Comment on Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos
perestroika@lemm.ee 1 week ago
The countdown to Android’s slow and painful death is already ticking for a while.
It has become over-engineered and no longer appealing from a developer’s viewpoint.
I still write code for Android because my customers need it - will be needing for a while - but I’ve stopped writng code for Apple’s i-things and I research alternatives for Android. Rolling my own environment with FOSS components on top of Raspbian looks feasible already. On robots and automation, I already use it.
throwback3090@lemmy.nz 1 week ago
What’s over engineered about it?
perestroika@lemm.ee 1 week ago
In my experience, the API has iteratively made it ever harder for applications to automatically perform previously easy jobs, and jobs which are trivial under ordinary Linux (e.g. become an access point, set the IP address, set the PSK, start a VPN connection, go into monitor / inject mode, access an USB device, write files to a directory of your choice, install an APK). Now there’s a literal thicket of API calls and declarations to make, before you can do some of these things (and some are forever gone).
The obvious reason is that there are a billion fools whom Google tries to protect them from scamers.
But it kills the ability to do non-standard things, and the concept of your device being your own.
throwback3090@lemmy.nz 1 week ago
I suppose that’s all true, I’d say more “following apples lead on locking things down” than over engineered, but 🍅🍅.
I find myself avoiding the whole root business, I do want my mobile device to be fairly locked down. But I also use alternative OSs and app stores to avoid 90% of the garbage (stuff I can’t avoid I put in work profile, like I still need google maps).
It works for me, but on the front of this complexity driving away devs I don’t really see a viable alternative. Base Linux isn’t secure enough for what we put on these little computers. I mean you’ve still got tons of influential people arguing you shouldn’t use secureboot or a tpm as if leaving your whole computer unsecured is better than the indignity of using a non-free bios.