Awesome @Kea thanks for your post! And yes „The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is a must to read.
„These capabilities were and remain inscrutable to all but an exclusive data priesthood among whom Google is the übermensch”.
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No, not trolling. Just curious (and grateful) for the thoughts you and others wrote.
My Palm Pre was also enough, then Lumia 800 (especially the offline map, great), also Jolla 1. But they got outdated, e.g. the Jolla 1 browser cannot cope with some sites I visit. And also my expectation about what a smartphone should be able to do increased.
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I must pay even more attention to that the reply-to is set properly it seems.
That was for @sacd’s post just above mine.
I think this is a healthy discussion to have, and i wish there were any serious alternatives. Not that Sailfish needs replacing, but because how a larger community benefits everyone.
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This is from 2017 and surely accurate, plus 2 years of optimizing, and then came:
Tadaaa - Covid !!
(with nearly all things of life getting digital, and the nearly 100% dominance of Z**m in the news reports I saw)
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I do remember, but only because of life events that give me some landmarks. [Harp Arpeggios] The year was 2009. My wife and I both had candybar feature phones, and we moved to a new city (and area code) for my wife’s job. That job required a couple of professional-type apps running on a smartphone unless she wanted to be lugging a laptop from patient to patient, hotspot to hotspot. You had 3 choices of OS: Palm, Windows and Blackberry, since those were the only business-oriented devices at the time. I guess Android and iPhone were “toys” in the eyes of the professional software industry of the day. IIRC, she went through several years and a Palm with a keyboard and a Windows slider before the big two mobile environments of today would be accepted in the medical world.
I finally got my N900 a year later when the price came down (a little). I never tried it, but the hospital apps might have worked on the Garnet Palm emulator.
(BTW, I’m also really irritated with today’s business of needing an “app” to use a piece of hardware when a web interface or a couple of buttons and maybe a display would do. I find myself eschewing all manner of devices that want me to use their app.)
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We can all protest by simply not buying products that unnecessarily require an app. I really wish people would start acting like that, but I’m afraid there is no hope about it.
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Good point. Though, I think my Oura ring would not really be better with display and buttons.
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But an open protocol…
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The crackedlabs article about corporate surveillance is ‘old’ but still true. Wolfie Christl’s contemporary subject of research is the gambling industry. You can see that when clicking on ‘home’.
Here is a lightweight article that mentions some activities of Google, the unavoidable monopolist.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/16-creepy-google-projects-google-x-calico-self-driving-project-loon-future/b
Again not new, but still relevant. Google is more advanced now. Deepmind e.g. is now implemented in London hospitals.
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There seem to be some misconceptions about Android in your post that might drive away potential users that are looking for something else, but are still eyeing the OS:
Indeed, this has been plaguing the Android community for quite a while now and agree that at the end of the day they are just AOSP spins.
This is highly subjective, but we can maybe agree that the UI is seriously incoherent between apps: you can mostly avoid this by using (likely) proprietary apps from GPlay to do the job compared to e.g. from F-Droid, but the app design depends on the developer, not the Mountain View guys.
If you do not like the SystemUI theme, though, you can always cope by writing your own overlays.
Again, this is subjective; the UI can be scaled through Developer Options (Smallest width option).
Although SFOS has tons of potential because of its simplicity, it is currently miles more inefficient than Android, because there:
- Apps come mostly straight from upstream (no need to use outdated or forked components)
- Proper user-space power management
- Can handle low memory situations and devices way better (
lmkd,ro.config.low_ram) - ART handles memory more efficiently and offers more responsive apps e.g. through AOT compilation
Not quite sure what you mean by this, but not necessarily: you can always adb root into your device without a Superuser package on Android (almost nobody builds as user anyways) or install a terminal app and gain root through the package.
Very strict SELinux policies also greatly reduce Android’s attack surface, but if you find them cumbersome then you are very likely (99.9%) doing something wrong with the OS. Remember that you can always set it to permissive if it gets in the way.
See above.
First of all, a kernel cannot be shared across devices unless they are almost the same (or, y’know, GKI).
Software stack-wise, this is kind of the same situation with SFOS: as it is currently, it is not as modular as e.g. PMOS or other more regular distros are, and because some bits and bobs are proprietary you cannot even reproduce this exact stack in a fork of any kind.
OTOH, AOSP’s OSS model of “look but don’t touch” (just like every big G project) allows you to get the same stack and have 100% full control of the OS through patches, unlike on SFOS where core apps are proprietary and you just have to trust Jolla that what they are doing is right.
Overall I agree with @sacd’s take here: an AOSP spin is still an OS, they avoid the big G-isms and provide something that “just werks”.
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Well… they could have better frameworks and stricter guidelines.
Precisely what i don’t want.
I can turn down the number of megabytes an app takes up in settings? 
What does this mean? To where? What upstream? What apps? As opposed to…?
Interesting that a proper setup should allow proper root; i guess i should not be surprised.
I was just judging from what normal people seem to be doing with their devices, seemingly having to choose between locked-out or that everything has root.
Oh, come on, don’t twist words! Not an exact config/build obviously.
I was agreeing that with some good will it is all Linux at the very core - pointing to how the difference (or lack thereof) is higher in the stack.
SFOS allows you to “get” it too, just that a subset of it is binary-only. And in the parts that are open you have a much bigger chance of getting something upstreamed.
Also, you’ll still have people arguing that without GMS, it’s not working properly - and that’s certainly closed.
I still think it is disingenuous of e.g. Graphene “”“OS”"" to call themselves a “mobile OS with Android app compatibility”, as opposed to something like a spin on AOSP. That doesn’t make it satan itself, just disingenuous.
I see, strange. I use my icloud mailbox on ipad as an archive. This way I store many links to articles. When clicking on it, the page appears in browser (search engine Qwant) and I can share it, but when I tap on the link in this forum it doesn’t work. Sorry.
I wish… this, of course, does not happen because the app code itself is immense, the build system is broken, or binaries are fat: app developers nowadays insert way too many assets and animations (“that’s what users want”) into their apps, but this is explicitly done to hook users more than anything else.
There are many examples in SFOS of this, but let’s take Firefox: for Android, Mozilla maintains the source code for the browser and publishes builds itself, allowing the browser to remain up to date. For something like the SFOS browser to get updated, Jolla has to:
- Rebase all their patches (not an easy feat)
- Upgrade compilers and other OS packages to get it to build e.g. LLVM
- Likely add new patches to retain support for some old OS components while the engine adds or removes features
- Solve any issues related to middleware
Absolutely, this is the exact opposite of the “look but don’t touch” model mentioned above.
Considering the promotion they are getting nowadays, I would question their ethics. They even admit that AOSP is being used below the half of their main page:
The features page provides an overview of the substantial privacy and security improvements added by GrapheneOS to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
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I have the ‘SingleFile’ extension installed on Firefox, so i can store webpages of interest as a html file on computer.
i flashed back my XA2 with Sailfish OS(49 Euro) to Lineage OS 19.1 Android 12
without Google sevices .
Works 100000 times better than Sailfish!
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you just copy/pasted it wrong 16 Bizarre, Surprising, Or Creepy Google Projects From Bloodstream Robots, Military Dogs, Lunar Bases, And Even Deodorant - CBS San Francisco
I second that. I am now using LineageOS for microG on my XA2 H4113. Some of the problems that have been resolved are:
- GPS works now without having to send my location data to Google, as was required with supplpatcher
- Bluetooth and NFC works.
- Android apps using GPS crashed the whole android layer in SFOS. This is not a problem, anymore.
- Battery life has improved.
- I am able to circumvent the annoying root detection functions in certain apps that won’t let them run, so I
couldn’t use banking apps and official government issued apps with SFOS.
But … I absolutely agree with @attah that SFOS as a system is much more palatable. it is a real Linux system as we know and love which you can’t say of Lineage. I can have some root access in Lineage with Magisk but it is still limited. I shall keep a close watch on the development of SFOS and if the issues above are addressed, I’ll come running back!
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I would just go back to a ‘cereal box prize phone’. Sometimes, less is more.
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