TL;DR
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Google has made it harder to build custom Android ROMs for Pixel phones by omitting their device trees and driver binaries from the latest AOSP release.
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The company says this is because it’s shifting its AOSP reference target from Pixel hardware to a virtual device called “Cuttlefish” to be more neutral.
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While Google insists AOSP isn’t going away, developers must now reverse-engineer changes, making the process for supporting Pixel devices more difficult.
That was bound to happen at some point. Buying a Google device to then “degoogle” it never sit quite right with me.
I bought mine secondhand because I had a bad feeling about giving google money just to degoogle as well but still really wanted to use GrapheneOS
Amen but here we are
I swear to god how many time it has to pass until developers realize open source is just a facade only Free Software licences are free as in freedom
Sorry how would have a GPL`d aosp helped here? Google would and could still have not published their drivers for the pixel. You’d need pixel drivers licenced by someone different from google to make them publish their changes to the drivers
Preach
huh, look at that. the thing people were warned about when buying pixel phones happened.
Google doing something bad? SAY IT ISN’T SO
I was about to buy one next year… what do you recommend instead?
fair phone has treated me well enough.
I have a FP4 that runs e/os. won’t lie, the software has bugs, but the hardware is pretty solid.
Long time coming, Play Integrity (or whatever’s called nowadays) restrictions have effectively killed any alternative distributions.
This fucking sucks. Cyberpunk dystopia
In cyberpunk dystopia you could buy normal things, just most wasn’t it.
I am running GOS on a Pixel 7, which means I’ve had this device for ~2.5 years at this point, and back when I transitioned to this setup I was aware they were talking about being beholden to Pixels due to the hardware security module not being available on other devices.
It has been a known issue. I understand it is a very difficult and costly undertaking to develop new hardware and new entrants would be competing against the big guys for fab space, manufacturing and assembly etc.
We need some kind of nonprofit or independently financed group to advance this cause. Could it be FUTO, Framework, or some other company/organization like this?
There would be market incentive to solve these problems - There has got to be a lot of demand for a neutral hardware platform that meets the hardware security module and other requirements for bootloader security, custom ROMs, etc.
Would fairphone be a good choice?
No. Sadly they lack the security requirements for GOS. Source
So I installed LineageOS recently. Now that I’ve transferred my passwords and account info I’m quite happy. What will happen from here? Will some apps stop working? If not, is there a problem with just continuing to use the phone as is until I need a new phone (security, eg)?
No.
More like A-no-SP
It’s Nopen Source
ACSP
It’s the year of the linux phone. /s
apple and google are doing their best to promote linux phones at this point.
dont buy american
If Pine64 can spec out a reasonably decent prototype of a phone and Purism can sell theirs for 2 grand (not worth it), then somebody else can legit come out with something just the same. Pine64 project and Purism cannot be the only communities that can somehow come out with these kinds of tech. Better yet, more people should be jumping to help out these guys to be free from Google and Apple dominance.
Teracube just came out with their 3 phone Teracube 2s, and of course there is Fairphone
Damn, I’ve just switched to Pixel 3a XL I got for $100 and then installed Evolution OS.
Like, I understand the more the merrier, and so I don’t hate on the whole Pixel, ROM development thingy, but I just don’t understand the appeal of Pixel phones. If you want to be a photographer, get a camera. Other than that, you really don’t need that great of a camera on your phone. Given the condition of America and the police state and corporate surveillance, I don’t know why anybody with a damn look of sense would put their information on these major platforms, let alone even on the outskirts. Some people make money on social media, but a lot don’t. I stick to my guns and I’m on the internet and computers to learn to educate myself, not to dick around with stupid shit. We need something other than Android. And we have to be weary of open source, especially when it’s sponsored by Google. Google is a terrorist organization.
If you want to be a photographer, get a camera.
🤦♀️
Even professional photographers don’t have their cameras on them at all times, nor are they as convenient for just whipping out and taking a picture within 1.5s.
Plus, cameras are expensive and they’re another thing to carry around (idk about you but I don’t have infinite pocket space) and they’re another thing to keep charged, whereas you have a phone with you at pretty much all times anyway, because they’re effectively required for modern society.
You may as well be saying you don’t understand why phones can play music when you can get an MP3 player, that you don’t understand why they play videos because TVs exist, that you don’t understand why they have web browsers and plenty of apps, because PCs exist.
I stick to my guns and I’m on the internet and computers to learn to educate myself, not to dick around with stupid shit.
He said, on this Lemmy thread.
And we have to be weary of open source
Ah yes, that nefarious Open Source software. Tell me more about the evils of FOSS, Mr Balmer.
Being weary of open source is like being afraid to eat food that you watched somebody cook for you.
one less reason to buy a Pixel, well done Google!
How badly would this affect graphine os?
I don’t have any actual research, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pixel itself doesn’t really make money at all. One of those “get people hardcore into the Google ecosystem to get their money/data” things.
The absolutely criminal dark patterns that they pull on people via Google photos auto backup is insane.
Just in my own orbit 2 of my friends wives, my parents, and my in-laws all wound up paying Google because they thought they had to or lose all their photos. We helped most of them disconnect the autobackup (that they didn’t even know was activated) and move it to offline safely. But that was the most downright evil shit Google has ever done and literally a fire in me for manipulating the elderly and less tech savvy so blatantly.
devil’s avocado: this move has saved many people’s cherished photos from disappearing by having them auto save. before Google photos I’d run into cases (I used to do home IT support) where people had years of family photos disappear because they didn’t back them up properly. Having to communicate what happened was never fun.
is Google photos perfect? No, but it’s a great solution for people who don’t want to manage their data.
Yes, but that shouldn’t explicitly opt in, and they shouldn’t marry that product to Gmail and Google Drive if they are going to push it to enable by default.
Again, it’s really insidious. They push it so aggressively I had to disable it on my personal device twice, and I can’t just not use Google Photos app because it’s tied to the camera itself on pixel phones.
I agree with you, it’s insidious.
Given you’ve got a Pixel phone, you can save at least yourself from this problem by running Graphene or Calyx on it.
I’m not worried about me. I can manage. But I had to intervene and make it a Project for my immediate family. Which is always unfun, because who wants to expose all their personal data that way, especially photos.
Crazy that Google just screwed over GrapheneOS like this.
The company says this is because it’s shifting its AOSP reference target from Pixel hardware to a virtual device called “Cuttlefish” to be more neutral.
This actually probably make sense, but they could still be cool and have pixel drivers be open source in a different repo if that was the only reason.
Yeah, just that this has shit to do with the stated reasons. Google hasn’t been an open source ally for quite some time now
Do you think it may be related to the monopoly issues they are currently facing?
Quite possibly, the GrapheneOS team seems to think so:
Yup, the entire culture of Google has nearly changed. It used to be coder- and innovation-driven, and open-source was a natural thing to support. Make more money by growing the pie, creating markets with new tech.
Now it seems it’s middle managers and MBAs calling the shots, and their strategy is generic business zero-sum mindset - lock down, restrict, extract. They still see the PR value in open-source, but that’s it.
Just becoming 1990s Microsoft or 1980s IBM.
Just another example of enshittification from a publicly traded company. Nothing really new here.
Would be great indeed, but “more neutral” in this case seems to mean vendor agnostic by abstracting the hardware away and have anything run on a closed source google container.
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