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Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos (www.forbes.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Per one tech forum this week: “Google has quietly installed an app on all Android devices called ‘Android System SafetyCore’. It claims to be a ‘security’ application, but whilst running in the background, it collects call logs, contacts, location, your microphone, and much more making this application ‘spyware’ and a HUGE privacy concern. It is strongly advised to uninstall this program if you can. To do this, navigate to 'Settings’ > 'Apps’, then delete the application.”

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[–] [S] 40 points 2 years ago (12 children)

if there was something that could run android apps virtualized, I'd switch in a heartbeat

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Waydroid?

    To be clear, I haven't used it at all and have no idea how well it works.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I gave it a run on Ubuntu touch with a fair phone like 8 months ago... It was still pretty rough then.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    There are two solutions for that. One is Waydroid, which is basically what you're describing. Another is android_translation_layer, which is closer to WINE in that it translates API calls to more native Linux ones, although that project is still in the alpha stages.

    You can try both on desktop Linux if you'd like. Just don't expect to run apps that require passing SafetyNet, like many banking apps.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I know about WayDroid, but never heard of ATL.

    So yeah, while we have the fundamentals, we still don't have an OS that's stable enough as a daily driver on phones.

    And this isn't a Linux issue. It's mostly because of proprietary drivers. GrapheneOS already has the issue that it only works on Pixel phones.

    I can imagine, bringing a Linux only mobile OS to life is even harder. I wish android phones were designed in a way, that there is a driver layer and an OS layer, with standerdized APIs to simply swap the OS layer for any unix-like system.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Halium is basically what you're talking about. It uses the Android HAL to run Linux.

    The thing is, that also uses the Android kernel, meaning that there will essentially never be a kernel update since the kernel patches by Qualcomm have a ton of technical debt. The people working on porting mainline Linux to SoCs are essentially rewriting everything from scratch.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Every one of them can, AFAIK. I have a second cheap used phone I picked up to play with Ubuntu Touch and it has a system called Waydroid for this. Not quite seamless and you'll want to use native when possible but it does work.

    SailfishOS, PostmarketOS, Mobian, etc all also can use Waydroid or a similar thing

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I have used Waydroid, mainly with FOSS apps, and although it has some rough edges, it does often work for just having one or two Android apps functionality.

    Linux on mobile as a whole isn't daily driver ready yet in my opinion. I've only tried pmOS on a OP6, but that seems to be a leading project on a well-supported phone (compared to the rest).

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