Pay the $25 ransom little devs or else!
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There will never be progress so long as device owners cannot unlock the bootloaders on their phones.
30/9/2026
there aren’t 30 months in a year…
Euros mad about this one
I got into making apps for android less than a year ago… I have no idea where else can I post my apps or even how to make them for other platforms… If any good person would give me pointers in either direction I would be grateful.
You can publish your apps on f-droid.
You can still develop apps for lineage, calyx and graphene without registering your personal details to Google however that would greatly reduce your userbase pool.
If your not publishing on the app store your already severely limiting your pool. The vast vast majority of users well not install anything outside of the app store.
Last I checked revanced wasn’t in the app store
That is true and most of users most likely wouldn’t care about Google overreach
Is this a one time 25 or is it monthly like a subscription?
It’s a one-time payment. Google’s FAQ says it’s:
The $25 fee for the Full Distribution account in the ADC helps cover administrative costs. We are actively working to support multiple forms of payment to accommodate developers globally and will have more details when the console launches. There is no fee for developers who qualify for a limited distribution account.
So it’s a fee to cover administration that Google itself decided to implement for no reason.
Keep in mind you also need to provide a lot of personal information to become verified and officially able to distribute apps for Google certified devices.
£25 for now, who knows when they decide to add more fees…
should be one time
I didnt care really about switching OS’s, but i do start to care when a fucking company gets abusive. Not only that. I get spiteful and petty. And that generally supplies enough fuel to get me through the pains of moving to a new system quite well.
When Windows 7 was discontinued, i used linux. Now im still using linux, outside of some work i did a couple of years back, none of my devices run windows.
Btw, i baught (with money!) Windows since 3.11 (Windows 3.11 - Win 98 - Win 2000 - WinXP - Win 7)
I mean - how many of us are here because we got spiteful and petty over reddit API shit?
Yeah but mobile has no alternative. It’s 2 shit options
I just want to know what is going to my fdroid apps when this comes in. Will they all get binned? Disabled? Just fail to load until I jump through the new “untrusted” sources hoops?
What gets me is that upstream linux has had this solved by trusting repo keys for years, why not let the end user be the trust arbiter
Because you’re not the end user, you’re the product.
yes that is the cynical take, and I mostly agree, but installed apks list their install source, so if that information is there, then its simple to give the user the ability to mark said source as trusted. But to do this under the guise of security, when there is more malware on play than fdroid is such a head scratcher
yes that is the cynical take, and I mostly agree, but installed apks list their install source, so if that information is there, then its simple to give the user the ability to mark said source as trusted.
For now.
Yoy described the current solution I believe.
The more hoops they put in place to jump through, the less people would consider going outside Google Play. And the more control Google has on the ecosystem.
The dumb part is that this won’t even solve the problem. It will be trivially easy to get dev certificates through a shell company. Anyone who is making money off scamware will have no trouble standing up LLCs faster than Google can ban them.
What does Google care? They’re making money off of it now.
You still think it’s about security while it always has been about control.
For those who have the means, please consider donating to PostmarketOS, which has been slowly but surely pushing forward pure linux support for phones, and is the best longterm solution we have to completely circumvent Google and reclaim our hardware permenantly.
F-Droid is way more trustworthy than google pay.
Google claims the google playstore is safe and the only way to avoid malware. Ironically it was like 65-70% of all malware on android came from the playstore.
Or Google Play, for that matter!
(I don’t really care because I find the idea of hooking your credit cards to a third party to pay with your phone creepy to begin with, but are there any non-Google-Pay alternatives for GrapheneOS or Linux phones?)
Threat model. Have stores have your cars info or your phone provider.
I think it was a play on words
…or pay for that matter.
I understand wordp(l)ay, I swear! 😅
Unfortunately, theirs had a namespace collision with a separate actual product, so I decided to riff on that instead.
Linux phone time
I really want Linux phones to catch on, but even watching demos, while they are making progress, it seems like they are still very far behind.
A phone for me (and many others) is more a lifestyle utility than a tech gadget, so reliability and compatibility is paramount. Things need to just work the first time every time for me to trust relying on it for important things.
I still follow the development of some projects and contribute when I can, but it doesn’t look like it’ll be a realistic option (for my use case at least) any time soon.
Friend had a fairphone (no google version) worked well, with like a quirk or so. Sounds quite close to a really good phone.
Banking on smart phones is safer than banking on Windows, and far safer than banking on Linux. -That’s probably never going to change, and because of ‘privacy concerns’, it will be as bad on the phone or worse than desktop Linux.
Open apps like Open Street Map absolutely suck. I’ve tried helping them out, but they made it so complicated to contribute to naming locations.
There are some FOSS apps for phone I’m fond of, but I wouldn’t consider using a slap-stick repo like F-Droid especially for such volatile software that gets abandoned and forked regularly.
With all that said, there are some people claiming daily driving lately and it seems like they fixed issues of the past, but some issues aren’t likely to get fixed. -Ever. (due to fundamental issues with copy left GPL and the cult around it)
If only the clamoring happened around BSD instead.
Open Street Map absolutely suck
You have upset a lot of people. OSM is an awesome alternative to Google Maps, it’s basically the Wikipedia equivalent for mapping where everyone can help contribute by adding locations and such. Particularly for densely populated areas, I find it to be very accurate, and there’s even support for public transit!
I wouldn’t consider using a slap-stick repo like F-Droid
You have somehow upset even more people. F-Droid has soooo many good open-source apps that are stable and they usually work far better (and look nicer for the most part) compared to proprietary options. CoMaps is a good client for OSM and arguably has a nicer interface than GMaps, and you can install maps offline which is super convenient! Kvaesitso is a nice search-based custom launcher that is much better than the stock one for my purposes, and Lawnchair is another good option if you want something closer to vanilla Android. More great FOSS apps:
- Breezy Weather
- Etar (calendar)
- Auxio (local music player)
- Aegis (2FA codes)
- Chrono (clock)
- FluffyChat (Matrix client)
- HeliBoard (keyboard, the BEST ONE! even has accurate suggestions and glide typing!)
- various self-hosted bits (Nextcloud, Immich, etc.)
- KDE Connect and LocalSend (AirDrop+ that is cross-platform, the former is preinstalled on KDE Plasma)
And games on F-Droid are a bit more lacking, but here are some nice ones I found:
- Simon Tatham’s Puzzles (all the puzzles you could want, quite fun!)
- Breakout 71 (fun game that is quite neat)
- Retroarch (emulation, my device can play up to PS2/GC and Wii, but higher end models can even do Switch!)
Plus, you don’t have to use the F-Droid repos. You can use third-party repositories like IzzyOnDroid or similar with the F-Droid client!
Doesn’t mean it still sucks. I want it to be better and use it occasionally and try to help. It still sucks needs a long way to improve and realistically probably never well.
OSM performance really depends on your location. In my entire country, there’s like TWO people (not me) contributing 99% of data. As you can imagine, there’s no real time info and lots of stuff lacking.
Public transport is also very dependent on location, both countries I’ve lived in recently didn’t have integration.
Edit: I love that somebody downvoted me for stating objective verifiable facts. Dude, get a life.
That might actually be a good bot project; just slowly going through Google maps and trying to update missing information from OSM like road type, lane width, etc.
Hence why I specified OSM being better in densely populated regions! It is a good point that, depending where you live, OSM could be a pretty inaccurate mapping tool. If you want, you could help contribute to OSM for your region! (There’s a few apps available that gameifies it if you’re into that)
In Hong Kong, where I grew up in, everything is well mapped and all the MTR stations are labeled. And during my short trip to Germany, I was able to find a relatively obscure restaurant in Munich.
I live in a 20M city, it’s pretty densely populated :)
Yeah, I did make some contributions to OSM but eventually dropped out due to not actually using it myself.
Banking on smart phones is safer than banking on Windows, and far safer than banking on Linux
this is patently false. smartphones leak all sorts of data about you on a network that desktop computers, regardless of OS, simply don’t, especially if you use a hardened web browser like arkenfox, phoenix, or librewolf
Your research: “Linux subs and communities”. You LiGNUts should stay out of tech conversations because all you know is propaganda. “All Eyes on Code” finally died. -the rest needs to too.
what are you saying right now? you’re not making sense. i work in securing networks for children’s data though. and there’s nothing we can do to get the kids’ data safe if they access our systems on our phones so we recommend chrome on a desktop computer because we presume they won’t have the technical knowledge to harden a browser and chrome is set up, by default, a little more securely (though not as privately) as firefox
You didn’t try a search engine did you? -Why didn’t they test you for that before hiring you?
first result, specific to banking, i got from a forensic expert:
Randal Wolverton, a certified public accountant who serves on the American Institute of CPAs’ Forensic and Litigation Services fraud task force: “My preference is to bank with computers in a secure environment, as thieves may find smartphones more attractive to attack,” he says.
Since smartphones travel with you, they give fraudsters unique opportunities. If a customer is standing in line at a grocery store and decides to check her bank balance on her phone, someone could be looking over her shoulder and guess the password. That kind of situation is unlikely to arise when banking on a computer at home, Wolverton says.
this is pretty in alignment with our forensic research for network hardening when it comes to kid data, too. a phone is just a snitch that lives in your pocket. the less you do from it, the more secure you’ll be. you should really only be doing critical things, like banking and logging into your labor or educational institution, from trusted hardware on a trusted network. phones are fine for looking up business hours, interesting tidbits, and the like, but you shouldn’t do anything you specific that matters to your life if you can help it.
Can you elaborate on how banking is “safer” on smart phones than Windows and Linux?
Apps are more locked down than a browser that does everything. 2 factor authentication automatically. There’s more but you should learn to use a search engine especially if you use Linux.
you’ve misunderstood the research and shouldn’t be admonishing people for not using a search engine when clearly you didn’t. an app is more secure than a mobile browser, but neither are more secure than a workstation browser. you are spreading misinformation when you pronounce stuff like this that you clearly didn’t put the work in to understand
Loonix propaganda. -It’s like getting all your information from a conspiracy theorist site. -It’s why Linux evangelists are called conspiracy theorists.
i haven’t said shit about linux, and you will even note i said my company’s official position is to recommend proprietary software like chrome. i’m saying to use a desktop, not a phone, regardless of phone os and desktop os.
you’re just saying stuff at this point and if you keep it up i’ll be blocking you because none of what you’re saying has anything to do with what i’m saying
Speaking of, the first waves of the new Jolla phone (with sailfish os) are apparently coming out now. I haven"t seen any posts about it on Lemmy yet, just an unboxing vid on YouTube
Literally the only one I like but I live in Hell and they don’t seem to do too well with the carriers over here. Some of them are crazy, lwanting like nearly 2k, ain’t happenin’ chief.
Sailfish has been around since 2013. Hopefully the hardware is good 🤞
1st version hardware was decent enough and I had really high hopes for the company. And then they went and messed up royally with the tablet-kickstarter. I hope they really can push to the market this time, but I’m not the first to buy their device again.
Darn even the fin is critical of them.
I don’t know how many, if any at all, are still on board from the original company but I really had high hopes for them. I used N810, N900 and N9 from Nokia. That OS (maemo/meego) then eventually matured to Sailfish some time after Nokia was already either down or going that way. I really liked the first Jolla phone, it had something in it which none of the android slabs I’ve then had doesn’t. They had at least some kind of market share, promising applications coming up and, at least in my opinion, at that time, very real chance to challenge Android/iOS on the market.
And then they blew it all with a massively oversized kickstarter for their size. I haven’t followed too closely what actually happened, or could that been avoided, but that blunder meant that I haven’t really followed Sailfish or Jolla since. I really hope they succeed, the market needs desperately at least one more player to challenge walled gardens we currently have, but previous experience says that I’m not going to throw my own hard earned money on them until they show they can actually stay on track.
I don’t like jolla after that one time when they sold their brand and product to russian company affiliated with current corrupt government that you know, killing people in Ukraine.
It’s worth noting that the current Jolla is whatever the original founders could get back through the Finnish courts after their investors from Russia stopped communicating.
I really don’t mean to start any more in-fighting on “this side”, but is it really worth it to wait for something “better” to appear? I admit I don’t know much about that russia thing, but this latest Jolla phone is selling out all the pre-orders, there is lots of momentum going on, it seems that we might finally have a viable option that isn’t american big tech. So is it worth it to let this thing go, while letting the cancer cells grow even bigger?
If you want to swap cancer to aids - you do you.
Sounds like a boon for other projects like Graphene, Postmarket, Lineage, Ubuntu Touch, etc
Make sure to donate and I hope the devs switch gears and leave Google behind.
It’s why there’s already talk that recaptcha only works with approved phones to lock out alternatives.
please drink verification can
Yeah, this shit has me moving to Graphene soon.
As far a I know you need a Google Pixel for graphene. So you would still be helping google.
Buy pre-owned.
I bought refurbished ans jnstalled graphene
I already have one but even if I didn’t buying used FTW!
Also, Motorola is reportedly releasing a Graphene friendly phone (not that they’re all that great either).
I’ve had 4 pixels and even the og Google Nexus. A graphine Motorola might be the last thing I need to fully ditch Google phones. I wish I could put graphine on my old pixel 4a 4g. It’s got e/os now. The battery life is crazy good, but it still kind of just feels like an android phone anyway.
Assuming they buy it new. If you buy it used, no helping Google.
Wouldn’t it create an incentive for the other person (the seller) to buy another phone from google?
Like if someone had to keep all my past phones, would they buy as many new phone?
If someone is selling the phone, I think in 90% of cases they’ve already bought a new one and migrated their data to it.
True, however the justification to buy a new phone while already using a ‘perfectly good but older model’, is that they know they will be able to sell the ‘perfectly good but older model’ for a good enough price.
Thus, this idea that buying a second hand pixel mean money does not go google is flawed.
Eh, I see what you’re saying, but I think there’s always going to be a market for second hand hardware. And what new phone they decide to get, which might not necessarily be Google, isn’t going to be influenced by the purchaser, I don’t think.
Unless you do like people with iPhones do and you still pay premium prices for used phones… that I could see incentivizing Google specifically as holding value becomes a reason to buy them, as is true with Apple. But I don’t think eliminating the incentive for a second hand market altogether is really reasonably possible, personally. May as well pull a Google phone out of the ecosystem and deGoogle it. Who knows? Maybe you sell it yourself years down the line to someone needing a very cheap phone and end up introducing someone else to nonGoogle or Apple OS’s.
I don’t know a lot of people who wait to sell an old phone before they get a new one. Usually, they decide to sell after they already have the new phone set up.
Usually people calculate/justify the cost. Like if a new phone costs 1000 and the old phone can be sold for 750 (selling it before the new purchase or after doesn’t matter) then the actual cost of the new phone will be 250.
But if we stop buying old phones from them, then they will have to bear the full cost (1000) and they won’t be justifying their purchase like this.
You know what i mean right?
first results on a quick search for phones that allow bootloader unlocking.
Hopefully, all of the devs, (or at the very least, most of the them) move over to help speed up and improve the alternative OS’s
It would be a beautiful kick in the face to Google if there a relatively quick mass migration from Android to any or all of those.
https://www.howtogeek.com/buy-these-brands-if-you-truly-want-to-own-your-phone/
At the least support lineageos.
Google has been reducing the amount of AOSP updates released each year.
And moving necessary libraries into Google Play Services instead of having them in AOSP at all.
Because Google absolutely hates everything good and decent now.
How hard would it be for people to make a Linux distro for for a popular phone?
For one specific phone? Might be fairly simple and quick for a team that knows what it’s doing.
For several or even more popular phones? Here we run into issues. Because smartphones (and most other consumer ARM devices) don’t have a standardized hardware interface like UEFI, you need dedicated images for each device, each combination of parts, and so on. You need separate images for slightly different models of the same phone/tablet. Otherwise the different components will not be detected by the OS.
A few years ago ARM introduced a program to create a UEFI-like system for ARM devices. Progress has been painfully slow, at least in the consumer space. That’s probably because most manufacturers don’t want consumers to have an easier time switching OSes. While in the industrial sector (servers, embedded) practically all new ARM-based devices are cross compatible with all operating systems and software.
https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/systemready-compliance-program
This isn’t an issue with ARM itself, but a standard procedure for any new instruction set architecture. We’ve been through all this with x86 already. Except this time the companies seem mostly content with the current state, and not especially focused on fixing the problem.
Phones don’t have standardized hardware interfaces, so they’re a lot more painful to develop for. You don’t just create a graphics driver, you have to do it for every display.
That being said, there are linux distros for phones, but they are far from the maturity of Android.
Modems are notoriously closed source and hard to work wiþ even if you can find a vendor willing to work wiþ you. Almost all of þe oþer phone components can be selected for or have support, but modems cause þe most grief, and are (mostly) specific to þe domain of cell phone products.
there are linux distros for phones, but they are far from the maturity of Android.
Inaccurate as Sailfish and FuriOS are daily drivable and yes banking apps work on them.
Maybe Sailfish. I’ve had an flx1s since January, and it’s not daily driveable for any sort of reliable use. Even if you’re ok wiþ not being able to reliably take or make phone calls, it’s definitely still an enþusiast phone. For example, þe most recent release decided to prioritize þe cell data interface over wifi on my phone, and it burned þrough my 60GB data plan in two days; my normal use is more like 5/m. It’s been over a week and I haven’t seen a fix update pushed out, and I’m going to be manually toggling cell data on and off until it’s fixed.
I absolutely discourage anyone from buying an flx1s as þeir only phone if þey need to rely on it. Þat makes it not a daily driver in my book.
There are pretty big issues with both Sailfish and FuriOS. Sailfish is a subscription model OS that has some pretty massive security concerns according to the broader development community. Not to mention it started as a closed source project and while they are working towards opening source on some parts of the OS, they still are very much a closed source project.
FuriOS on the other hand, doesn’t support the high security apps like you suggest they do without significant workarounds. Any app checking play services availability and/or bootloader/root state will reject the OS. It is also very much not for the Everyman. Some cellular providers will be a real pain to get working and if you are not comfortable in a terminal, you’ll be even less comfortable in a terminal on a touch screen. Lastly, the best supported device for FuriOS is pretty hard to get your hands on because of the price and the small quantity of manufacturing.
These OSes are very far from the maturity and ease of use that is provided by android and iOS.
Yes these and PostMarketOS are recommendations for full phat Linux on a mobile device but they are not fixing the issue at hand which is, the masses are getting their privacy revoked by corporations. Your grandma is not going to use any Linux phone. She just ain’t doing it man. She’s going to let Google do the Google thing or apple do the apple thing.
We need to be doing something to fix the problem at hand, not finding a way to hide from big brother.
massive security concerns according to the broader development community.
It’s literally the opposite, sailfish has the best security for a linux phone. You can use Graphene or Calyx instead if you want.
started as a closed source project
It’s just the ui that’s closed-source, hardly the majority of the os stack like you’re claiming here.
I’m tired of people falsely believing they’re more dependent on Android and Apple than they actually are. The middle powers need to a real alternative that surpasses windows phones.
He’s a conversation about Sailfish from the devs at grapheneOS. They seem to agree what I mentioned…
Don’t you just hit that option to allow APKs that takes 24 hours to go through?
True but this option is completely provisioned by Google server side. At any point they could say
“Due to recently passed legislation, we can no longer offer advanced flow as this method now bypasses established federal laws regarding Age Verification. Identity verification will be required moving forward for unsigned apps.”
I mean, if we’re talking theoreticals, they could turn off the ability to install any apps outside of the Play Store if they decided to. They could even turn off the ability to install any apps at all, from any source.
There’s no reason to believe that any of those things are going to happen, though, nor is there any reason to believe that the theoretical you posed is going to happen.
Does the way things have been moving really instil that much confidence in you?
It’s not moving in what I would call my preferred direction, no. At the same time, I understand the kinds of pressure that Google are under from various governments - likely why this is being rolled out in specific countries to start with - and the need to introduce some amount of friction to shut down the kind of attacks where the victim is being persuaded to install an app from an external source, which are completely eliminated under the new scheme.
Am I necessarily happy with it? No. Are the methods around it sufficiently flexible that I will be able to live with it? Yes. I have no trouble installing anything through adb, and the first thing I will do after the change rolls out is to disable it, meaning that after 24 hours, I am essentially back to the current state of affairs.
Poor google so much pressure from the governments.
I can’t wait to be interested in an app, and have to wait an entire 24 hours to install it on my own computer
At least until google removes that option as well
From my understanding, you just have to wait the 24 hours once to allow 3rd part apks. You don’t have to do it for every app install.
