There's even a paragraph saying it's good for the environment. This means Apple really cares about the environment. That's good! So I suppose I can install my community OS of choice painlessly after Apple decides to stop supporting it so it doesn't turn into e-waste that day despite being perfectly good hardware for many more years?
I also suppose parts can be easily replaced without also replacing everything including the motherboard should something stop working?
Sarcasm, obviously, but until they do these things, their environment selling point is just irritating and scandalous and they should just focus on the other selling points.
Try "aware, even vaguely, of the privacy issues standard smartphones pose".
(I would bet more than 5% have at least a vague notion of open source though, and a positive a priori - also possibly mixing it with source-available, which would be on par with some people we can read on HN)
That's not what I observe. Many non technical people have ethical concerns.
This fantasy among the technical crowd here that the general public only cares about cheap and convenient, which is at best condescending, needs to die. Convincing oneself of this only takes meeting non technical people.
Every non-technical person I’ve talked to doesn’t seem to care. In many cases I think it’s because they don’t really understand or the threat is too abstract. For example, collecting information to display ads and manipulate an algorithm to influence how a person thinks, feels, and consumes, for fun and profit.
Since they can’t see it, think they’re above it, and see stuff that makes them laugh, they just keep going. Never mind all the misinformation these same people send me or how worked up they get about various political issues they never seemed to care about before.
This is the boat a lot of people I know fall into. They will get upset about a lot of stuff, but have a massive blind spot when it comes to online and device privacy, even if I try to point it out. I’m usually trying to point it out as they are trying to convince me to join Facebook and Instagram. If I get worked up over some privacy overreach in something I’m trying to use, they just kind of shrug. A fiend of mine spent all morning ranting to me about streaming services, but isn’t cancelling any of them.
My experience is that you can't "convince" people out of Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, because the platforms themselves convince people to use them. They always emit that background radiation of "You're missing out on VERY important stuff".
It's literally brainwashing by design. My dad is convinced everybody should use Facebook to be informed or they'll be "left behind". My peers are convinced you're socially a loser if you don't have Instagram. Privacy concerns are not even an afterthought.
And this brainwashing sits on top of the dopamine/reward center related neurochemical effects of these apps, which are very mild, much milder than any typical substance addictions for most people.
It took me aboout 3 months of abstinence of Reddit and HN for it to finally click that I didn't actually need them at any capacity in my life.
The blind spot is all too obvious for those with eyes to see. I can tell which app is a person's drug of choice within ~5 minutes of meeting them. Over time, these algorithm-driven apps even (subtly) change a person's personality.
Most of the non-technical but politically-attuned people I know are the ones who are actually concerned about the Apple+Google monopoly. The technical people are the ones who don't care.
I suppose it depends on the area then. Or maybe I'm in my own bubble.
Most people I know aren't particularly technical, and many of them are at least concerned or aware of these topics, even if they haven't taken any concrete actions (yet).
Keep trying to gently spread the word then, that's a good thing to do (without being annoying!). It takes time, but it eventually pays.
I also have a lot of friends who deleted WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. over the years due to privacy concerns. I also know a few people who have dumb phones for the same reason. I have gotten a couple friends to install NetGuard firewall on their Android phones and gave them a quick tutorial how to whitelist new apps and they are very happy that they have some sort of control about what comes in/goes out of their phones. All of the above groups are very non-technical. And on the other end, 50% of my technical friends don't seem to give a shit anymore - maybe they realize it's futile to even try, since the panopticon is multi-faceted and drains a lot of energy trying to keep prying eyes away. Ignorance can be bliss?
I think that group of people is divided between those who think they're above it and don't care at all and those who do care but feel powerless to stop it and try not to think about it. Both end up looking the same on the surface
I move them from the, “doesn’t think about it” to “thinks they’re above it”, when they make claims that their algorithm isn’t like that, they can see the manipulation tactics, etc… while at the same time being fired up over some nonsense they saw in their feed or thinking AI stuff is real. It’s clearly impacting them, but their hubris prevents them from seeing or admitting it.
> 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.
C has had fixed size int types since C99. And you've always been able to define struct layouts with perfect precision (struct padding is well defined and deterministic, and you can always use __attribute__(packed) and bit fields for manual padding).
Endianness might kill your portability in theory. but in practice, nobody uses big endian anymore. Unless you're shipping software for an IBM mainframe, little endian is portable.
You just define the structures in terms of some e.g. uint32_le etc types for which you provide conversion functions to native endianness. On a little endian platform the conversion is a no-op.
It can be made to work (as you point out), and the core idea is great, but the implementation is terrible. You have to stop and think about struct layout rules rather than declaring your intent and having the compiler check for errors. As usual C is a giant pile of exquisitely crafted footguns.
A "sane" version of the feature would provide for marking a struct as intended for ser/des at which point you'd be required to spell out every last alignment, endianness, and bit width detail. (You'd still have to remember to mark any structs used in conjunction with mmap but C wouldn't be any fun if it was safe.)
A lot of the complains expressed in this article are distinctly from the proprietary parts.
Stock Android, and especially stock Samsung, is far from being a free software solution.
A turnkey solution based (almost exclusively, and except the driver blobs) on free software would be to buy a phone running something like /e/. I think they also provide backups.
Of course, stuff requiring SafetyNet (or whatever Google current oppressive attestation system) may not work (though microG makes some of it work).
Faultless in terms of grammar and orthography, but very verbose, horribly hard to focus on, full of emptiness and terribly boring, each being way more faulty than a few typos and language mistakes. Maybe I'll just start flagging these comments and HN posts more systematically.
I also suppose parts can be easily replaced without also replacing everything including the motherboard should something stop working?
Sarcasm, obviously, but until they do these things, their environment selling point is just irritating and scandalous and they should just focus on the other selling points.