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Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid (www.neowin.net)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 11 months ago (7 children)

they can take down the code today and not much will happen, as the code is mirrored elsewhere.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago

    Obv, they can't take what we have, which is why for now we're OK. The winds are shifting, though. I expect at some point, I expect android will require a deal with the devil from manufacturers. Start actively combatting linux phones.

    For now, it's a quick path to privacy, long term, we're going to need friendly hardware

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    I think the big problem with this, as far as I know, is that this code needs pretty rapid security updates that require a fairly huge and experienced team of people to both find, understand and implement the security changes. Otherwise it becomes very insecure very quickly. So yeah we can always use 2019 Android, etc. But it would just put you at a huge security risk.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    doesn't the same apply to any operating system, including the linux phone distributions? android has security measures that may be breached, but mobile linux has much fewer security measures at all

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)

    Yes, it does apply to every operating system - hence, the differentiator becomes whether the operating system has hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on dedicated security development. This is why a lot of companies now don't even let you use Android devices for BYOD aside from Google or Samsung, because they're the only companies with the resources to keep their security really up to date.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    my point is that if the open source community cannot figure out just maintenance of an android system, there's no chance of creating a real mobile linux distribution, as it would need the aforementioned maintenance and the development of additional features

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    Ahhh I see, I was confused about what you were getting at. My mistake. And yes that's very true...hmm. More dire than I was even thinking then..

    Honestly this is exactly the kind of thing that taxes and governments are supposed to be good for handling. Failures within failures I suppose!

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    no worries. but that's why I think android would be a much better base for a free software mobile operating system than a current linux distribution. lots of engineering work and experience went into making it, both on the technical sides and in the UX, with lots and lots of feedback. it has largely solved permissions, inter-app communication, power saving, things like these, and I mean all in the AOSP project, forgetting about the proprietary google mobile services.
    not everything is perfect, lots could be improved, and there are things we don't like, like how app background activity is handled is not too transparent and neither customizable, etc, but those would be much easier to fix and maintain then reimplementing everything. hardware drivers are a problem, but it is anyway, and with android we at least have a working system with which reverse engineers can analyze the drivers in operation. certainly android is not the cleanest codebase but its not so bad either to warrant throwing it away. in the parts of the code I looked over the years, it's quite organized, but of course I have only seen very little.

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