Android's Sideloading Limits Are Its Most Anti-Consumer Move

Can you create and run a service that starts when phone is turned on, with a PWA app? Usecase is a backup daemon.

Not related to this particular news item, but several high-profile App developers are either killing their apps on Android entirely (like iA Writer) or removing features due to Google tightening submission requirements and increasing costs for apps that integrate with their services.

not the change mentioned in the news link. I was referring to what people are discussing over on the reddit play store sub. Google are terminating dev accounts without giving any reasons or warnings. I'm sure most, if not all terminations have have some element of justification but ultimately it means that Google seem pretty happy to terminate any dev account without letting the developer know why. And to make things worse, that developer is forever banned from ever publishing any content on the playstore for life. They cannot make a new account. Their career in android app development can be destroyed in an instant. Most terminations seem to be handled by bots... and to rub salt in the wound, Google only responds to appeals... using more bots. That is according to what the community has been saying at least. I'm sure they know what they are doing and one thing we all know is that Google actually IS big enough not to fail. But it does seem like the right thing to at least make new developers more aware of the risks. And it is obviously a very stressful time for anyone who is actually making a living off an android app.

Sandboxing isn't feature dependent on Apple being a big curator is it? These are orthogonal but not the same issues. I've never said that PCs don't have viruses or that it isn't a problem, only that I should be able to install software from developer I trust if I want to.

I agree let's have sandboxed app instalations on platforms. Flatpak is already going this way. But it looks like big players Microsoft,Apple and Google are gatekeeping app sandboxing behind their stores instead of allowing people/devs to use sandboxing directly.

The toolbars don’t just magically appear there. They are the product of a technically illiterate user.

You are missing the part where the OS provider is the virus and keylogger. Unless of course you feel it reasonable that google and apple datamine everything you type via their software keyboard[0] or reading the contents of your notifications via play services[1].

0 - https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/16046-google-keyboard-w-net... 1 - https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/sandboxed-google-play-pr...

That physical address will be useless, and probably easily worked around, in many if not most countries. Expecting Google to be able to use that address together with the law is a pretty US-centric expectation. I don't think most virus creators would be impacted, especially not the ones that are part of professional (criminal or government) organizations.

Can you imagine what you're suggesting for a Linux machine? It's absurd. My box my rules, I'll run any damn code I please.

Will they send letters to sanctioned countries? What about a PO box, or a remailer service?

Considering both Graphene and Lineage have been complaining about google making development harder and harder for how long will that be a possibility?

sure. now. why do you think google won't choose a way to destroy them in the near future?

My devices are not supported by either of those, sadly.

True, although using adb requires the use of the usb port, which for some of my projects is highly impractical.

Also, with this move, Google has made it very clear that they don't want people to have any real control over their machines -- so I'm not inclined to think that using adb to work around the problem will always be possible.

It's fine, though. My hobby projects will continue into the future, just probably without using Android.

In terms of cameras, my pixel takes way better pictures than any iphone, and people I know with iphones (which is basically everyone) admit it.

>requires Google Play Services, which is basically every commercial app.

Not my experience at all. Only some banking apps or apps that otherwise hard depend on play services feature like google pay. GrapheneOS offer isolated unprivileged sandboxed Google play services for those.

> and a _far_ faster CPU.

No longer true with the newest chip that Mediatek cooked up, ARM licensed cores like C1 are catching up rapidly with Apple CPUs (or maybe Apple has hit the limit of their current design philosophy)

> The iPhone 17 is the same price as the Pixel 10

I mean, flagship vs flagship idk if one has ever been significantly cheaper, but I've never been in the market for those either. It's very easy to get a higher priced, more interesting, highly specced Android phone. Both iPhones and flagship android phones are way too expensive for what they are capable of compared to any of their own prior generations of themselves, if you ignore tech specs and consider the tangible end-user functionality, but even still.

I've always bought the phone that suits me in the moment, have never budgeted higher than $600CAD, and have simply never been interested in iPhones beyond what used to be nice industrial design. For that, last time I got a brand new Pixel 7 on sale, Pixel 4a, Nexus 5 etc.. and they've all done what I needed and usually came close to matching the fancier versions in some ways in the same year's lineup.

Usually though I have breadth of options to pick from across a range of brands that I can choose between based on whatever the hell I prefer. iPhones are just iPhones, bigger or smaller, more expensive or cheaper, big camera plateau or small, and that's all fine too.

The sideloading aspect for me and a better sense of control is absolutely a component in that preference, and I'll have to consider that going forward, but I'd sooner just dial back my dependence on phones in general than switch to an iPhone.

> The iPhone 17 is the same price as the Pixel 10

Too bad there aren’t any other Android phones…

GOS allows you to install and use apps from the Play Store and the vast majority of them works flawlessly.

It's certainly cheaper when you compare phones with like specs.

1: citation needed

2: yeah okay with that logic "I just subjectively feel that way", there's no point having a conversation

3: Android is short for AOSP. You're probably thinking of things like Google Play or OneUI?

You can definitely get cheaper Android phones than an iPhone. There will be compromises but it will be cheaper. Many people are fine with a $200 or less phone.

I'm out of the loop on this. What is Graphene doing?

https://grapheneos.org/features

>GrapheneOS is a private and secure mobile operating system with great functionality and usability. It starts from the strong baseline of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and takes great care to avoid increasing attack surface or hurting the strong security model.

Everything in settings loads near instantly for me including search. What exactly has gotten worse with Android recently?

> takes 10 seconds to show anything when I search through my phones settings

Ah, I see ol' Google's been shamelessly copying Apple again.

Unrelated but related to embarrassingly-bad search: On my iPhone, I have a Hacker News reader app called Octal. Now when I search the phone itself for "octal" (like I do to launch most apps), sometimes the only result found is... the Octal entry under Settings (where iOS sticks the permission-granting interface for notifications, location, etc.) Can't find the app itself. Just the settings for it.

my iphone doesn't reboot every time I try to take a picture or make a phone call (on every pixel I've had)

android sucks, but it was open

now it just sucks

I will take Apple's software over Samsung's ad infested, buggy & ugly software any day.

What are all these things that are broken?

The only thing I can think of that's worse on iOS is that you're forced to use safari or another skin on webkit rather than true alternative browsers. Everything else works better thatn android AFAICT, and integrates amazingly with MacOS.

As I recall, in the US at the time the best networks were CDMA and had more strict device activation requirements, especially Verizon.

Couldn't you install with adb without rooting?

They didn't. They implemented the WebExtensions API for WebKit. It's not complete (e.g. Stylus doesn't work yet), but it's enough to run uBlock Origin.

AOSP releases are going to stop (or become late and cursory like Darwin releases), and new Pixels will not be able to run non-Google-certified operating systems :)

BBM itself should not have been a lock-in. It would have taken incredibly little effort to open it as a desktop messenger that can seamlessly interact with people who have BBM numbers for example.

I doubt they learned their lessons. Apple walked all over them in so many ways and, if memory serves me right, they even mocked Steve Jobs over the iPhone.

Edit: just so I’m clear I’m discussing it from the perspective of early to mid 2000s. iPhone hadn’t yet come out, but iPods were popular. Trillian and Pidgin were dominating the online landscape of software that could support multiple chat protocols - seamless ICQ, AIM, IRC, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, all in one program. If there was a time for RIM to corner the market here it was right then and there because BBM was the real deal, being available on phones and they could have signed agreements with others to bring it to, for example, Nokia and Motorola and whoever else.

But no. They’d rather be arrogant and stupid.

Weird. If I wanted to send messages from my BlackBerry, I used AIM. I had no awareness of BBM (despite owning a BlackBerry), nor would it have provided nonzero value even if I had heard of it.

This does not suggest to me that BBM was somehow positioned for mass adoption. There was no problem for it to solve. It was worse than the existing messaging landscape.

(If I had wanted to send a message to someone else whose only mode of communication was their BlackBerry, a situation that never arose, I would have emailed them. Convenient email was the BlackBerry's entire marketing strategy. Note that this works just as well on smartphones today.)

The market for that is extremely niche and Google is going to make that less and less practical as it closes off AOSP source availability