Uncomfortable Questions About Android Developer Verification

Stallman's fallacy is thinking every system is perfect and unbreakable and that people have a perfect understanding of software and systems (for better or for worse)

People will be running pirated debugger copies if that comes to shove

99.9% of people DNGAF about OSS. They do care about doing what they need on their phone without malware/bloatware/nagware

Also publishing and development are separate activities

Your fallacy is thinking that authoritarian governments care about enforcement or successful enforcement of such laws. The goal is to create a status quo in which all citizens break many laws daily and so are already guilty if they ever rock the boat and disturb those in power.

Stallman's "Right to Read" is an accurate reflection of reality in that sense.

Yeah and people had gay sex when it was illegal but it still is a shameful injustice for the government to decide what software I run on my own hardware

I doubt that Stallman, of all people, thinks literally that. But systems which are breakable have ways of improving themselves, closing off the exploitable holes. So it makes sense to regard systems as being eventually unbreakable. Or at least having an unacceptably long "mean time between cracks". The game plan cannot simply be "oppressive software and hardware systems will always have imperfections so the good people will cheerfully get around them", even if is is de facto that way at some point in time w.r.t. certain systems. That's actually a kind of defeatist attitude disguised as optimism; passively accepting crap based on the faith that you will scrape through somehow.

> They do care about doing what they need on their phone without malware/bloatware/nagware

Yeah you're absolutely right, tell that to Facebook/Instagram/Temu/TikTok/Pinduoduo/(any other _spying_ apps) users.

Their spying doesn't prevent anyone from using their bank app, or using other apps on their phone, or consume (too) much battery

> I doubt that Stallman, of all people, thinks literally that

Yeah I agree his opinion is probably more balanced, however Right to read is a short story displaying characters with too much learned helplessness and too little agency so I'm just going based on what he literally put to paper

I wouldn't bet on hackers saving us from everything. There are 150 million Nintendo Switches in the world, and nobody has figured out how to jailbreak one without getting into the hardware and shorting some wires (and even then only on early unpatched models). I don't think its out of the realm of possibility to make a best-selling phone that stays uncrackable for the general population for its entire lifecycle.

What an absurd ask. How is a $2.5 trillion dollar company supposed to make any money if it has to spend a bit of time on security? Did you even think about the economy?

Clearly it wasn't doing fine in 2018 when Apple became the first trillion dollar company. Nor was it when in 2012 when Apple's market cap exceeded oil companies, barely breaking half a trillion dollars. And the economy was definitely in shambles back in 2005 when no company even had a 400bn market cap! Seriously, how could the economy ever survive?!

Where would the wold be without all those innovations. Like the 2005 invention of YouTube, the 2007 release of the iPhone. Where would we be without such world changing technologies that followed with tech's rise in global dominance? Technologies like, Bitcoin, VR, and an even thinner iPhone? Do you even know how many peoples' lives these technologies have saved? Seriously? Because I don't...

> I don't think its out of the realm of possibility to make a best-selling phone that stays uncrackable for the general population for its entire lifecycle.

It is surely possible if only because the general population is not interested in infosec.

On the gripping hand,firmware writing practices being that they are; it is impossible to produce an uncrackable phone.

> There are 150 million Nintendo Switches in the world, and nobody has figured out how to jailbreak one without getting into the hardware and shorting some wires (and even then only on early unpatched models).

It's is acceptable for the hack to be difficult so long as it exists. I'm sure later models will eventually be jailbroken too. In the meantime, all of nintendo's best efforts haven't ended the piracy of switch games which is what the vast majority of people care about, not getting their favorite linux distro to run on the hardware itself.