Comment on Android won't kill sideloading after all, but new verification rules will make it harder
Zak@lemmy.world 1 day agoI wonder what an alternate history where Google chose not to become evil would look like.
What if they had looked at Microsoft’s Palladium proposal and thought, as pretty much everyone outside institutional IT departments did that locked devices with remote attestation was a nightmare scenario best forgotten, refused to build it, and made an effort to prevent anyone else from doing so on top of Android? Safetynet didn’t appear until 5-6 years after Android launched to the public. What if it never did? Android already had enough momentum by that point I don’t think the financial sector could refuse to be on it no matter what risk management said.
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Well, I kind of know what happened in that scenario… because it did. Until Pay, there was Wallet. The original Wallet, not the current one. Wallet had a physical and virtual prepaid debit card, that you would load up and manage in the app. I used it a few times (new tech woo), and distinctively remember ordering at a McDonald’s, the clerk announced the cost, I held my Nexus 7 to the new nfc pad, they started to say ‘uhh no you have to-’ and then a success beep, and their jaw dropped. They thought it was nuts, I told them in a few years ‘this will be everywhere’.
So before Pay, there was Wallet, and it’s own little sandbox of testing if anyone would use this. A couple years later the Wallet card discontinued, and Pay took its place.
Zak@lemmy.world 1 day ago
A different Wallet/Pay implementation is a possible outcome, but I’m thinking of a bigger picture where Android phones are more like PCs: no non-unlockable bootloaders, no remote attestation anywhere, barriers to root detection at the OS level, third-party ROMs encouraged.
The early days of Android were like that. I wonder if things had developed along that path, would we have a paradise for power users? A security nightmare for mainstream users? Both? Neither?
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Classic Google.
I remember wallet only working consistently at McDonald’s.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
For most of early wallets existence it did only work McDonald’s lol