>Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

There are zero OSes that are 1/ open source 2/ appropriate for phones 3/ with good hardware support. There's absolutely nothing. Running Ubuntu Touch isn't a viable option. Neither is postmarket, librem, tizen, they're all terrible. Security wise, for something as critically important in our lives as a smartphone, I am also not trusting any new pet project that won't be stable for 10 years.

Sure, you might be a poweruser that doesn't care about your phone burning its battery in your pocket after 1 hour because you know how to SSH on it from your watch and put it in sleep, but that's not a viable option. Leaving Android is suicide. A large part of its critical underpinnings are already into the kernel anyways, just disabled. (although a distro running binder could be a fun project). APIs are reverse engineerable generally speaking, except for the server part of play services. But then, if your issue is "my bank won't let me access their app without play services attesting me", I have great news, you won't even have an app for it on your new OS anyways, so it will not work by default. There's already not enough people working on GrapheneOS _or_ on mainstream linux OSes, what makes you think the sitation won't be ten times worse for your custom made mobile OS ?

>We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.

Android is one, and that can never be taken away. Google pulls the plug ? cool, you're stuck on Android 17, which is centuries of work ahead of literally anything else in the open source community. Hell, for all the shit that Google is doing, they're still constrained by having to work with other vendors: the system privileged notification receiver is swappable at build time, the recent app signing/verification system also is, because Samsung wouldn't let them control it all.

I don't get what's so user-hostile about Android. Everything negative about the ecosystem is mostly Google Play and the legacy of every OEM forking Android for the better part of a decade. Sure, file pickers are inconsistent, filesystem is chaotic but it's performing quite well on most hardware, runs on phones, TVs, laptops, tablets and mini PCs and AOSP doesn't contain any hooks for Google to siphon off data. GrapheneOS isn't so much undoing evil Google stuff but extending upon their work and improving memory protection and adds security features that can be easily toggled based on assumed threat models of the user.

Google's ownership of Android is definitely headed towards user hostility though, I'm not arguing against that. But just the source that GrapheneOS is based off of doesn't contain too much stuff that shouldn't be there, to my knowledge.

> Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

Not sustainable as opposed to what, exactly? Developing and maintaining a completely different mobile operating system? Focusing on truly open platforms sound nice in theory, but completely falls apart the moment you consider what people want to do with their phones compared to the developing resources available.

> Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions, even Brave is about to do it

That's just wrong, there are other forks that still support MV2 extensions right now, and at least brave has no plans of shutting down MV2 extensions even after Google removes MV2 from upstream completely. It will certainly add maintance effort on brave's side, but they already patch a million other things that upstream doesn't support.

I appreciate that there are people out there working on stuff like /e/OS, but the number one question I have when I learn about a mobile OS that isn't iOS or "Googled" Android is: will the banking and payment apps I need to operate in the modern world run on this OS?

A lot of people don't think this way because they haven't had any problems. But then one day it happens to you and you realize, ok, this is the one thing that matters - you're in a cashless store and the only way you can pay for your meal is to use Approved Apple or Approved Google operating systems.

Where I live, the app my electricity utility provides for viewing and paying my account DISABLES ITSELF FOREVER if you so much as enable USB debugging on your phone (even after you've disabled it again).

To their credit Graphene maintains a global database of which of these apps work and don't. They're the only ones I know of so a thousand upvotes to Graphene OS.

But for my banks, the records in that database are grim. They won't run on Graphene, and they don't respond to reports about it.

One of my banks just discontinued its web UI because "people don't use it anymore, they use the app only."

This is how they're going to get us, folks. This is how we're going to lose it all. Writing code alone will not solve this. It will require some kind of collective action to defend our liberties. Some parts of the world are already lost. So this situation will likely come to a jurisdiction near you eventually: to make a transaction you will need permission from Google, Apple, Visa, Mastercard, or it won't happen. Then that four company list will start to shrink.

> Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

I would say we need both a sustainable free mobile OS in the long term, and a "less worse Android" today in the meantime.

Initiatives like FairPhone paying someone to upstream device support in the mainline kernel / postmarketOS are interesting for both approaches at the same time (but extra effort would be needed, the FairPhone 5 almost working under postmarketOS [1] is kinda irritating, I hope it reaches full support before Lineage OS stops being updated for this device).

Ignoring hardware support, Linux mobile OSes are quite usable now.

Hardware support is the next step, and only then we can imagine the proprietary apps we are forced to use to work there (though Waydroid provides some answer to this as well).

Another way of helping the cause would be, I suppose, lobbying for laws that forbid the dependency on an stock Google or Apple mobile OS. Or, maybe we can dream a bit, mandatory open source releases for those apps and standard APIs.

[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_5_(fairphone-fp...

It's not sustainable but it is better than the alternative. For the moment there is no alternative for a phone os that will start from zero

> that Google spends >$1B/year to develop.

Let's see...

https://www.techpolicy.press/the-true-cost-of-browser-innova...

* Most of the personnel involved in developing web technologies are engineers, but they also include product managers, sales, marketing, legal, customer support, and other functions.

* Given the complexity of Chrome and web technologies, the engineering teams skew towards higher levels of seniority. Assume that Staff Software Engineer is the most common engineering level represented across the web technologies teams, which is towards the more senior end of Google’s software engineering job ladder.

* The average base salary for Google employees working on web technologies is $240k and the average annual take-home pay is $500k, including salary, bonuses, and stock payments. These estimates are close to the current average base salary and take-home pay for Google Staff Software Engineers listed on industry salary data sites.

* Google has approximately 2000 staff working on web technologies.

Using the above assumptions, the estimated personnel cost for web technologies is 2000 * $596k = $1.2B. Of course there are additional costs associated with these businesses. Based on this sketch, it seems fair to assume that Google spends at least $1-2B annually on Chrome, Chromium, and the evolution of the web platform.

At this point it is very difficult to develop truly open OSs for mobiles because so much of the hardware depends on undocumented binary blobs.

As I see it, the only options is to go for a drastically simpler design of the hardware - which means, we have to tone down our expectations especially when it comes to things like gaming performance, camera performance etc.

Over time even these things can be improved but it is going to take a few years.

In the meantime, I am not sure many people are willing to make those compromises to have a truly open hardware and OS though.

> Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

I appreciate the vibes where this is coming from, but does it really? I think that assumes that everyone that works on this would work on a true open source OS otherwise, and that if they did, that would result in us breaking free from Android where we otherwise wouldn't. I'm not confident about either of those assumptions.

Meanwhile I'll keep complaining to orgs that don't allow me to work through their website, and tell them that their app won't work on my phone.

> Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions, even Brave is about to do it

Source?

I wouldn't call Android user hostile. What makes most Android phones user hostile is Google Play Services.

Oh, is this the deal with GrapheneOS too? Damn, I was excited about the Moto GrapheneOS collaboration.

> Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions

Ungoogled chromium still supports MV2, and uBlock origin extension works fine.

>Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

To what?

>We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.

De-Googled Android was/is a truly open platform. Same result. You're pointing out maintenance issues.

How many developers do we have to maintain this or any other platform without pay? That problem applies to a de-Googled fork of Android, or a complete bottom up build of a new platform.

The benefit of using an Android fork is the labor savings on what's already built.

Maintenance is not going away just because we build a new OS.

The day AOSP sources aren't relased, Google will just lose control over Android and it will be managed by a Chinese consortium instead.

8 of the 10 top smartphone manufacturers are Chinese, there's no going back from that.

Helium still allows MV2

The day Google pulls the plug on source code releases is the day the open source community forks the last release...

Not sure what this fatalism is about but it's a hysterical take.

> even Brave is about to do it

Why anyone ever gave that browser a second of trust is beyond be. The damn thing was built on hijacking ad revenue into some imaginary IOU crypto thing, and built by a creep.

You don't have to use Chrome or Chromium.

I think this is a false dichotomy.

Basically what you’re implying is that all the people working on Android derivatives like Lineage, Graphene, and /e/ coming together and working instead on a fully open source OS like a Linux mobile distribution would result in better outcomes and actually get us closer to a daily driveable open source environment phone operating system.

That’s analogous to saying that an automotive tuning shop that puts turbochargers and body kits on Toyota Corollas shouldn’t waste their time, and they should instead design and mass produce their own sports car.

The level of effort difference between AOSP derivatives and a fully open source OS is massive.

"Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable."

Not sure about the first claim but the second is obvious. Yet peculiarly ignored

The OS literally comes from Google. As such, the term "de-Googled" is quite strange. Another recent HN front page item about the other project mentioned recently used the phrase "break free from Google" and currently only runs on Google hardware

AFAICT, the most significant issue with Android is "phoning home". Unwanted data transfer to third party. This is embedded in the OS. Google is the third party. Google operates as if it should be trusted as if it was a first party (why)

IMO, a user-friendly (cf. user-hostile) mobile OS would be one that does not phone home. But at times it seems like these projects are OK with the idea of phoning home to third party, as long as it isn't Google

Users will never have a mobile OS that does everything Android does, with the same polish, that isn't attached to a trillion dollar corporation. That "goal" results in projects where the majority of the Google-sourced code is unchanged instead of user-controlled source code

It isn't _that_ difficult to stop Android, i.e., system, pre-installed and user-installed "apps", from successfully phoning home (cf. trying to phone home) over WiFi. For example, this can be done by changing gateway and DNS settings. If the user installs an app that can forward ports nd use the the built-in VPN support, successfully phoning home over cellular data can be stopped, too

But a corporate-sourced OS like Android can change at any time for any reason. It changes often. Users have no control

I see some HN comments are starting to acknowledge the idea that control can be more important than performance. IMO, it can also be more important than "features"

Only if a user can embrace this idea can he begin to truly "break free" from the trillion dollar surveillance advertising company. Otherwise, sacrificing control for "performance", "features", etc., will always leave the user tethered to the company

With the corportate-sourced OS users have no control over performance, features, etc. anyway. The corporation controls them

Until there is a user-controlled, open source mobile OS like other form factors (HN commenters often claim this is not going to happen for good reasons), then, IMHO, "mobile" sucks

Generally, we all have to use mobile, as least for some purposes, e.g., it's replaced residential landlines, paper maps, and so on. But none of this means it is a good choice for for so-called "general purpose computing". It's not a computer the user can control

Chrome did not crack down on adblockers in Chrome. In fact the chromium team worked together with adblockers on mv3.

>it is impossible to maintain features that complex on a browser

While Chromium is complex, it is modularized which does make it possible for teams to maintain features.

[dead]

> We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.

But currently AOSP is very much open. That's also what the GrapheneOS devs say and why they want to continue using Android. Until it becomes clear that they will completely stop releasing the source code under a free software license i dont see why one should not use Android.

Extensions prior to MV3 were notoriously insecure and granted extension developers a very wide attack surface. Assuming that Google only has a sinister reason to switch to a better standard in an ecosystem riddled with ill-intentioned actors is a bit too cynical.