other option.
Just allowed me to pay only for ad free and not include youtube music. I know youtube lite is a thing but its only available to limited countries.
And as the parent already said, "I may as well get an iPhone".
I myself use iphone cause I like the hardware quality (over android). I pay for youtube premium cause I like the service (over apple music for example)...
You can bellow as much as you want that you are losing a "free service" but nothin is free buddy at the end of the day. You get what you paid and youtube premium is one of the few services I find worth paying... Not worth it, you say? Feel free to bounce to a zillion other video platforms - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms .
Now? I feel like I'm sitting on gold by keeping these cheap dumb devices around.
Depending on how old they are, phones have diminishing network compatibility, and cheap, dumb devices are in production still, and will be for the indefinite future. So it's not like they are a resource that the world has run out of.
Old laptops age better, but it's not like anyone restricts software on laptops, or will ever be able.
You can still buy equivalent dumb phones, but they aren't any more open than the rest of the rabble.
Laptops are a different story, although I believe part of that battle was already lost when the Intel SSM and AMD equivalent came around. We'll see how things go when banks start to require you to enable (In)Secure Boot just to be able to log in through a browser on a PC.
If people stop the bullshit it's not that hard to effectively oppose
Later we get the wet dream of surveillance with V passports. Social credit style. If you watched the ads companies were trying, you would've seen it. But of course you're going to call me a conspiracy theorists just like it happened back then.
Locking down your devices, putting age restrictions and therefore digital id and no privacy to access the internet, it's all pretty convenient.
But hey, Google is doing this all for your own good, or they aren't and the good EU will stop them because there's no way they'd like control.
If you're going to use unrelated discussions to launder your conspiracy theory, at least provide evidence. Otherwise we get to dismiss you without trial which is faster but less fun.
I don't give a flying fuck if you dismiss me. You already did in 2020, 2021 and so on and I'm still here, didn't you?
Now I get to see you move uncomfortably while still ready to lick the next boot.
Enjoy it.
So yeah, your comment was completely unrelated as phones aren't public property. I don't expect to be able to control the DMV or my local Kroger, but I absolutely do expect my phone to behave as-advertised.
It really is enlightening how people like you are willing to hate the "other" just because the government tells you to.
Terrorism, disease, children's safety, drugs, etc.
No emergency justifies it because emergencies have a tendency of staying forever, entrenched in law, long after the perceived emergency has been forgotten.
Funniest thing was, you wanted to quarantine and oppress the healthy. You also didn't quarantine and oppress the rich or your politicians who didn't abide by their own theater. No, the coward man went along with the excuses and screamed murder at the sky. Just like in history, you accuse groups of people of being "a disease" to suppress them. Google that, will ya?
As for risks, I posit you're a risk to me, with your hellbent intent of locking me up because I don't follow your theater. Should I ban you from society? Engage in state punishment and suppression like you wanted?
Stop killing your family and friends.
My taxpayer dollars go to not breaking the social contract and you not killing people with your ideas. Cease and desist killing people. You'll murderer.
Oh, see how easy it is to just say those things?
Now argue in the real world. We're not in 2020 anymore.
Do you even have personal opinions?
Disease actually kills people.
I know that makes you uncomfortable and you'd like to live in an alternative reality where you can do whatever and cause no harm, but come back down to Earth.
1 million Americans died from Covid. Our policies caused some of that. Selfish people caused some of that. Everyone, including you, is partially responsible for those deaths.
That's uncomfortable, and it's hard to hear, but it is also indisputable. The sooner you come to terms with the reality we live in, the sooner your mind can heal.
> Selfish people caused some of that
Lol. Fuck off with this tired bullshit. This fake accusation of murder when thanks to your moronic policies economic hardships have caused much more hurt around the world. And let's not start on the undetected cancer and other treatments.
You're just repeating the same old propaganda. Anyone who disagrees with your theater, which was disproven then and now, is a murderer.
Go stop genocide that your country is either perpetrating or supporting and then we will talk about "murder".
You are legitimately delusional.
Requiring a mask doesn't hurt anything other than your feelings. Not wearing a mask actually, literally, in disputably, without a doubt, with no room for argument, hurts people. At least, during the pandemic.
Are you noticing how my thing is real and yours is just made up? That should tell you something.
Also, you know fuck all about my "economic policy". As if whatever stupid ass economic policy you voted for is better. Remember - that BBB is putting us a few trillion more in debt and is certainly going to lead to some deaths due to Medicaid cuts!
Humble yourself brother. The world doesn't revolve around you.
You just repeated the propaganda so much that you're not able to interact with reality.
The rest is just ramblings.
Not even the politicians that screwed you over followed their theater.
The truth is, obviously, somewhere in the middle. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to deduce putting a physical obstacle between your mouth and other people mouths and noses reduces how many particles can go into their system.
Its not ramblings at all, you just don't understand much about anything.
Again: your stuff? Not real. My stuff? Real. Covid is real and did really kill people, for real.
If you were an outside observer, who would you choose to listen to? Its very basic reasoning.
I agree that in general the world is moving towards more authoritarianism and control in all facets, but I think Canada is still solidly lagging behind their friends in the UK, US, Australia and some EU countries. We still have no internet censorship authority. There is still hope to push back internet regulation a bit, even though it's obvious it won't last forever. The bills to clamp down will just be reintroduced over and over again until one of them passes. Still, banking bans are unlikely to come anytime soon, unless the people decide to threaten a whole city and the national government by putting on another J6 reenactment.
The modern mobile ecosystem is selling games consoles when the nerds want mobile Unix workstations.
For example, university students whose main use for a computer is editing documents could comfortably get by with nothing but a nice-ish phone, a monitor, and a Bluetooth KB+mouse.
also, FYI (and for the sake of non-native English readers), it's "unrealistic". ["irrealistic" relates to irrealism, a literary technique that departs from reality]
if it came out today with say 16gb of RAM and used the new Android VM feature I would buy it instantly
It could have been a decent concept if the Tegra 3 chipset wasn’t a little underpowered and the onboard storage so slow.
On new stuff, a Bluetoothu keyboard and mouse more or less solve input, and USB-C should solve video out (and input if you want). Modern phones should be powerful enough for basic desktop use, I just don’t think people want it.
You just described Librem 5.
The StarLabs tablet would be much better suited here, but it’s also 12.5” which is so large that you may as well just get a laptop with more power and better battery life.
I do most of my light/routine server management via SSH from my phone, plus keeping a version control checkout of my documents that I do actually work on in vim (yes, the limited keyboard is annoying but it's fine for light work). At a previous job, the former extended quite far; I could get paged in the middle of the night, connect to the VPN, SSH into the server, triage, and frequently diagnose and even fix the problem without having to actually get out of bed.
As compared to your personal laptop? Or is the 'personal' qualifier that makes you say that?
...A smartphone, yes.
> especially since doing work-related stuff on your personal smartphone seems dangerous
It was my work phone, not my personal phone.
Controlled BGP enabled switches too.
Fixed database replication issues.
They're more powerful than plenty of computers from not too long ago
1. Presents a mobile hotspot, and
2. Supports CardDAV so I can actually sync my contacts
3. Records calls
It was only ever Google that didn't
The fact they now make up half the market is what makes it rare, not that other mobile OS' didn't make it available
Kinda sad that it's KaiOS the FirefoxOS fork. One can only wonder what would have happened if Mozilla kept with the project till now. There is huge wave of people wanting less absorbing devices nowdays.
I've been more neutral about this in the past, but the current and future integration of LLMs (and other ML models) into the base operating system will mean these mobile phones do less of what the user wants and more of what the user does not want.
Secondly, Apple is in the process of becoming an adtech company and will not provide an alternative to Google.
Thirdly, Google may be forced to divest Android and the mobile business. If so, the buyer is likely to be as bad, or worse, because they'll have to figure out how to pay for the whole thing.
I guess you can get a mobile hotspot and a dumb phone separately. Looks like 5G Wifi 6 APs are available for ~$100.
Even just my personal CardDAV account has close to 200 contacts.
I never left. Well, my flip phones have had cameras in them, but. On the other hand, "virtual credit card"? What?? And what good is proper "mobile storage and compute" if I don't at least have a laptop-sized screen and a proper physical input device?
This legal reality is showing itself more and more in the practicalities of actual using "smartphones". The only real solution is what op said, make the modem completely separate from the computing device.
So how about we just stop making "mobile phones" and just sell what they are: pocket computers. And that name immediately tells legislators what's appropriate hardware control, namely: none. If you buy a pocket computer, you can now do with that computer whatever you want, and the company that makes the hardware has no say over that, and the company that makes the OS has no legal basis for locking you out of anything. And if those are the same company, then the EU can finally go "how about no, you get to break up or you will never sell anything in our market again".
I called my mom yesterday (to her landline), and then I sent a text message to my friend from a parking lot to let them know I'd be there soon.
And it's all LTE, your pocket computer needs a network whether you use SMS or some IP messenger. Therefore carriers get involved, and they make horrifying demands of users and manufacturers.
But yeah, i don't want a phone, i want a pocket computer with VoLTE
Apple stopped selling all iPod hardware, including iPod touch, for a reason.
You won't have modern mobile banking or cellular communications in a device without binary blobs or "trusted" compute modules you cannot inspect.
It's time for an antitrust breakup of Google (and Apple).
These two companies control mobile computing like a dictatorship. This is a sector where most people do all of their computing. This isn't gaming or a plaything - it's most people's lives and trillions of dollars of business activity. All gatekept by two companies.
Here's what needs to happen:
1. We need government mandated web installs of native apps without scare walls ("this app is dangerous and may delete your files") and enabled by default without labyrinthine settings to enable.
2. We need the ability to do payments and user signups without Google or Apple's platform pieces. We should not be forced to lock ourselves into their ecosystems.
3. Google search and Chrome cannot be the defaults on mobile platforms. We need the EU-mandated browser / search picker.
4. First party applications should not be treated as first class while third parties are left to dry. Google and Apple should not be allowed to install their platform components by default - a user must seek them out.
5. No more green text / blue text bubbles. All messaging must be multi-platform and equivalent with no favoritism.
6. Google and Apple wallets should not be the defaults, but rather the user should have the ability to configure their bank, PayPal, Cash App, or whatever payment provider they choose.
Look up remote attestation.
That's like the tiny moments of freedom that Winston Smith has in 1984 before he is captured and tortured.
We live in a mobile computing dictatorship. There isn't time, money, or energy for millions of people to do this.
And so we are taxed, corralled, and treated like cattle. Google and Apple own smartphones and nobody can do anything about it.
The only solution is government dismantlement of the Google/Apple monopoly. That starts with mandates for web installs of native apps by default, without hidden settings menus or scare walls.
All phones have these days is "the app ecosystem" which is designed and optimized just to rent you out to corporations. Exposing yourself to it is almost always a loss.
There's another vote on the 17th of October and most countries are in favour now :( And if it fails again I'm sure they will keep trying like they have been until they can finally push it through.
Notably in this iterations the politicans are making an exemption for themselves and their servants (including police etc).
But I think Google thinks the time is right now because it will be a prerequisite for this.
This has not always been the case. And still isn't in plenty of locales and companies. The S&P 500 of 2025 doesn't define immutable universal laws.
1. Termination of WIPO Copyright Treaty (prerequisite for #2)
2. Repeal of DMCA. (primarily because of Section 1201)
3. Enact and enforce, Right to ownership, Right to repair laws.
4. Enforce antitrust laws. / Break up monopolies.
I've given up hope of politically-appointed prosecutors ever doing a thorough and effective job of this. Sure there are some high-profile cases (AT&T, Standard Oil, Microsoft (almost), Google (maybe), etc) but the vast majority go unprosecuted.
There are really only two ways to fix the antitrust disaster:
1. Private right of action (like RICO) for the Sherman Act -- let nonprofits and individuals file the charges. This takes the implicit pardon power away from politically-appointed prosecutors.
2. Graduated corporate income tax, which creates a natural diseconomy of scale. The income tax code already contains a decades-old mechanism (search for "common control" in the IRC) to prevent evasion using shell-company shenanighans. It's very well tested, it works, and it has been working since the 1980s -- mainly to prevent US persons from evading the extra requirements for owning controlling interests in foreign corporations.
If you're really interested in it, I suggest subscriber to https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
I know you have “let’s reprogram old phones” in mind, but approximately nobody does this even when it’s an option. If you don’t like phones being locked down, then argue that on its own merits; e-waste is not a good argument.
Every shitty iPhone could still be a MP3 player, home control or something else. But no, its Garbage because your only way to install is by going online and hoping that your critical apps are still in a useful version in the app store.
Besides, when the options on the market range from "impossible" to "damn hard to reprogram", can you blame the market for not taking advantage of that? I'm certain a law that would allow waste recycling companies to unlock any phone, even without password or receipt, would lead to phones or phone motherboards being reused in a variety of lower-volume products.
Compare that to GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone), which will be supported forever, since they run mainline Linux.
But that kinds of threats must be theoretically established and acknowledged - which I think is ultimately inevitable but could be delayed or hastened by human actions. The point is, you could be seen as throwing pointless tantrum about your toys until it happens.
Approximately nobody is going to be reprogramming their 8 year old iPhones to "prevent creating digital waste", especially when the CPU is unbearably slow and the batteries are well worn out. Say reprogramming is important for user freedom or whatever, but claiming it's going to make a meaningful difference in reducing e-waste is always going to be a spurious justification.
An iPhone doesn't have to be an iPhone forever, and end-users don't have to be the ones doing the conversion. All we need is a law that would stop phones from going to a landfill and instead actually get them recycled as general computing devices.
The market can figure out the rest. If manufacturers today are willing to deal with antique toolchains and expensive programmer gear to save a few cents on microcontrollers, imagine what they could do with cheap boards running Android or iOS.
The average person has no need for "IoT sensors", whatever that means.
>thermostats
Seems unlikely given that most HVAC systems in north america operates off 24V wires, so you'd to add some sort of electrical relay switch on top for it to work. That alone is going to kill most of the savings. Moreover is your heating system really something you want to DIY? Sure, it's all fun and games to spend an entire weekend setting up your own home surveillance system from repurposed phones, because if it fails nothing really bad happens. A thermostat is something that you don't want randomly failing because your phone decided to randomly bootloop or turn into a spicy pillow.
>home intercoms
Most people would just use their phones
>mobile data modems
What's wrong with tethering off your phone? Why bring an extra device?
>smart TV dongles
Assuming your phone even supports 4K output in non-mirroring mode (you really want to watch TV shows in 1080 x 2400 that your phone's screen runs at?), this seems like a suboptimal solution given that you'll need a usb-c hub for it to work, and will be missing niceties like supporting a TV remote. All of this hassle, just to save $30 for a fire TV, or $100 for a SBC.
- IoT sensors are a thing, whether the "average person" needs them or not. Think remote weather stations, car counting cameras, GPS trackers...
- "Smart thermostats" exist, surely you could just copy whatever they're doing with ease. And let's not limit ourselves to DIY here.
- Every block of flats I've been in here has had an intercom system, some even have video transmission. Sounds like a job for old phone hardware, no?
- Carriers still sell USB modems, and I guess they know what they're doing.
- A hardware manufacturer could surely just build in a USB-C to HDMI converter. A DP-to-HDMI chip is a common enough component already.
And just to repeat, I don't want regular people to start making these things out of old phones en masse, I want businesses to have that opportunity. You're arguing against a strawman.
Something tells me that your average municipal government or enterprise isn't going to want a hodgepodge fleet of phones as IOT sensors. Most of the applications you describe don't even need to the phone to be reprogrammed. There's a dozen apps that allow your phone to be repurposed as cameras or GPS trackers today, what's holding back their adoption?
>- "Smart thermostats" exist, surely you could just copy whatever they're doing with ease. And let's not limit ourselves to DIY here.
Yeah but how much is this custom hardware going to cost, especially when you don't have economies of scale? You can get a sleek looking smart thermostat for $150-200. Most people will take that over a tangled mess of wires that a DIY solution is going to look like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ahmed_Mohamed_Clock_by_Ir...
>- Every block of flats I've been in here has had an intercom system, some even have video transmission. Sounds like a job for old phone hardware, no?
So you're going to be gluing a phone next to your door? Sounds like a great way to lose an old phone.
>And just to repeat, I don't want regular people to start making these things out of old phones en masse, I want businesses to have that opportunity. You're arguing against a strawman.
No, you're arguing against a strawman. If you read my initial comment you'd see it states in no uncertain terms that I'm skeptical of the argument that it'll meaningfully reduce e-waste, not that there's going to be exactly zero people repurposing their phones.
> There's a dozen apps that allow your phone to be repurposed as cameras or GPS trackers today, what's holding back their adoption?
Personally I think it's the lack of control over devices that's hindering these apps. A common modern phone doesn't let you replace the system UI with some purpose-built app, it doesn't let you run without a battery, it doesn't even let you disable all notifications. The result just isn't up to snuff unless the user/device manufacturer has full access to reduce the system to just the parts they need.
> If you read my initial comment you'd see it states in no uncertain terms that I'm skeptical of the argument that it'll meaningfully reduce e-waste, ...
And you haven't provided any meaningful counterargument so far. You still seem to be under the impression that reusing phones means hobbyists "gluing phones" places, but that's far from what I'm advocating.
The average person doesn't have any need for "computer nodes". Just because some homelabbers want to create a k8s cluster off their 10 year old phones, doesn't mean any significant proportion of phones are going to be salvaged in that manner.
I also didn't mention any use of k8s which I don't make use of or using rpis as nodes on a computer cluster ("homelab"), so you are extrapolating in a very weird direction.
By nodes I meant, say robotic applications, simple room surveillance camera, baby monitor,audio streaming, multimedia/tv remote control, where a rpi/custom hw could be perfectly be replaced by an old phone, since it comes with imu, cameras, audio, touchscreen, wifi, storage, etc.
For the family that has a techie willing to jump through a dozen hoops to set those up, sure it might mitigate some e-waste. However I doubt that's applicable to most or even 10% of people. Moreover I don't see how an unlocked OS is necessary for most of the applications you mentioned. Why do you need an unlocked bootloader to turn a phone into a camera/baby monitor? Aren't there a dozen apps that basically serves that purpose? Finally, as the saying goes, "[insert OSS project] is only free if you don't value your time". Sure, you can spend an entire weekend turning your old phones into cameras, installing frigate on a docker container somewhere, and adding a coral TPU to do object recognition. Or you can pay $50 for a 2-pack of wyze cameras which have cloud connectivity and object recognition out of the box, and is in a far better form factor than a smartphone.
The point isn't that exactly zero phones will be diverted from landfill, just that approximately zero phones will be.
If there's an ecosystem that allows converting old hw, lot of people will less resources can make reuse of that e-waste.
Installing ubuntu nowadays is a few clicks that anyone minimally proficient on computers is able to do, not much more difficult than installing a browser "or an app on their phone".
Sure, there's "dozen of apps" for that iOS/Android, but if the HW+OS combination is no longer supported, how can we continue using it or update it ? $50 might not seem a lot to you or me, but it's a lot to many people in the world, specially with something they already have. Using cloud for inference, which is also not free or private, bringing again dependency from some entity, where local HW is perfectly capable of basic object detection. I personally have "professional" PoE cameras with built-in object detection for surveilance, but see a use case where cheap access can also be useful.
I'm still mystified why there's so much push back from people to own and make use of old HW for whatever purpose they see fit.
They certainly DON'T. I don't know where this estimate is coming from, but it's inarguably wrong
5% of all iPhone users having a home button does not mean that only 5% of iPhone SE purchasers are keeping their phones, since the population of iPhone SE purchasers is smaller than the population of iPhone users.
Let's be conservative and say about 10% of iPhone users ever bought an SE. If SE users now make up about 5% of the iPhone user base, that would mean that about half have kept their devices -- an order of magnitude off from your 5% claim.
You're accusing me of "unscientific thinking", but you're basically making an argument from ignorance? You haven't provided any rebuttals to my argument, and you're basically arguing "we haven't tried so if you try to argue against it you're WRONG".
And saying this in a forum literally named after the act of hacking and repurposing devices is quite bold.
I have old devices still laying around in the hope one day I could reuse them for something, anything useful, I simply can't get myself to throw away something which seemed magical a few years ago.
What happens when Apple stops putting new macOS versions out for the M1, which by all accounts is as far better computer than my old Sandy Bridge Thinkpad, but will become completely useless far earlier?
The ways performance is reduced is when processing power may be throttled (eg Apple battery gate) or because a newer App or Os has high requirements.
Full ownership of all our computers must be norm again. It's fine if tech companies want to charge extra to sell walled gardens and market it as extra security. But they must sell computers and software that the buyer actually owns.
A user would install the runtime, signed by a developer who shared their government ID with Google, and then use the runtime to launch whatever app they want. It's probably infeasible to launch an APK from another APK, so the runtime could be based on WASIX+WebView or something.
We could call it "General Computation". Google could start a cat and mouse game of banning developers who sign the app, but at least this "war on general computation" would be obvious and ironic.
It would be challenging for Google to argue that the app should be banned entirely, as it's basically a web browser with extra APIs, like TCP/UDP sockets.
This is "one weird trick" thinking, but there's no tech-based counter if the device manufacturer is determined enough.
Let's just assume this is about the amount of effort Mozilla puts in. So they'd need to collect ~500 million per year.
Where does that money come from? Presumably the answer can't be Google.
Or any sufficiently hard-boiled alternative from the inside. IMO things like custom ROMs lack sufficient vertical organization and that is why they're not so relevant (but at that point, you're basically constructing something much like a corporation once again, if not an entire society stemming out of it).
lol: HUAWEI will no longer allow bootloader unlocking (Update: Explanation from HUAWEI) - https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-bootloader-unlocking...
(It was surprisingly hard to find any news articles covering this. Most media just don't care that one of the biggest manufacturers in the world won't let users control their own phones. So much for holding the powerful to account, or protecting liberties.)
Not totally unlike the way Bell used to strictly regulate their own user endpoints in the 20th century.
Within that stage, I could be wrong, but I would expect a somewhat freer software ecosystem there, as it is an economy oriented around manufacturing, and it is useful to write many various applications around that end.
And PCs connect to corporate-run wired networks. What you're saying is at best an argument for locking the only radio chip itself, at worst it's propaganda to justify stripping ownership rights from consumers - "The item you think you own can affect some corporate property, therefore the corporation will seize control of it."
Hell the ISPs, phone and wired, can already drop you as a customer, blocking your communications, if they detect you interfering with their network. So any arguments that they must also control your devices are simply lies, transparently so even if they were coming from someone with 1000-times the goodwill and honest record of ISPs.
Edit as reply because I'm "posting too fast, please slow down":
> your handset plays the role also of one of these unfree modems
No, only the cellular chip does. And non-free/locked firmware is nothing new, even in PC-land.
> but any alternative must rival what makes the telco system, for the most part, actually work.
But it worked (and still works) just fine with rootable phones on the network. So rootable phones are not in any way an "alternative" - they are the (dwindling) status quo.
A bit wrong, PCs usually connect to modems or ONTs that in turn connect to the wired telco network, which are deeply unfree.
The nature of RF as a channel means your handset plays the role also of one of these unfree modems.
Attempting to draw a line between the corporate part and "your part" doesn't necessarily make sense because one doesn't exist, and if it did, is always shifting, especially in different environments.
I'm not necessarily "arguing in favor" of this kind of organization by describing it, but any alternative must rival what makes the telco system, for the most part, actually work. It's not enough to demand freedoms (which doesn't work), they have to be enshrined in real organization, in the social sense and material too. Today that means people have to get paid.
If the definition of "the network" is connecting to some LTE, sure, if it means being able to use RCS, or Google pay, or a banking app, it is much more questionable.
You attempt to cut the cellular chip out as the sole telecomm relevant part, but it is a fiction. It's visible today in bandwidth constrained environments like aircraft wifi that certain types of supposedly application-level traffic are not permissible (video calls). Conversely improving the channel capacity in general will require higher control of the user environment.
This trend started in China, spread to countries like mine, and (as recent history shows) the relatively free democracies have been more than happy to copy some pretty nasty ideas from autocracies like ours — we went through your current news cycle 10-15 years ago, so I wouldn't be surprised if removing the last few vestiges of having control over your computing also came to you in another five to ten years.
Part of the story is that it only takes a /single/ major scandal RE sideloading to seriously injure a bank's reputation, even if the vast majority of sideloading use cases are legitimate.
I’m very much a credit card point churner and I have an HYSA. The same rates and offers are on the websites and the apps.
And how would a bank know if you’re using a website on a rooted phone?
People are complaining about the app stores when they are choosing banks which are app only - which I would never do - you should be complaining about your bank.
If there's something like a Play Store with OS-level integration preventing unsigned applications from installing and running, FINE, that's an arguably useful security feature for regular users who have no interest in writing their own apps or consuming software outside the Play Store.
This doesn't preclude allowing the user (with admin rights) adding signing keys of their choosing.
If I want to trust Lennart Poettering's or Jonathan Blow's binaries to install/run on my computer/phone, let me install their public keys, a one-time addition gated by admin rights.
If you're not enabling me to potentially put bits of my choosing on my computer, its software better be in ROMs getting physically swapped out for "updates".
