@mcc @joepie91 Also consider collaborating with the LibrePhone project, which is basically trying to do what is proposed in the OP: Make FOSS OSes run on a greater variety of phone hardware. As I recall, it is focused on reverse engineering.

https://librephone.fsf.org/

@ireneista I'm not expecting the guide to cover how every single thing about how android works, to be clear, just to explain the parts of the process of 'getting a custom rom running on a mystery device and working out how to fill in the gaps'. all the weird permutations, that's what the community part is for

@joepie91 right, yes, it makes sense to want in the abstract

@joepie91 the thing is we, like, have 40 years of knowledge on programming and a fair few of those years are on low-level stuff and we couldn't write that guide, because we only know about 10% of the topics it would need to cover for the very base, minimum functionality of making things boot at all

@joepie91 so we do feel like we are at least qualified to say that the architecture is too big. we're not just offering that opinion from a distance or in an uninformed way.

@joepie91 furthermore it's a moving target where the whole architecture gets shifted around every few major releases, so we're dubious it would even help.

don't play Google's game. it's a losing one.

@ireneista this does feel like it is assuming a single author, though. there are evidently people and groups who can complete this process (or we wouldn't have custom roms), and so there is some grouping of people who can produce the relevant knowledge, and what I'm thinking of is more a collaborative effort by said grouping to produce such a guide.

that may well take the form of a wiki or something else non-linear, but that's an implementation detail. the important part is that this knowledge is currently either 'locked up' in people's heads, or scattered around the internet, and it's in desperate need of some *organized, structured* documentation process by those who know how to navigate these waters.

@joepie91 we of course encourage collaboration, no matter what, collaboration is a good thing

why does Android have to be the target? is there some reason the additional work of that is, like, worth it? keeping in mind that the purported UX benefits really go away when none of the animations work properly or any of that, which is the case right after bring-up

@joepie91 like, using Android makes things harder, not easier

@ireneista @joepie91 Just re-upping this position of mine:

Android should be relegated to a UI & system glue framework to run existing apps, not kept as its own OS.

@dalias @joepie91 good call. we agree with that.

@ireneista quite literally: because those are the phones that people have.

like, even if you were to run something not-android on those devices, that wouldn't change that you need to interact with - and probably pick apart - the android installation that is already on there in some way.

@joepie91 you don't have to run Android on them. that's all we're advocating for. you do have to subvert the bootloader to load your own thing instead of the stock thing, yes, and there are a few ways to do that and they all suck and give less security than you'd have on a device meant to run an arbitrary distro from the start, but it's not really the hard part.

@joepie91 you may overestimate the amount of picking-apart of the manufacturer Android distros that is involved in this work.

@ireneista from my perspective, the process involves picking apart the vendor images, finding a way into the bootloader (potentially involving finding exploits), extracting hardware-specific drivers and mechanisms from said vendor image (which likely involves more than just copying over a file, due to vendor kernel patches and such), and (partly or fully) reverse-engineering those to port them to whatever is to be run on the device after that, whether it is Android or Linux or something else.

all of these steps are an integral part of the process of liberating a device in some way. I expect that a lot of work will be in the reverse-engineering of the drivers, and understanding the android-specific bits of said drivers.

this is why I believe this whole thing to be viable with the right tools and training; each of these steps is highly specialized and some of them are very slow, but each is also tractable with the right tools and support network.

whether those bits and pieces then get turned into Linux drivers or patched into some custom Android ROM, I have no opinions about that - the choice there is not relevant for whether the device can be liberated. that is also why I do not believe the architecture of Android itself to be a meaningful hurdle in this.

@joepie91 and then it involves a ton of additional Android work after all that. again, using Android does us no favors.

@joepie91 if the goal is to make things that work for everyone, we shouldn't be taking on expenses that we thus-far have been nowhere close to being able to afford

@joepie91 sorry, this was meant to be in the other branch where we questioned why Android

@ireneista whether we are collectively able to afford the expenses of dealing with android devices, is directly affected by whether we have reusable tools and an accessible on-ramp for new contributors. that's why I focus on those points. they are force amplifiers and we do not have them right now.

like, this is a revolutionary struggle, to put it bluntly. and like any revolutionary struggle, it involves learning both how to build new things, and how to subvert the tools of the enemy. what I am arguing for here is the latter; building up durable subversive capabilities.

@ireneista and to extend that not-quite-an-analogy further: the current situation is the equivalent of having a revolutionary movement led by maybe a hundred people max, where they are the only people who understand how the movement is structured, upon whom all of the weight rests, and without whom the movement would fall apart.

we all know that this is not sustainable and that's no different when it comes to phones.

@joepie91 that is the part we agree on.

@joepie91 we agree that it is a revolutionary struggle. we agree that communal infrastructure must be part of what we fight to build. we are disagreeing with you on strategy.

@joepie91 seriously, there is no reason to carry water for Google here. their shit is not that useful for our purposes.

@joepie91 the work you propose is a proper superset of the work we propose, and has no added benefit.

@enigmatico @joepie91 I can't even fit this one phone in my pockets. If I have any.

@sam so that's a "no" then.

can we then also all agree that the whole 'degoogle' thing is just a personal hobby project and not some kind of activist "for the good and freedom of the people" thing like it's usually framed as?

@sam also the "scarce people with the knowhow [...]" bit specifically pisses me off because maybe there'd be more of those if anyone in the scene ever actually bothered to document the processes properly and train folks!

@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech these resources exist? it assumes a deep knowledge of boot processes, kernel things, android etc but even though it’s scattered finding out how to do things with AOSP or LOS isn’t hard

@sam "it assumes a deep knowledge of several things and it's scattered" is just a different way to say that there's no proper documentation or training, because proper documentation and training have neither of those properties

@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech of course it assumes a deep knowledge of things, you can’t build a ROM if you don’t know how a bootloader works just like you can’t bake a cake if you don’t know how to read numbers from a scale

@sam it is fucking *wild* to compare "how a bootloader works" to "reading numbers from a scale", tbh. bootloaders are highly specialized knowledge, and also something that's entirely explainable.

so the conclusion doesn't change: there's no proper documentation or training.

@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech I think you’re highly overestimating the amount/type of work that a bunch of volunteers wish to take on, especially in an increasingly hostile environment (see: locked BLs, Google not publishing device trees for Pixels anymore)

@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech "explaining the whole damn tech tree" isn’t something I see happening

@sam and just like that, we are back to "these are nerd hobby projects, not serious activism or freedom fighting"

@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech and this is fine, you can port lineage to your recent expensive ish phone, and say "degoogling your phone is good, but manufacturers make this nigh on impossible, and you can’t solve systemic issues with technological solutions" without being a hypocrite imo

@sam it *is* fine for it to just be a nerd hobby project, I absolutely agree with that. and this whole thread wouldn't exist if that was the extent of it.

my problem is specifically that people constantly try to make it into more than that (the whole 'freedom fighting' framing), without doing the work that comes with it - it's stolen valor that does more harm than good to the cause

@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech @sam@shonk.sam.ax

There's barely any documentation for anything!!!! It's all scattered between old forums and telegrams and discords!!!!!!! I fucking hate it!!!!!!!!!!!! Make a goddamn wiki and code forge!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech multiple things can be true at the same time, good luck degoogling something from a manufacturer that doesn’t give a rats arse about the GPL for instance
and yes the people porting devices generally are generally motivated by them having such a device and wanting a (better) use for them

back when you could still unlock phones there definitely were people with money to blow but they blew it on flagships

@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech eOS evangelists and the people doing the porting tend to be different people

@sam "good luck degoogling something from a manufacturer that doesn’t give a rats arse about the GPL for instance"

yes, that's why you collectively build tools to deal with such cases more easily, which as far as I can tell nobody has really bothered to do

like, *of course* there's going to be fucking adversity when you're doing activism or resistance of some kind, that is my whole point with "not pretending it's fighting for freedom" because if you are *actually* fighting for freedom then you face that adversity and find a way around it, instead of going "welp too hard"

@joepie91 @sam I'm a bit out of date for the aforementioned reasons of only being able to tolerate installing a custom ROM 3-4 times a decade, but my most recent understanding was that many of the people producing custom ROMs or e.g. porting Lineage to new devices were kids, literal teenagers with near zero experience in software dev or documentation, just hacking to get it to work and doing the bare minimum to get it on XDA or into official Lineage. so that may have a lot to do with it.

@Elizafox see https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01M02HVCTJ0T6NKMTC37XTM153

I have been spending the last 15 years of my life doing a lot of hard work for many different kinds of activism, and so I don't have a lot of patience for "but it's hard!" and constantly dressing things in activist language (like eg. the degoogling and self-hosting crowds do all the time) but then suddenly going "we're all just volunteers here, you can't expect anything!" when someone points out that it's not actually serving the people who need it most

@Elizafox oh and by the way, I have repeatedly offered to various folks to source and buy devices for them, especially low-end ones more commonly used in poorer regions, and then the response is pretty much always the same: "well but the manufacturer doesn't provide kernel sources so I can't do anything with that"

which I'm sure is true, but is also not a thing that should matter if you really, *actually* collectively care about making this shit available to a broader public, because then you'd be developing your own tools for working with such cases, and so in the end it again comes down to "it's hard"

@flaki yep, absolutely. this has been part of my frustration actually - a lot of the degoogling crowd have been pretty much framing it as The Solution, and completely neglecting eg. the political and campaigning angles (which would likely be necessary to address the platform integrity issue)

@mertn good for you. you have missed the point of the post entirely.

@john just like everything else, their support list is primarily well-known brands, and it is a uselessly tiny list compared to how many different phones are in widespread use, which is the whole point I'm making here

@joepie91 @john Their support list, incomplete as it is, features a *lot* of cheap, old, and popular xiaomi devices, even my xiaomi mi 5 from 2016 is supported, as are other xiaomi phones of comparable vintage.

Yes, there's a lot of room for improvement, and working on that is a worthwhile endeavor, but you seem somewhat dismissive of those people who are already working to do exactly what you are clamoring for

@pinoaffe @john I'd be a lot less dismissive if the degoogle crowd as a whole were actually realistic in talking about the impact of what they're doing, and didn't reliably jump on the defensive while barely reading what's being said, as can be seen in the rest of the replies on this post (and basically every post about this everywhere around the web)

for the past 5-10 years, folks have been relentlessly going "just install whateverOS!" in response to people expressing their concerns about google's behaviour, and basically telling them to just buy a new phone, as if that's the full story, without ever recognizing that this is an extremely privileged and classist view that's useless to the people actually most affected by this shit. all the while dressing up the whole thing in FSF-esque "we are the bastion of freedom" language.

now it's 5-10 years later, things are about to explode, and there's fuck-all by way of tooling and training and organizing structures to make it even *possible* to support a wide array of devices, and yet the same degoogling and custom rom crowd is *yet again* talking about "degoogling" as if that's a trivial solution to google locking things down, while staunchly refusing to engage in any sort of political campaigning.

so I have run out of patience and I have zero fucks left to give about being nice here. people have been larping activism while roundly dismissing actual people's needs for too long and I am absolutely sick of the entitled attitude.

if these people do not actually want to put in the work of facing the difficult problems, as activism requires, then it is high time that they acknowledge that this is just a feel-good nerd hobby and that people need to look elsewhere for their liberation, instead of keeping up this facade of tech freedom

@pinoaffe @john I guess it boils down to this: if people insist on framing it as an activist endeavour, implicitly or explicitly, then I am going to hold them to activist standards

@joepie91 @john
re: the degoogle crowd: i guess I've just not encountered those posts/tendencies as much, but seeing some of the replies I understand your frustration. I guess I feel like there is very little overlap between the degoogle crowd and the folks actually working on open software on smartphones.

5-10 years ago i was somewhat active in the postmarketos and various custom rom communities, trying to get/create better support for my cast of cheap, crappy and half-broken smartphones. Just like back then, device support is awfully scarce, and maintaining support for the few compatible devices is sisyphean in and of itself. The folks I've interacted with in those (and other) communities are almost universally aware of the fact that the situation is awful. However, there has been *soooooooo* much improvement since then, especially in terms of documentation and tooling. Information that took me weeks of poking around in my phone to figure out is now just readily available, and people have put in a lot of work to make maintenance less of a burden, including and up to mainlining support for lots of peripherals. There is still so much work left to do, but a lot has been done and a lot is being done

@joepie91 @pinoaffe

Agree #grapheneos is TERRIBLE at communication but you might be too after death threats and lawsuit scares.

Lineageos is also good enough, though more work than the frankly unbelievable success of Graphene contributors building on Android Open Source

@joepie91 @pinoaffe I'd also like to humbly suggest that if doing a little work and critically considering the volunteer contributions to privacy from people with bad messaging disturbs you (and it can be MUCH work) the tech industry won't ever lose its control on a part of your life you obviously aren't pleased with consuming.

@john @pinoaffe you seem to be making an awful lot of assumptions about me here, all of which are wrong.

@joepie91 @pinoaffe please set me straight, I would like to understand

@john @pinoaffe that kind of conversation has to start with you actually engaging with the problem I am pointing out and genuinely trying to understand it and where I'm coming from - instead of searching for ways to disprove it.

adversarial debate makes time and energy demands of me that I am not willing (or able, for that matter) to pay.

a good starting point would be re-reading the original posts, particularly the 'landfill' bit, and working out for yourself why your initial reply is entirely off on the wrong path already.

@joepie91 @pinoaffe I did read and while I appreciate your concern about low-end models wasted, I don't attribute that to activism but the security model of graphene.

For postmarketos, architecture, hobbled components prevent some phones from working. I have a duet Chromebook that does.

LineageOS is on 100's of models and real but overstated attack vectors/security holes can be mostly mitigated, & save a lot of phones from the landfill.

It Is work though.

What messaging & tone bugs most?

@john @pinoaffe what I am trying to get across with my post is that the whole way that these custom roms are approached, basically assumes "just buy a compatible phone" as the default. even for something like lineageos, which I'll treat as the baseline here because it's the best case, this still remains true.

this makes it *practically* useless from a perspective of "resisting google's lockdown of android". the vast majority of people already have a phone that is not on the support list, and are going to be either not interested in or not able to replace it. it's not going to work for most people on an individual level, it's not going to exert any meaningful pressure on google at a societal level, and people in markets with a lot of local or 'off' brands (india, russia, much of africa, ...) are going to be even worse off because none of these are going to cater to them.

and this is not a device support problem, it's a *philosophy* problem. the philosophy in the android scene right now is that if you want to run a custom rom, you need to buy a compatible phone. that will *never* work for anyone but the biggest nerds, because that is not how most people buy devices. the correct philosophy for serious resistance would be "we should maximize our coverage across devices people actually use for *whatever* reason they use them, even if it's suboptimal".

which makes the whole custom rom thing basically just a nerds' plaything with no real relevance to society. which would be *fine* if that's how people treated it, like a nerd hobby. but they don't. instead, people routinely present this as a fight for freedom, as an alternative to google, as the way forward for open mobile devices, and whatever other lofty proclamations.

and that's the problem I have with this, because it takes the air out of the room for people who actually take this stuff seriously. that's not hypothetical, I've tried to get involved with this seriously in the past and drowned in all of the aforementioned bullshit and eventually gave up. you cannot make change in an environment where everyone insists that things are fine as they are, and refuses to acknowledge (let alone meet) the most basic needs people actually have.

and everything else derives from this. there's no comprehensive documentation, there's no training programs, there's no semi-automated project-independent tooling stacks for porting stuff, nothing. because nobody involved seems to want to recognize that "maximizing device coverage" should even be the main objective to begin with.

so I want people to choose. either they acknowledge that this is just a self-serving personal hobby, and stop pretending that it is more than that. *or* they decide that it is activism, and start taking the strategy and other people's actual needs seriously. but not both, framing it as activism when it invites praise but suddenly calling it a volunteer hobby when there's criticism on strategy.

and so every comment going "well this one supports hundreds of models" or "well you can buy a different one" *completely* misses the point by a mile because the exact number of supported devices never mattered and people don't buy new phones over mostly invisible policy updates.

and that is why I get ticked off by trying to find ways to disprove the criticism. there is no way that that line of argument can ever lead to any improvement in the situation.

@joepie91 @pinoaffe I'm not the best example of an average user: in my free time I give linux tutorials at my local library and help people install grapheneOS or other OS's & always recommend buying a used phone over a new one.

The messaging is crap... The benefits can be real but it takes work. I think we need more average users advocates in the space to squeeze note benefit for more people.

I just don't want people to throw the useful baby out with the badly messaged bathwater in this space.

@john @pinoaffe it's not a messaging issue. it's an attitude/culture issue.

like, I've brought up average user needs repeatedly in the past, and they consistently get dismissed out of hand. you cannot fix that by bringing in more advocates, that just burns out more people. it's the people with the shitty attitude who need to change.

@joepie91 @pinoaffe oh absolutely there are some assholes in every tech camp... Also neurodivergents and those totally unable to communicate...and some who have been damaged by their attempts to help as well.

Which is what I meant in my (last?) comment ...we really news people to push out the real assholes and find a role for real communicators.

The tech for these programs is solid. I've seen it work for normies. That also is very, very true.

We can do better-I've said as much to graphene

@joepie91 @john @pinoaffe

Okay, this point I agree with, joepie91.

Maybe I failed at reading comprehension, but I think this is a fundamentally different argument than the one you made in your post that opened the discussion.

@joepie91 @pinoaffe

Ok, that's a lot clearer than you have previously expressed it.

On the whole however I still disagree that the entire custom ROM segment of hobbyists are simply 'self serving'! That's just your personal disappointment talking, in my opinion.

You seem to ignore that lineageos does a solid job on ovrt 4+ MILLION devices, including chinese brands and 'walmart specials'.

However I still very much agree ROMs need to do a better job listening & communicating with the public.

@joepie91 @pinoaffe

For the the record I frequently look at ROM community and see an annoyingly high percentage of majority-demographics and wealthy privilege at play, as well as the aforementioned shitty/toxic communications (especially #grapheneos).

But if you want to make it better volunteer at a library like I do or create a communications focused tool to help those who need it navigate ROMs.

Due respect but ypu spent 1000s of words bitching, tearing down, how are you going to HELP?

@john @joepie91 @pinoaffe (Erm, possibly a minor point, but what are we talking about here? What's an ROM? (Obviously you don't mean ReadOnlyMemory) Isn't defining terms part of communicating? 😝 )

@quixote @joepie91 @pinoaffe ROMs for phones means the same as compiling your own linux desktop OS's for a specific hardware recipe (each phone has different drivers, hardware, etc).

It works because android's original flavor (android open source project) is free as in Linux.

Its only the proprietary apps that are well, proprietary :)

ROMs extend the life of phones corps choose to abandon

@john @quixote @joepie91 @pinoaffe i'm ok with the term ROM. It really meant read only memory in the old days. And now it means android operating system. But that's OK, because nobody talks about those small black bugs that stored the OS of my C64.

I get mad if people use "GPS" for anything geolocation related.

@john @joepie91 @pinoaffe Interesting. I've read about (brave!) people compiling linuxen for their phones but haven't seen that acronym.

What's it stand for? I'm guessing it's still 'read only memory' but in the context of a chip containing the OS?

@john @joepie91 people do activism "degoogle! be secure! use grapheneos! it's the solution!" and at the same time don't actually put in the work to make it so that grapheneos and the like can be a realistic solution for a significant portion of the population. When that is pointed out they get defensive and dismissive

That is what joepie seems to be miffed about, and I very much second that sentiment

@pinoaffe @john @joepie91 yeah, case in point the main reason I'm still on LineageOS - on a 7 year old phone which hasn't talked to US cell towers for 4 years since the 3G++ shutdown, so it's effectively a wifi-only handheld rather than a "phone" - and not on GrapheneOS is because my broke disabled marginalized ass can't afford $200 for a used Pixel that'll run Graphene.

@pinoaffe @john @joepie91 by the way, this might seem like a tangent but I don't think it is, the state of non-carrier VOIP calling on LineageOS is FUCKING ATROCIOUS. I gave up on it and got a hardware SIP phone with wifi 6.

edit: and I'm willing to bet it sucks on most other ROMs too, ever since SIP was ripped out of AOSP, and because every SIP softphone app I have ever tried on Linux also sucks, despite valiant attempts by some authors to make them not suck.

@john @joepie91 @pinoaffe [Edit: Sorry, I'm being needlessly aggressive here.] Running a bunch of command-line crap *every single time* there's a numbered OS update "is work, though" for *me*, a relatively sophisticated user comfortable with command lines. It is absolutely infeasible for your average smartphone user.

And having the right phone isn't work, it's a combination of money and luck.

@john @joepie91 @pinoaffe But if you really want to know about the messaging and tone, you can start by rewriting the LineageOS docs to not be insufferably condescending. Like they have a "don't see yours?" link on every model page, and it links to an FAQ. A normal person would assume it's a link to something one might theoretically *do* about it, but (while it's worded less arrogantly than I remember) it does boil down to "please don't ask."

@Linebyline @joepie91 @pinoaffe lol oh I specifically agreed and challenged them on their condescension... It may come from coping with being called liars, threatened with prison and death, or just being very talented jerks, I don't know.

At least they are making a serious attemot to make and share

The best I can do is community volunteering.

What are you constructively adding, besides a partly justified takedown of others?

@john @joepie91 @pinoaffe I'm not contributing anything. I just want to use my phone. And it's not Lineage's (or the others') fault that Google is making that so bloody difficult.

But it *is* their fault when they position themselves as saving Android users from Google, and then very much do not do that for anyone but tech-savvy hobbyists with disposable income. And it is their fault that when people *do* want to contribute, the response is "Figure it out yourself."

All of this is in the OP.

@john @joepie91 @pinoaffe

Like, this isn't unique to Lineage, Android forks, or phone OSes generally. It's a huge problem in FOSS, where on one hand people running these projects want to be taken seriously as real competitors to big corporate software, and on the other, their response to criticism is "fix it yourself."

I don't think the only options should be "kernel developer" or "slave to corporate interests" but maybe that's just me?

@Linebyline @joepie91 @pinoaffe dude... Complaining about tech geeks not being human resources or communications experts is fair but tired. I agree. So...now what?

Help them figure out a way to smooth off rough edges? Awesome!

Help them figure a way to get more, cheaper phones freed from corporate control?
Ditto awesome!

Help out in your neck of the woods?
Have fun!

Bitching on the internet they don't do a thing well enough?
Not helping.

@Linebyline @joepie91 @pinoaffe and as I said in the op....we can wince it is poorly done with rough edges, make it better with our own sweat equity, stick with corporate bs... Or frankly just keep memoaning there is no option.

I know which one I am picking.

I call out bad attitude but I also praise effort made freely available.

What are you going to do to help make things better now you have pointed out more people need better options?

@pinoaffe @joepie91 pinoaffe, agree with you there are a lot of used phones these projects put out that serve privacy AND budget/functionality needs.

Agree with you also that there's room to improve, but I respect the hell out of the talent,volunteer community spirit and creativity being fferee free.

Communication skills would be good for everyone to improve in the tech world of course lol especially to convince more Normie's to 'come on in, the water's fine!' :)

@joepie91 @john

I understand the frustration with that but that is entirely the responsibility of those brands unable to meet the security standards. Those standards aren't very demanding or exotic, the security of most brands is just very lackluster. GrapheneOS tries what they can and for that reason has always been open to partner with OEMs and help them meet those standards. Motorola has eventually shown interest in that but others haven't.

@tranquil_cassowary @john I was not talking about grapheneos and I am *explicitly* not interested in this line of argument as an excuse for the shit state of custom roms.

@joepie91 @john
That first part was unclear, you could have been talking about it based on the content of the message you replied to.

I understand the frustration but you seem to be venting it out on the custom OSes while they don't decide whether support is possible (unlockable bootloader) or whether support aligns with project purposes (device meeting the requirements needed to actually be able to support the features of the OS). In case of the former support isn't possible, in case of the latter support will ask a lot of resources because another version of the OS has to be made with certain features dropped. And if that OS version doesn't align with what the developers want to make then why on earth would they do that?

Most custom OSes are FOSS and free of charge. I understand you are disappointed with the state of things but I don't really understand what you expect of them.

@tranquil_cassowary @john I have gone into all of this extensively in all of the other reply threads.

@john @joepie91 Just, lol. You are missing the problem by a few orders of magnitude.

"Many cheap phones" - not in my experience. None of the phones in my price range ever have support (I check before buying!). There are entire lines of cheap phones that aren't even sold in the US - Samsung has A0 to A7, and in the US they start at A3.

"Cost a few hundred online" - one, a single hundred USD is already a lot for most of the world; two, online where? In countries where the Pixel isn't even sold officially, there isn't a huge market of used devices.

And particularly for used devices, you have to consider how long they will still be supported, critical for people on a budget. The one time I had a phone supported by LineageOS, it dropped support pretty quickly and then I was on outdated Android for years.

Unless you have experience with actual entry-level phones and crucially, outside the first world, don't go around claiming shit about "cheap phones". You can't even see cheap phones for sale.

@john @joepie91 Not getting into language support, documentation translation, regional variants, and other international issues (variants), of course.

It is easy to look at the hundreds of supported devices by LineageOS and sure, it is impressive. But how many are not? Are there _any_ Samsung A0 or even A1 device supported? What about the Galaxy M or F lines, even cheaper and sold exclusively in India? That for a major brand. (Other brands have less consistent lines and more variations so harder to generalize, but all the Motorollas and Xiaomis and TCLs I could buy were not supported)

It is simply dire for cheap devices, even if you are trying to buy a cheap device specifically for LineageOS. A bunch of models I can't really find don't help me.

And don't get me wrong, I know how hard it is and why it is hard (and it is mostly Google's fault). But people from the US and Europe online talk about the issue without even knowing what they don't know. Or sometimes not caring.

@eldaking @joepie91 all fair points. Also glad to hear you acknowledge the regulatory capture and corporate fuckery working hard to keep it that way...

@awooo see https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01M02HVCTJ0T6NKMTC37XTM153

@awooo and to add to that: when we're talking about "google is going to retroactively lock down existing devices", then "check before you buy" is completely useless because people *already* bought a phone, you're years too late with that

@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech @awooo@floofy.tech

Also, I did check before I bought. I got a Pixel 6a expecting I might want to unlock it at some point. I bought it straight from Google because I heard that buying from a carrier can prevent you from unlocking it.

Shortly after I bought my phone, my family decided to switch to Verizon for cell phone service. I can't afford my own plan so I had no choice but to go along with them.

It turns out having a Verizon plan, even if you didn't get your phone from Verizon, prevents you from enabling OEM unlocking.

And I still get GrapheneOS reply guys telling me "you should haven't researched your phone before getting it," or "just buy one of these new phones that allows OEM unlocking."

@2something @awooo @joepie91

It turns out having a Verizon plan, even if you didn’t get your phone from Verizon, prevents you from enabling OEM unlocking.

what the fuck??????

@lily@java.duke.social @awooo@floofy.tech @Rairii@labyrinth.zone @joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech

Behold

@2something @lily @Rairii @joepie91 would taking out the sim card not work? or does the phone forever become bound to verizon or something

@awooo@floofy.tech @lily@java.duke.social @Rairii@labyrinth.zone @joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech

Honestly I don't know. I don't have good fine motor skills and I don't trust myself to remove the SIM card myself. But I want to try it at some point even if I need someone else to remove it for me.

@2something@transfem.social @awooo@floofy.tech @lily@java.duke.social @Rairii@labyrinth.zone @joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech does this apply to verizon mvnos? specifically us mobile if that matters.

@joepie91 Did not see that reply, but to that I'd say, it's also hard to work on devices you don't have unless you specifically go out to buy them, and not many people have both the time and money available to do that, so the result of that is going to be that a couple popular devices that happen to have devs using them will be supported.

I think it's a bit unrealistic to expect that more work from the community will solve this without a bigger systemic solution, because the device count is in the tens (hundreds) of thousands.

@awooo see https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01M02KSZHY7RHMT8T9QTW74A9N

I would suggest maybe reading through the thread further before opining

@joepie91 I have read it, I think you're making the wrong call here. The people who put in hard work to get any devices out there supported are not at fault for the lack of support, nor are people who support degoogling, they don't have the resources to support most devices out there, period.

You would be much better directing your anger at the vendors who do not mainline their devices and do not standardize their boot infrastructure, and the politicians who are not regulating this.

@awooo so you fucking *organize* those resources. that is how activism works.

@joepie91 Are you suggesting that people are not trying? They very much are, but it's insufficient considering the scale of the problem.

Just for reference, it can take several years of work for a group of volunteers to truly liberate one family of devices. It's very specialized work, including kernel level stuff, which takes years to learn even once someone already is a developer in other fields.

A lot of people have full-time jobs and they need to pay rent, they don't have that much time on their hands if they want to keep having a social life at all after work.

@awooo I am aware of all of these things. that is why when you organize, you build community structures and tools to reduce that cost and inaccessibility, to make it easier for others to reproduce the work. you train them, you build automation for (parts of) the difficult work, you set up mutual support structures that are open for new people to join.

none of that is shaped like "working on a single device family with a group of volunteers for years". that is an individualist approach and it doesn't scale exactly *because* it isn't organizing

@joepie91 Yes, of course doing that helps, but you still underestimate the scale of things.

There is no way in hell volunteer effort can outpace the amount of consumerism-driven crap being pumped out on the market every single damn year.

No matter how many devices you manage to support, next year there will be a bunch more released with zero regard for sustainability and user freedom, and as always, zero technical documentation, meaning someone with the right skills has to go out there and do the work. Pooling resources and building infrastructure makes that easier, but still not cheap, it doesn't put a dent in the mountain of crap.

@awooo I can assure you that I am not underestimating the scale. but if you're reasoning about this as "one new device == one entirely from-scratch process", then you are definitely not understanding what I am talking about.

the device industry reuses components and software just like everyone else. that's precisely the sort of thing you take advantage of through a combination of automation and collective documentation, neither of which are happening.

I tire of these "here are all the reasons it cannot be done" arguments. what I want to see is "hmm, how can we make this possible, which angles would help us in that?"

@joepie91

the device industry reuses components and software just like everyone else. that's precisely the sort of thing you take advantage of

Yes, people already know that, and almost 90% of the components (various libraries, standard linux utils, etc) are already known, their plain name are right in the name (like /bin/sh or /usr/lib/libbz2.so). Those are not a concern and easy to replace.

The struggle is in the 10 last %, which very often relates to features users might find useful to have (phone calls, camera, sound, network connectivity) (/s).

I tire of these "here are all the reasons it cannot be done" arguments.

No matter what, the harsh reality is that it represents a colossal amount of work, which even huge amounts of money could hardly solve (I'm talking in the hundred of millions a year).

I could even risk to say that a proper support of all these devices is literally impossible without help from the all the manufacturers involved (from the smartphone ones to the component ones).

You might understand that unpaid volunteers might not want to dedicate 2+ years of their free time just to support an already 6+ yo device they don't own and where only three users complain about in an issue tracker.

@SamantazFox "components" means "hardware components", not linux libraries

also, see https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01M031X6YGAX4CJC807H4D05C1

and if it takes "2+ years" to support a single device then you are doing something very wrong in your approach, see all the things I've already mentioned upthread

@joepie91 Even if you only had 10 different CPUs, with each 4 different GPUs and 5 different modems, that's already 200 different variants for the main SoC.

And that's already under-estimated for a single SoC product family.

If you're lucky, they all have the same registers, firmware version and addressing. If not, you effectively have 50, 100 or more distinct SoCs which share little more than a different range of ARM SoCs.

and if it takes "2+ years" to support a single device then you are doing something very wrong in your approach

Imagine that a dev overcame all the bootloader, hypervisor and OS layers to get root access. Imagine they also managed to extract and understand what needed to be patched, in all software components of the device, except for one.

Now that last component, says the camera app, is so integrated that one can't simply patch the problematic bits, and needs to rewrite it from scratch.

Determining what value to write in which register to activate stabilization or color correction is far from an easy task.

One can always brute force it, with the risk of writing the wrong thing to the wrong place and trashing their sensor. They could buy a dozen sensors, but then there might be HW revisions, or encryption preventing the sensor from being replaced (hi Apple), or...

The list goes on. Without access to the OEM documentation, each new IC, each new SoC is a black box. Sometimes you're lucky, and it share an existing Linux driver from a different device, and sometimes it's a brand new thing.

@joepie91 And even when sharing knowledge, you have no guarantee that the previous person properly understood the intricate bits of that 10 MiB binary blob. Or maybe they had a slightly different model number than your and forgot to specify it.

You try their code, and it bricks yours device. Game over, start again.

@SamantazFox I am well aware of all of this, and none of it invalidates the points I have been making here

@awooo@floofy.tech @joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech

I think there was a project started by the FSF to actually work on doing this - researching parts to reverse engineer firmware for to port Linux to, that is.

@liquidparasyte @awooo I'd be interested if you have a link for this! I hadn't heard of it

@awooo@floofy.tech @joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech

Found it! LibrePhone project

https://librephone.fsf.org/

Like all FSF projects, the timescale on this one will be …long term, probably. But it's still the right direction, I think.

@liquidparasyte @awooo thanks, I'm going to have a look into that!

and yeah, I'm honestly not too concerned about the immediate timescale, the main thing that matters to me is whether they recognize the systemic nature of the issue, and work on the tools to do the job rather than just the job itself, so that it'll survive beyond a generation of phones 🙂️

@GroupNebula563 that's an assessment I don't feel qualified to judge on definitively; I could see arguments the other way as well (eg. if google can push updates then you'll be playing cat-and-mouse forever like with windows), and I don't know enough about *exactly* where google's hooks are in the system to determine whether it should be one, the other, or both

@joepie91 i do know that:
1. the base android kernel is open-source, and
2. it's basically just "sparkling linux", to quote the old champagne meme :P

@GroupNebula563 in theory yes; but eg. you often don't get root access on devices, and there are widely-publicized issues with "uninstallable vendor apps" so there does seem to be more to it in terms of how much control you can actually exert over the system

@joepie91 re: the previous reply: that would make it somewhat easier to figure out how to do live work on an installed system like that, and I believe (though please do correct me if i'm wrong) that a lot of google's stuff is installed the same way as standard apps/system services (i.e., at a relatively high level). it would certainly be a fair bit of work and an upfront investment, but i think the results would ultimately pay off more than the current method :P

@sberson okay but "the phones you can buy on ebay" are not "the phones that people have"

@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech

So get porting then - don't ask others to do what you aren't actively doing yourself. Or if you are like me and don't really have the coding skills for this - then do what I do, and try to help folks linking them to resources or guide them to being able to actually start to use alternatives for their daily drivers (e.g. I am up on the UBports Telegram groups often for this). But defeatist shooting down what others have already started towards providing options in this does not help at all.

@sberson "patches welcome" is a toxic fucking attitude when it comes to social issues, and a very good way to systemically exclude marginalized folks.
 
so: no.

@joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech

So then we could help form coops for our areas that acquires old phones that can be flashed with degoogled options, and hand them out to the marginalized. That's a way better use of time than just posting on the Fediverse as far as trying to effect a tiny bit of positive change on this.

@joepie91

So: 'don't harsh my bitching session' combined with using "marginalized folks" as meat shields. Delightful.

@sberson

@Violet I wonder how much of a factor that really is, honestly - I've repeatedly offered to folks to source phones for them to work on porting to, for free, and I can count on none fingers the amount of times I was seriously taken up on that offer

@joepie91 @Violet that's crazy. Many people have a stack of decent enough phones.

And If you are offering a phone to someone and they decline your help customizing...well...

people afraid of tech and inconvenience I guess.

@troed no.

@xz you could try, idk, reading any of the conversations in the thread

@joepie91 I did read them all. Please consider redirecting that anger at the system not the symptoms

@xz I'm guessing you missed the part where this inhibits that

@joepie91 Yeah, I guess I must have overlooked the part where you mentioned how international competition among nations and capitalism force companies to lock down devices.

@xz if you cannot perceive or understand anything that doesn't already align with your personal beliefs, don't make that my problem thanks

@Grzesiek11 @joepie91 The point wasn't just the price of the new phone, although it's a lot, but that you have to buy one, and turn your old phone into e-waste. 250€ is still a lot of money for someone that doesn't have any.

@HollieK72 @joepie91 Okay then, I would not understand this from the original post.
I mean, I would sell the phone, though that makes it a game of hot potato in a way, you're selling something defective, and the only reason you can sell it is because most people are not aware Google is evil.
Also, you need to be aware a lot of phones simply cannot be unlocked: Huawei, (almost) anything with a Unisoc CPU, a lot of other cheap brands, Samsung (if updated to certain firmware).

@HollieK72 @joepie91 I also don't consider this "making the phone into e-waste", I consider it that the phone always has been e-waste, the blame is on the manufacturer for locking it down, not me. After all, they could've just shipped it with LOS.
I agree 250€ is a lot, which is why I recommended OnePlus as well, a lot of these have good support and are more around 60€-120€ if you look for the older models.