People should be able to write software for Android, and distribute it outside Google’s Play store, without having to:
- pay Google
- give government ID to Google
- agree to Google terms and conditions
People should be able to install the software they want on their phone, from sources other than Google’s Play store, without having to jump through Google-imposed hoops.
e.g. via F-Droid.
We’ve got until September this year to stop Google squeezing the open Android ecosystem.
Dumb question: how is this affecting projects like Graphene OS?
Can android just be forked and detached from google?
I am guessing that despite being “open source”, the project depends on many binary blobs to interface with the wireless devices ??
Google has been systematically moving stuff out of the open-source part of Android and into proprietary areas for some time now. They’re making it harder and harder for anyone to make a working Android OS that isn’t full of closed-source Google spyware. For now these projects survive, but Google is clearly hostile to them.
What would it take to start from a clean slate? I mean, a mad lad said about 35 years ago “UNIX expensive. I’m gonna make my own OS”
What are the obstacles for something like this to happen for phones? I assume device drivers, but probably it is much more complicated than that
I have a GNU/Linux phone I carry in my other pocket. Here are the biggest issues I can see:
Aren’t there also issues with Banking Apps and their requirements around security and signing?
and authentication apps like itsme …
As some other people mentioned the Waydroid app or their website can work. If you do Waydroid, you can install Gapps, and other banking app isn’t happy with that, they typically offer decent mobile websites.
GNOME Web and Mozilla Firefox via this PWA extension let you have a dedicated app icon for any web service you want into your app drawer. The Firefox one works best, and I believe does a better job isolating stuff from the main browser.
What’s cool is you can run an entire Monero wallet (or other cryptocurrency) on device for full mobile financial experience, though don’t store more in it than you would a regular wallet.
I carry a Linux phone in my normal pocket, not my other one.
The camera doesn’t work, I don’t have any problem with apps but I am probably not a typical user in that regard, but my 5000mAh battery lasts me a day and ends on 30-40%, which is reasonable but not nearly as good as Android. My family members complain I sound like I’m underwater when I call them and the phone crashes every morning when I take it off the charger.
Linux phones are a wonderful promise but require a lot of comprimises. I hope they improve soon
FSF has a project called LibrePhone
Broken link?
I see a lot of people responded with a true clean slate, but really, a fork is a clean slate.
It’s not like Graphene, or Lineage, or any others would stop working. More maintainers would be needed for security issues, but way less than to get (non-Android) Linux phones up to speed.
Many graphene users, myself included, use all FOSS software from outside Google’s store.
My last straw was when I had location services permission denied to chrome, and then one day discovered that it had turned them back on without notifying me…
Also, every time my apps updated they gave themselves back permissions that I had disabled.
GrapheneOS is currently unaffected, at least specifically regarding your freedom to install apps. They’ve stated this won’t affect GrapheneOS.
The main problem as pointed out by floofloof is that a lot of Android development is no longer part of AOSP, but separate proprietary implementations. For example, if you install stock Android, Google has a feature to recognize music playing around you and provide a list to you later. GrapheneOS lacks this feature, because it relies on proprietary code. Same goes for the features to find your device if it’s lost, AI stuff, etc.
Personally I’d be very heppy if Graphene OS continues long into the future without those features anyway.
Most of them aren’t necessary to most people, but the main concern is features that should reasonably be part of the core Android experience being removed, or features that have no reason to be reliant on Google at all.
For example, GrapheneOS can’t support the detection of your phone being quickly ripped away from you to auto-lock the device, even though that should only require onboard sensors and processing, and it can’t support the additional custom clocks for lock screen customization, because Google decided those would be built into the Google app then extended to Android after, rather than being built into AOSP.
You can reasonably see a future where other functionality gets put into these proprietary blobs too. Maybe the launcher becomes proprietary and GrapheneOS has to use or develop a separate FOSS one that might not support all the same features. Maybe charging optimization gets locked behind proprietary code because Google claims it uses “special algorithms” to adjust how your phone charges. Maybe Private Space gets turned proprietary because Google claims it needs special security features.
That’s why it’s particularly concerning, because in the future, Google could just decide that any number of features aren’t part of AOSP anymore, and now GrapheneOS either has to give them up entirely, or make/find an alternative.
Okay here what noone talks about android is linux at its core if android and linux were merged it wouldnt to hard of a parject but the issue is time and resources. If linux and android were merged as open source it screw up the entire system and google would be screwed and thwy realised that and thats why their quietly trying to do it first.