Uncomfortable Questions About Android Developer Verification

Linux is 30 years old, and still it has a laughable percentage of desktop usage. Plus, the only reason it's even usable is because of the relentless work by thankless developers for reverse engineering device drivers. On smartphones this is orders of magnitude more difficult. How do you properly profile and debug a random modem in a phone? What about the cameras?

So, how can anyone expect FOSS mobile OSs to ever exist unless forced by law by the US or something?

Because of hardware standardization Linux has become a pre-competitive layer, a commodity we have decided not to compete on. And it turns out that such a commodity by definition is private, because we don't want any one party to reap all the benefits of a commodity project (we'd rip it out before using it anyway), in the same sense that we don't want want 1 company sitting on all our water consumption data for example.

So, how do we get to a commodity layer for Mobile devices? It looked like it was going to be Linux (Android), and that was Google's intention. But now they are just using their significant resources to corrupt that original idea, using their trojan horse called "play services".

The public at large only cares about convenience, not about privacy. Why don't we? How much enshitification is enough to draw that line in the sand?

This is 'easily' solved by following the Apple road - focus on one or two devices. I think many FOSS enthusiasts would be happy to buy such devices.

(I am holding out hope for the phone that the GrapheneOS project is planning to make.)

I know this isn’t what you meant but it’s important to remember there is some hope. Thirty years ago I was required by my CTOs to use Windows, Borland, AIX, and Solaris. Linux, FreeBSD, and Free dev environments were viewed with deep suspicion.

In 2025 you’d be viewed just as much suspicion for not building your stack on Freedom. I still have hope that we’ll get there with phones, too, some day.

> How do you properly profile and debug a random modem in a phone? What about the cameras?

This is a huge factor. Mobile chip sets (CPU/SoC, crypto enclaves, GPU modems/basebands) are buried under NDAs a mile thick, and you can't just whack an oscilloscope on the bus like its 1979. Those companies treat their opaque hardware as their defense against IP theft, they'll never, ever give it up in the current environment.

And the cameras are super complex and require a bunch of DSP and AI to even vaguely work let alone do all the headline features.

The Android stack, right back to the pre-aquisition "Danger" stack, ripped out everything GPL'd above the kernel, and Google has been investing in their "fuschia" project to make a non-GPL'dv kernel as well. Gradually making more and more of it proprietary was the plan.

Google is a big company and there may have been some factions pushing to make android an open ecosystem, but I don't see that that was ever the companies intent overall.

This has been attempted multiple times, and always fails because followoing FOSS to the letter doesn't play with how hardware industry works, and when people aren't willing to make concensions they cannot ever deliver a product the general public would replace their Android/iOS phones with.

In 2025, we all use Windows and macOS laptops around here, Linux is something we run on cloud environments, mostly the distributions of the cloud vendors themselves, which certainly don't upstream everything.

The use of managed language runtimes, and SaaS products with low code/no code, makes the OS kind of irrelevant, and many times we don't even consider Linux on the cloud vendor, it is seen as an implementation detail, as many workloads are done via managed deployments like Vercel, Netlify, Azure Web App Service, and similar services.

So the real question is: Why are people so social and pleasant, and why are companies so egoistic (and I mean egoistic in the cancer/parasitic/enshitifying way, not in the Ayn-Rand/social/We-are-all-equal way).

Is it the lack of deep, DNA encoded morality? What are we going to do about this? What is the DNA of an organization anyway?

How, as a society can we take away these stimuli that make it so natural to consume individual freedoms when we grow our tribe-size?

Maybe we need more freedom, more freedom to say: "F-this I'm out of here, I just like the set of rule of this other society better." Maybe we are still too constrained. By our ways of generating income, by our countries, continents and ultimately our planet. We have 1 lifetime, we have to make do with what we find.

Are you aware of the PinePhone and Librem 5? As others have said, it's already been tried.

I bought a PinePhone, and after a few too many show-stopping issues (not being able to receive a call for a scheduled job interview was the last straw), I went back to using LineageOS without gapps. I'm not a developer either, just a fairly technical user, so when the device wasn't working, all I could do was report bugs, and things weren't improving fast enough. I haven't checked on progress in a while now. postmarketOS seemed like the one to follow, and they do also support some beefier devices like the OnePlus 6T, but then you'd miss out on the PinePhone's ability to easily remove the battery and to boot off the SD card in addition to eMMC.

I also felt a bit bait-and-switched that the PinePhone Pro came out not too long after the original and then everyone seemed to switch to that one. It reminded me of the awful Gemini PDA and how quickly they rushed out a successor without fixing any problems.

There are mechanisms which make firms more social: cooperatives. In another world, public infrastructure such as android would be owned by a cooperative of it's users. Instead, users are tenants of infrastructure owned by others, always vulnerable to the owners changing the deal

The problem is that it's difficult for cooperatives to raise capital: they can issue debt, but not equity (because the definition of a co-op is that it is owned by members (usually customers and employees )-and no-one else). But debt is not really risk capital in the same way as equity and doesn't enable bold initiatives and innovation.

GrapheneOS and SailfishOS focus on a narrow set of devices and they can keep up with hardware support. I agree that you have to make concessions in terms of allowing proprietary firmware blobs and opaque baseband hardware. You also have to choose your hardware wisely (e.g. GrapheneOS can/could piggyback on Google's driver work).

I was just saying that you can make the problem more narrow by not trying to support every device out there. Start small and pick your battles (which probably means using AOSP and using sandboxed AOSP).

I think the main issue of many previous attempts was what typically happens in the FLOSS community: there are N attempts rather than one coordinated attempt (Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, PureOS, etc.) and everybody is targeting different hardware. It's similar to how the Linux desktop got fragmented, though it's even more problematic for mobile, since the usage is probably 1/1000th of Linux desktop usage.

Don’t worry, the PinePhone Pro is now EOL while the original one will go on for 2 more years!!!

> after a few too many show-stopping issues (not being able to receive a call for a scheduled job interview was the last straw)

When was it? There are no complains from people daily driving both phones in the last couple of years AFAIK.

> In 2025 you’d be viewed just as much suspicion for not building your stack on Freedom.

Tell me you live in the web bubble without telling it.

Law is no longer interested in giving freedom to people

Yeah, the fragmentation is the main issue, however Firefox OS is a proof that even a single device doesn't work if there are no concessions, and the only thing left are unintesting hardware for the general public.

> Why are people so social and pleasant, and why are companies so egoistic (and I mean egoistic in the cancer/parasitic/enshitifying way, not in the Ayn-Rand/social/We-are-all-equal way).

It's specifically publicly-traded companies, because they cease to be controlled by real people who can make a human decision when there is a trade off between a marginal increase in profits and not being schmuck.

Late 2021, IIRC.