Comment on Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 week agodoesn’t the same apply to any operating system, including the linux phone distributions? android has security measures that may be breached, but mobile linux has much fewer security measures at all
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Yes, it does apply to every operating system - hence, the differentiator becomes whether the operating system has hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on dedicated security development. This is why a lot of companies now don’t even let you use Android devices for BYOD aside from Google or Samsung, because they’re the only companies with the resources to keep their security really up to date.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
my point is that if the open source community cannot figure out just maintenance of an android system, there’s no chance of creating a real mobile linux distribution, as it would need the aforementioned maintenance and the development of additional features
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Ahhh I see, I was confused about what you were getting at. My mistake. And yes that’s very true…hmm. More dire than I was even thinking then…
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
no worries. but that’s why I think android would be a much better base for a free software mobile operating system than a current linux distribution. lots of engineering work and experience went into making it, both on the technical sides and in the UX, with lots and lots of feedback. it has largely solved permissions, inter-app communication, power saving, things like these, and I mean all in the AOSP project, forgetting about the proprietary google mobile services.
not everything is perfect, lots could be improved, and there are things we don’t like, like how app background activity is handled is not too transparent and neither customizable, etc, but those would be much easier to fix and maintain then reimplementing everything. hardware drivers are a problem, but it is anyway, and with android we at least have a working system with which reverse engineers can analyze the drivers in operation. certainly android is not the cleanest codebase but its not so bad either to warrant throwing it away. in the parts of the code I looked over the years, it’s quite organized, but of course I have only seen very little.