TL;DR
- Efforts like Graphene OS face increasing pressure from apps that refuse to run on non-standard Android.
- The custom ROM project characterizes Google’s approach to device attestation as incomplete and flawed.
- Graphene OS is prepared to take legal action if Google won’t let it pass Play Integrity checks.
Even without the custom ROMs, the whole Android ecosystem is a colossal fucking mess.
I’ve got old apps that won’t work any more. It’s not even compatible with itself.
People give Windows a load of shit, and deservedly so for some of it, but it’s a million times more usable than Android when you want shit to “just work”.
I’m actually for this. The bar to entry for the Play Store is too low with too many low quality and unmaintained apps. I’m all for booting insecure and super old apps. They cheapen the ecosystem.
Well that’s all very well, but I’ve got a bathroom speaker I can no longer access.
So how about instead of Daddy Google deciding what’s best for everyone, they let things run and give you a warning?
Hell, I’ve even got games I’ve paid for that are now gone. Honestly, fuck them for even thinking that’s acceptable.
Same, it’s why I never buy a game or app nowadays, they will just stop working when the new OS version comes around, devs already got their money so they don’t have any incentive to care, and contrary to PC I can’t do shit about it myself on my phone, there’s no “androidbox” to run old apps inside my phone.
You’re really arguing for a covenant around tech that companies want to orphan. The rule needs to be the code is opened and a slacker code owner is appointed for handover.
This is gonna embarrass Google a Lot but it’s gonna embarrass azn and m$ a whole lot more.
The forced alternative is a refund if you can bring something recognizable with a serial number to your post office or something as ubiquitous, present and staffed - have them validate in the loosest fashion and require like 10 bizdays for the cash refund.
Whether or not the post office is there for that or charges the OEM for the notary-light service is a matter for the courts, the USPS, and these days probably the fn SCotUS.
That is not what’s happening. It takes tons of work to maintain backward compatibility but you’re framing it as though it doesn’t and they’re just being a holes on purpose.
The problem is allowing the APIs it uses to exist at all in the OS is a huge security hole.
So it’s my choice to run them?
If I can download an APK, I should be able to run it in a “compatibility mode” and have the OS do it’s best to run it.
There’s a few apps that let you virtualize an older version of Android, but in my experience they’re slow, and they’re all from sketchy-looking Chinese companies that are for sure harvesting all your data. There’s also an open source project running for this, but I don’t remember what it was called and it was fairly limited.
It can’t.
A compatibility mode would involve meaningful cost, massively compromise security, and not have a chance in hell of working.
They could just spin up a container of some sort. It’s still fundamentally Linux, so it should be possible to run Android inside an lxc container the same way you can run a desktop Linux distro in docker (which is based on the lxc functionality in the Linux kernel)
The point is that you have to emulate a fuckton of low level access to even have a chance of anything working. Either you replace the actual hardware access with junk data, making none of the apps work, or you break the whole permissions structure, and your security is completely gone.
All of those APIs were deprecated because it’s impossible to provide them in any way that resembles security.
I mean, as long as it’s in a pretty robust sandbox and it’s either firewalled or has no network access (if possible for the app in question), I would think security implications are minimal. Like, even if the version of Android inside the container is compromised, the app could only take over its own container, which is non-privileged and doesn’t have access to anything you didn’t explicitly give it (in terms of user data).
How we all wish there was a third option, I would genuinely take less functionality in favour of privacy and performance. I don’t need AI and fancy image processing. I want to use my phone to pay the old way, like when samsung copied the magnetic strip info, not like now where google gets a copy of my receipts.
Sucks iOS is the alternative, nearly gave in last week but the price was just too much for what I was getting.
That’s true for every operating system. Old apps aren’t updated to use new system APIs and such and they eventually stop working.
Yet I can compile applications that work on Windows XP, and they still work under Windows 11.
It’s not as if Android is some svelte slimline OS where every byte matters. There’s plenty of room there for keeping compatibility with older apps.
Dude there’s millions of lines of code and thousands of hours per year that keep old windows shit running. It’s a nightmare to support that. Microsoft has made that a priority and you can easily argue it shouldn’t be, but you seem convinced that’s the only valid path. It’s not.
On desktops we can use virtual environments, translation layers, plenty of solutions to make old programs and games work on a modern OS. Phones are somehow incapable of this.
Software that is 10 years old and unmaintained is likely unsafe to use and therefore shouldn’t work. Windows has a lot of issues specifically because it’s backward compatible with ancient software, actually. Security and a path forward should matter more than clinging to old software that must stop working someday regardless of how hard you try to delay it. Emulation/VMs are and should be a way to work around that on desktop and it would actually be nice if mobile OSes had that too. That way at least the ancient software can be sandboxed and not a security weakpoint. The right approach though is not to do this horrible patchwork of APIs like windows which creates a security nightmare
Where do you run your old Windows Phone apps nowadays? What about new Windows Phone apps?
On my Windows Phone silly
Can’t tell if that’s a horrible wallpaper or a totally fucked up screen
It’s a photo from a disused quarry that my granddad used to work in
I see it! That’s pretty cool.
Dude, that’s sick, thank you! I wish I had a better pic to offer but this is the best I can do since Jerboa app is not currently letting me upload pictures in a comment…
🤘🏼
Rad
Ah, memories.
Memories? Pssshhhh, he took that pic an hour ago…