[letstrynvm]

Librem seems to have the correct way forward, reject the big mess of Android and catch up to it with completely Open pieces.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

They're making good progress and I can't wait to be able to update my handheld device with mainline pieces for as long as anyone who still uses one cares to update it. Currently my Samsung Android device is at Dec 2018 patchlevel and nothing I can do about it.

[strcat]

> with completely Open pieces

AOSP is completely open source. Hardware and firmware is a much different story, but that applies to the device you're promoting just as much...

> They're making good progress and I can't wait to be able to update my handheld device with mainline pieces for as long as anyone who still uses one cares to update it. Currently my Samsung Android device is at Dec 2018 patchlevel and nothing I can do about it.

What's the relevance?

It's also quite important to note that the Android patch level includes firmware. Purism doesn'tship firmware updates in PureOS as part of it being 'pure', so you would be stuck with the equivalent of an ancient patch level at least with the stock OS. You're also no less dependent on the companies releasing firmware updates.

You're also bringing up hardware as an alternative to an OS that would run on the hardware that you're talking about. It's hard to understand the point. The Librem 5 will be a hardware target for GrapheneOS to consider. It will be missing many of the core hardware security and robustness features, so it couldn't be a tier 1 target, but it could still be unofficially or even officially supported.

If it doesn't depend on any out-of-tree kernel drivers, that will apply to Android and GrapheneOS too. I'm not sure why you're bringing it up as something distinct.

[cyphar]

> AOSP is completely open source.

This is only true in the most technical way possible. Yes, AOSP is open source -- but none of the standard applications on any stock version of Android use AOSP anymore. The calendar and other applications are all proprietary. The AOSP versions feel like they stopped being developed in 2010 -- which coincidentally is when Google started developing proprietary replacements.

I use LineageOS (and have for a while), which is mostly AOSP, and the applications from AOSP today feel older than the ones I used on Google's Android ~5 years ago. As a simple example, Google's Calendar application can create very complicated recurring events while the AOSP one is much dumber.

> Hardware and firmware is a much different story, but that applies to the device you're promoting just as much...

The Librem 5 hardware was specifically chosen so that it contains no firmware blobs and all the firmware is free software and upstream in Linux. There is a caveat for the baseband, but that's because it's not legal in most countries to sell or use baseband hardware that is free software (unless the user is licensed and even then it's non-trivial).

[Tepix]

OK, so with AOSP we have a good base to build upon. Why NOT use AOSP to create new FLOSS standard applications? It's certainly less work than having to start from scratch. Besides, there are already some really good free open source Android apps in the F-Droid app store

[cyphar]

LineageOS already exists -- if you want an updated AOSP, use that. I'm not sure why folks seem to think that all free software phone projects must necessarily just reinvent the Android ROM.

Android itself has a wide variety of issues which might be solved (or at least solutions might explored) by creating projects that go outside of the mold of Android ROMs.

[nextos]

> AOSP is open source -- but none of the standard applications on any stock version of Android use AOSP anymore.

I want a real Linux in a phone as much as anyone. In fact, I have stuck to the Maemo N770-N9 saga as much as I could.

But I am also realistic. Developing a new secure Linux distribution for phones and, most importantly, a healthy ecosystem with useful applications will take a lot of time and effort.

In the meanwhile, as discussed in other threads here, using AOSP on a Pixel (or even better, GrapheneOS) is a really good solution. It's remarkable how few people use it in comparison to the benefits it brings into the table, and given it's quite easy to migrate to it with the appropriate hardware (hopefully device-independent ROMs make this less restrictive).

If standard applications in AOSP are lagging behind, then it'd be probably worthy to spin off an effort to replicate all proprietary functionality. An equivalent to MicroG.

That said, I've never missed anything major. For me, Firefox/Chromium, K-9, Conversations/Signal, OsmAnd and Termux provide a great userland experience.

[wuschel]

> There is a caveat for the baseband, but that's because it's not legal in most countries to sell or use baseband hardware that is free software (unless the user is licensed and even then it's non-trivial).

Interesting, I did not know that. What are the reasons for this? Military application? Are these laws subject to change?

I always thought that there is no way to separate the CPU from the baseband/communications PU.

[cyphar]

It's my understanding that the issue is one of FCC certification and licensing -- the FCC won't approve something which can be easily modified to transmit on non-free frequencies (tools which can usually are sold to hamradio license holders, which should know better and know how much trouble they can get into).

[strcat]

>This is only true in the most technical way possible. Yes, AOSP is open source -- but none of the standard applications on any stock version of Android use AOSP anymore. The calendar and other applications are all proprietary. The AOSP versions feel like they stopped being developed in 2010 -- which coincidentally is when Google started developing proprietary replacements.

AOSP sample applications like Calendar are exactly that: samples. I'm not sure why those are at all relevant. There's a very healthy and active open source app ecosystem, along with many other apps that work on AOSP. Those AOSP apps are included as samples, and they're being removed from the project as at this point there's no real need to have these samples.

It's also not true what you claim about the stock applications shipped on a phone like a Pixel. Apps like Dialer, Contacts, DeskClock, etc. are still actively developed and maintained in AOSP with the Google variants being extended versions of those apps. It's true that some apps like the keyboard forked away from the AOSP version, but it doesn't make AOSP any less viable of a basis for an OS. It's not a bad thing for AOSP to not ship a bunch of user-facing apps when there are a bunch of good alternatives outside of it. Apps do better without a release cycle tied to the slower pace of the OS releases.

> The Librem 5 hardware was specifically chosen so that it contains no firmware blobs and all the firmware is free software and upstream in Linux. There is a caveat for the baseband, but that's because it's not legal in most countries to sell or use baseband hardware that is free software (unless the user is licensed and even then it's non-trivial).

This is completely untrue and absolutely a false claim. The SoC is entirely proprietary with proprietary hardware, firmware and microcode along with the other components like Wi-Fi, the baseband, etc. being the same. The cellular baseband is not an exception. It applies to all of the hardware components in general. Librem 5 is not open hardware and does not have open firmware or microcode. It's simply untrue, and you're falsely representing it. I can see why you would be under that misunderstanding based on their incredibly misleading marketing but they never actually claim what you are claiming.

Not providing firmware updates for these things is a security disaster. The firmware that's upstream in Linux is rarely open source. It's a subset of the necessary firmware for most devices and is still proprietary. Projects like linux-libre / PureOS do not ship these upstream Linux firmware updates. They strip all of this out of the kernel. They also don't provide all the additional firmware updates beyond what is upstream.

The hardware and firmware is just as proprietary. The boot chain has open source components near the end before the OS (coreboot), just as many mainstream devices do (https://source.codeaurora.org/quic/la/abl/tianocore/edk2).

There's a huge difference between choosing hardware that has built-in firmware and can work without the OS supplying it each boot and hardware with open firmware... what they are doing is shipping a device that can work without the OS providing firmware updates, since they don't do that to keep it 'pure' of proprietary code. The firmware is still present and running, except it's out-of-date and vulnerable to many patched security vulnerabilities. You're completely misrepresenting the reality and falsely portraying it as having open hardware and firmware when it absolutely does not.

https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1129124275464441856

What you claim about not being allowed to have open cellular baseband firmware is also nonsense. It's also not particularly different from how Wi-Fi works. Wi-Fi firmware is a comparable secondary OS, and the same applies to a lot of other components. These hardware and firmware components on the Librem 5 are not any more open. What you're doing is spreading misinformation and false claims to promote it as something that it's not.

[yegortimoshenko]

Librem 5 isn't going to be particularly security-focused: no attestation, no trusted boot, most userspace programs are written in memory unsafe languages like C, with no extra effort memory corruption mitigations. Also, Flatpak offers a permission system that's very limited compared to Android.

[pjmlp]

While with each Android interaction, Google locks down the amount of C and C++ code that gets exposed to outside world.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/05/queue-hard...

As such I have a very hard time believing that Librem with be as secure as modern Android.

[mbrumlow]

There is security, and then there is freedom. You can have the most secure system in the world -- but if there are state sponsored, or company back back doors it means nothing.

In FOSS initiatives spent ages building fee and and open software, combating proprietary systems and software that they had no control over.

All that would be loss just to give it up now that we have moved from PCs to phones....

I for one want control over all the software I run on hardware I own. I am not sure why we are so willing to give that control up simply because the platform changed.

[KirinDave]

> There is security, and then there is freedom. You can have the most secure system in the world -- but if there are state sponsored, or company back back doors it means nothing.

Okay, so you're saying: "If a backdoor is present than your security prioritization doesn't matter, the result is bad." I understand, but:

1. If there is a back door in open source code that goes unnoticed (and it certainly does) because of persistent but bad practices in the open source community (e.g., a stubborn refusal to stop using C-like memory management semantics and primitives when dealing with untrusted inputs), then why don't said accidentaly backdoors invalidate the open source work?

2. Does "control" actually matter in the context of AOSP? Strictly speaking, you have essentially everything you need up utill you hit the hardware drivers. You can easily rewrite that to your hearts content.

3. Given Librem's recently move into commodity-based social products (and the poop-from-great-height attitude they initially adopted), are you genuinely sure that they're actually trustworthy actors? If they're coerced, how will yu attest that they never injected a deeply subtle backdoor on millions of lines of code which you'd like to be unique and less scrutinized?

I can't really work out why you feel the way you do, so I ask these questions.

[soraminazuki]

> persistent but bad practices in the open source community (e.g., a stubborn refusal to stop using C-like memory management semantics and primitives when dealing with untrusted inputs)

This applies to the entire industry. It's not something specific to the open source community. It's also extreme to call the use of C as "bad practice," as any language has its own strengths and weaknesses.

[pjmlp]

Not the entire industry, as many companies have thankfully moved on from plain old C, or at very least reduced its use quite considerably.

BSD/Linux derived FOSS is still the C stronghold.

The Morris worm was in 1988, since then C has collected enough CVEs due to memory corruption issues to consider its use bad practice.

Something that even Apple, Google and Microsoft security reports now advise against, and with Google actively engaging into taming C's usage in Linux kernel.

[dahfizz]

Why do you assume that OSS has more bugs than proprietary software? I would probably argue the opposite.

With OSS you get more people working on a project that actually care. A proprietary business project prioritizes making money over actually creating a good product everyone loves.

You're right that this is not a perfect solution. All software has bugs and all software may have malicious back doors. I just find it much easier to trust the development that happens in the open with community involvement than the development that happens in secret where I have absolutely no way see what's going on.

If you had an inkling that someone was trying to poison you, would you rather eat the food you watched be prepared or the food that was prepared in secret? Both dishes might be poisoned, but it's reasonable to prefer the one you were able to examine.

[KirinDave]

> Why do you assume that OSS has more bugs than proprietary software? I would probably argue the opposite

I don't. But nor do I assume it has less. My point, as restated elsewhere, is that from a user's point of view Openness of Source is more about protecting against negligence.

[andrenth]

I feel google is really turning into Microsoft. These are the same anti open source talking points / FUD you’d see in the early 2000s.

[KirinDave]

Who exactly is talking about anti-openness here? We're talking about which open source piece of code to reuse. Someone gave a bad argument against one company's offering.

Microsoft of the 90s, which no one emulates these days and it's a wrongheaded comparison anyways, would have said that all the open options are bad to begin with.

If you meant to say "anti-free software" then maybe we could have a conversation, but that's hardly the problem Microsoft faced in the 90s and 2ks.

Seriously, what does your post mean? Could you maybe be specific? And while we're at it, what's your connection if any with the company that sells Purism phones.

[supportlocal4h]

Bad software is bad whether it's open or not. But historically, closed software has more lock-in. If a particular open lib or component is bad, it can often be fixed by somebody who didn't create it. Or, for those who don't want to touch the scary hairball, it can often be replaced by a completely new hairball written from scratch by a completely different party. Even if there's nothing broken with the original, open software is friendlier to alternatives. It might take a bit of work, but you can replace one open part with another just because it's shinier or smaller or faster or not Oracle or whatever.

I don't trust all open source software, but I trust it by default more than I trust closed software. And I know that if something really bad gets exposed the odds of a solid fix are better in open source. I get to see the warts of OSS. There's public criticism over small details on a lot of important projects. That doesn't happen for closed stuff. Sure, a vendor may have four of the brightest devs in that field and they might hash it all out behind closed doors. The open alternative usually has another four of the top 12 minds in that field along with four pretty competent others and they have a better process for hashing it out.

Then there's that other guy who's not in the top 12 who goes it alone and comes up with something spectacular. So three of the four from the other open project jump on board because they can. And since this new project tries very hard to be backwards compatible, it just snaps in as an overnight replacement. That's part of the awesomeness of OSS.

[KirinDave]

It's good then that both options I discussed were open source.

[opencl]

What freedom does PureOS offer that AOSP without Google services lacks?

[groovybits]

I believe there is a general lack of awareness of what AOSP is without Google services and add-ons on top of it.

In some facets, AOSP is not a complete and working OS as is. In particular, I have personally had many issues with GPS location for the past fews years. Out-of-the-box, GPS simply does not work without additional non-free software to help it out. Additionally, many (that is, 95%) of all Android apps that you would find on the Google Play store do not function properly without Google services (which AOSP does not have). Applications that are built to run on stock AOSP are not the 'Snapchats' or 'Instagrams' of the world. They are typically FOSS projects that are built out of passion, but recieve little funding or corporate support.

These shortcomings often carry over to third-party ROMs, such as Lineage.

So in my experience, as someone who used to flash a new Android ROM every week, it is not about freedom - its about basic functionality. One could also argue that, since the world operates on all kinds of propietary platforms that aren't available on stock AOSP, so do we also lack the freedom to use AOSP as our daily driver - simply because it often does not interface properly with these propietary platforms.

Edits: grammer and clarifications

[KirinDave]

In general, until we have open source handset hardware to work with, all fine-tuned sensors and clock hardware support will be bad. This is a problem Linux had for a long time, and it took a ton of effort to partially solve the problem. It seems a bit unfair to blame AOSP for not having drivers for specific hardware, that's not it's function.

The big contribution of Purism phones is that more open hardware. After that, the real question we should ask is, "What software platform can offer us the greatest values in the multi-dimensional optimization problem we face?"

It's true though that you wouldn't just flash AOSP. But it's also true that dismissing Graphene BECAUSE it is based on AOSP is unfair.

[opencl]

PureOS seems to have these exact same problems except way worse.

Yes, a significant fraction of Android apps do not work on AOSP without Play Services. And 100% of Android apps do not work on PureOS. F-Droid alone has ~1800 apps. I do not see PureOS or PostmarketOS catching up to that level anytime soon.

FOSS projects that are built out of passion, but recieve little funding or corporate support? Exact same situation on PureOS.

Are the Snapchats and Instagrams of the world going to port their apps over to this entirely new platform when they can't even be bothered to make versions of their Android apps that work without Google's services?

[strcat]

> I believe there is a general lack of awareness of what AOSP is without Google services and add-ons on top of it.

That lack of awareness seems to be your own.

> In particular, I have personally had many issues with GPS location for the past fews years. Out-of-the-box, GPS simply does not work without additional non-free software to help it out.

GPS doesn't require Play Services, etc. Play Services provides supplementary network-based location services for providing a coarse, inaccurate location estimate without waiting for a while for a GPS lock. The infrastructure for this is open source and part of AOSP. It has generic, provider-agnostic support for services like supplementary location providers, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, geocoding, etc. Play Services is what provides these on phones with Google Play, but there are alternative implementations used by Amazon and in China.

> Applications that are built to run on stock AOSP are not the 'Snapchats' or 'Instagrams' of the world.

Yet apps like WhatsApp, Facebook's apps, Microsoft's apps, etc. do work without Play Services... despite what you claim. A lot of these mainstream apps do work fine, and there's a large ecosystem of open source apps that are mostly designed to run without Play Services. Providing the Play Services APIs with an alternate implementation and is also certainly possible, although I would prefer a different approach than microG.

How is any of this resolved by moving to a completely different OS with far less privacy and security, none of these mainstream applications you talk about and barely any open source application ecosystem by comparison? I don't get it.

[nextos]

Have you tried a pure AOSP + F-Droid on Nexus/Pixel or Xperia? It's quite good. The only major drawback are closed drivers. But the userland is nice, open and polished.

My worry with Librem and all those initiatives is that rebuilding an ecosystem like F-Droid takes a lot of effort and time.

[andrepd]

How does microg help with that?

[pjmlp]

I for one cannot attest how many backdoors this Ubuntu installation might have, and I doubt everyone has the knowledge to validate their complete FOSS stack.

[realusername]

> As such I have a very hard time believing that Librem with be as secure as modern Android.

Android isn't secure, it's limited, that's the whole problem here. Any security you can't control isn't a security feature but just a limitation. It's "secure" because you can't do anything interesting with it.

[pjmlp]

Using Android with reluntance, since my favourite OSes were Symbian and Windows Phone, additionally I dislike Android J++ and the NDK is relatively constrained.

Still, I can do plenty of interesting things with my Android gadgets.

[letstrynvm]

I guess that's because they know that Chain-of-trust only gets you so far.

Eventually you're running something big with bug after bug found every month and and an attack surface that includes the local filesystem and the network. At that point the buzzwords make no difference.

[rst]

Chain of trust won't reduce the attack surface, but adopting memory corruption mitigations and replacing C code with something with stronger memory-protection guarantees would -- and while some kinds of memory protection can be bolted on later with minimal disruption, minimizing C is best done from the start.

[letstrynvm]

That sounds reasonable, but here we are with Android's endless security disaster and all their apps written in not-Java from the beginning.

The most cancerous aspects of Android are by design, that you cannot control network exfiltration from apps, you cannot update or modify the OS pieces at will, and the apps are monetizing everything you do and everything they can find against you. Librem will answer these.

[strcat]

> that you cannot control network exfiltration from apps

GrapheneOS has a Network permission toggle, which is one of the features already restored from the past work on the project. There are many other privacy and security features that still need to be ported to the latest release, although a lot of them have become standard features especially in Android Q. https://gist.github.com/thestinger/e4bb344dcc545d2ee00dcc22f... is an overview of the Android Q privacy improvements(not security improvements, just privacy) in the context of GrapheneOS. To conserve development resources, the past features that are becoming standard aren't going to be ported over rather than just waiting for the standard implementations being released around August. Some of them will need to be adjusted to make them a bit more aggressive when it comes to apps targeting the legacy API level, but that's a lot less work than maintaining downstream implementations of all of this.

> you cannot update or modify the OS pieces at will

Having a well-defined base OS with verified boot and proper atomic updates with automatic rollback on failure is a strength, not a weakness. It's the same update system (update_engine) as ChromeOS. The update system is not the problem with the broader Android ecosystem with lack of updates to vendor forks. The migration towards everything being apk components that can be separated updated rather than moving more towards the ChromeOS design is a negative thing in terms of GrapheneOS and it's one of the things that has to be changed downstream to improve verified boot.

> Librem will answer these.

That's nonsense. First of all, that's hardware, and also moving to a far less secure software stack with non-existent privacy and security, an inferior update system and no verified boot is not a solution to these problems. The solution to privacy and security problems is not completely throwing away privacy and security...

[bubblethink]

>The migration towards everything being apk components that can be separated updated rather than moving more towards the ChromeOS design is a negative thing in terms of GrapheneOS

Doesn't stuff like fs-verity help with stuff like this instead of just a block based RO partition that can be verified ? Overall, for the android ecosystem, it seems like a net gain if google moves more and more stuff out of band away from OEMs as OEMs are not incentivized to do anything other than sell devices. That is, as long as everything is still pushed to AOSP.

[eeZah7Ux]

> not security improvements, just privacy

Privacy is security!

[pjmlp]

Large majority of Android security exploits are in C and C++ written drivers, hence why with each release the amount of freedom with native code gets further locked down.

Android Q has another round of such measures.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/05/queue-hard...

[mpol]

Those may be security exploits, but the real malware is what gets installed through Google Play.

[yegortimoshenko]

Chain of trust does protect you from evil maid attacks. And yes, there can be bugs in application layer, but at least half of all CVEs are memory corruption bugs.

These practices do offer a massive reduction in attack surface. You seem to argue it doesn't matter since it doesn't eliminate attack surface completely.

[letstrynvm]

No, chain-of-trust only has one trick... it can check that what you're about to run is unaltered from what was signed to some degree of probability.

If that is the - shipped and validly signed - bugridden nightmare-fuel like the propreitary Qualcomm 802.11 stack or proprietary multimedia bits that are a rich and continuous source of vulnerabilities (take a look through the last months here https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2019-06-01 ) all the buzzwords did was ensure the vulnerable version is running so it can be exploited. The evil maid can get in that way.

Librem's security model is that of a Linux box, signed update packages... it's not a panacea against hacks but nor are the buzzwords you mentioned. At least they're trying to eliminate the really dangerous proprietary pieces that constantly provide new vulns.

[pjmlp]

You mean the one that had 68% of CVE exploits reported in 2018 due to memory corruption errors?

Source, the Kernel Self Preservation Google's talk at the Linux Kernel Summit 2018.

[sanxiyn]

Upstream Linux kernel security is hopeless at this point. You can't expect it to secure anything.

[strcat]

> No, chain-of-trust only has one trick... it can check that what you're about to run is unaltered from what was signed to some degree of probability.

This is only one of many privacy and security regressions from moving to a far less secure software stack without anything close to the same level of hardening or work on privacy / security.

> If that is the - shipped and validly signed - bugridden nightmare-fuel like the propreitary Qualcomm 802.11 stack or proprietary multimedia bits that are a rich and continuous source of vulnerabilities (take a look through the last months here https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2019-06-01 ) all the buzzwords did was ensure the vulnerable version is running so it can be exploited. The evil maid can get in that way.

Counting CVEs is not a way to judge security. Qualcomm's SoC hardware, firmware and driver security is the leader among the available options. The huge amount of both internal and external public security research targeting it is a strength rather than a weakness. The lack of attention given to other assorted drivers is not a strength of those drivers but rather reflects their obscurity and lack of hardening / auditing.

It's also not the norm in the Linux world to assign a CVE for a security vulnerability when it's fixed. The norm is to fix them silently without trying to obtain a CVE. It's completely bogus to judge security based on counting CVEs for many reasons. Not having public lists of the fixed vulnerabilities with CVEs assigned doesn't mean there aren't a bunch of vulnerabilities being fixed, and it's even worse if the vulnerabilities aren't being found and fixed.

Every x86 and ARM device is proprietary and has a massive amount of complex proprietary hardware, firmware and microcode. There is no escaping that for these architectures. The Librem 5 is not an open hardware device and has a proprietary SoC, proprietary Wi-Fi, etc. all with their own proprietary firmware and in some cases entire operating systems (Wi-Fi / Bluetooth, cellular, etc.). The distinction of an OS like PureOS is that they don't ship updates to this firmware but rather leave it vulnerable to all the fixed security issues, because they won't redistribute the proprietary firmware updates. The firmware is still present, but the OS is 'free'. Either way, that firmware is running, and with a bunch of known vulnerabilities if you don't update it.

Proprietary hardware and software is also not inherently less private or secure than open source software. These are differences in development model, not privacy or security. You're very mistaken if you think open source software eliminates backdoors / vulnerabilities or even reduces them. It's not how things work out in reality. Open source reduces the barrier to entry for security research, whether it's for good or evil, but it's certainly still possible without it being open source. Either way, the comparison you're making is between proprietary hardware + proprietary firmware + open source OS to proprietary hardware + proprietary firmware (but without updates shipped by the OS) + open source OS.

> Librem's security model is that of a Linux box, signed update packages

Again, you're mixing hardware and software. The Librem hardware isn't only for PureOS and will be able to run Android.

Signed update packages alone are inferior to not only having signed update packages but also verified boot and attestation. GPG also has far too much complexity and attack surface for this, and having online build / signing servers, etc. is a joke.

Android is Linux, and the Linux kernel is not a strength but rather the most prominent weakness in Android. A massive monolithic kernel written entirely in a memory unsafe language and entirely responsible for enforcing the low-level privacy/security model is not a strength. That's a major problem which needs to be resolved, not a hole to dig deeper. It's fundamentally not fixable and while a bunch of work on mitigations can help, it's very limited in what can be achieved. Moving to the desktop Linux software stacks also gives up the vast majority of these mitigations and the security model that has been rapidly improved over the years. It gives up having such strict SELinux policies developed as an integral part of the base system, as just one of many things that are lost. This level of security cannot be obtained on a traditional Linux distribution without a well-defined base system that's developed together with lots of holistic systems level privacy and security work. Addressing it in a bunch of separate fragmented projects doesn't work out, and prevents having the same kind of security model and security policies. The way that SELinux is used on Android compared to a distribution like RHEL / Fedora is day and night. It's drastically different and not even comparable at all. The same goes for the deployment of other privacy and security features / models.

[pjmlp]

> Android is Linux....

Kind of, Google can release Android running on top of any OS that implements the NDK stable APIs, plus their POSIX subset, and besides OEMs no one would notice the change.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

Other than that I fully agree with your statement regarding being a security weakness.

[Reelin]

> isn't going to be particularly security-focused: no attestation, no trusted boot

This is only true initially, presumably due to time and funding constraints. From the FAQ (https://puri.sm/faq/):

> What are your plans for tamper-proofing the Librem 5?

> We hope to have a version of PureBoot available for the Librem 5 for users who want to verify it with a Librem Key. We cannot commit to it being available at launch but it’s a goal.

A PureBoot description can be found at (https://puri.sm/posts/pureboot-the-high-security-boot-proces...).

[PyroLagus]

I imagine it would be possible to get Genode running on the Librem 5, which would be even more secure than Android. Only you'd be limited in what applications you can run.

Still, even on Linux, you can set up SELinux or Apparmor to harden your system as much as possible, run untrusted applications as a different user, compile your own hardened kernel, and so on. It's going to be a less secure system for casual users, but it'll allow power-users to more easily (you can do that on Android as well, but it's more difficult) secure their system as much as they want.

[strcat]

> It's going to be a less secure system for casual users, but it'll allow power-users to more easily (you can do that on Android as well, but it's more difficult) secure their system as much as they want.

No, it really won't. Doing substantial privacy and security hardening requires a years of work by a team focused on it and the OS needs to be developed with it in mind. Sure, you can enable SELinux elsewhere, but you won't have anything remotely comparable to the complete, full system SELinux policies developed as part of the Android Open Source Project and deeply integrated into it. You're talking about users doing all this from scratch somehow when there is hardly any interest in it for that ecosystem. There's barely any application sandbox or permission model to speak of and projects like Flatpak are not approaching it in a meaningful way that avoids trusting apps.

You're suggesting throwing out having an application security model and all this privacy / security work to reinvent it all from scratch for a new ecosystem without existing applications. It's hard to understand how that makes anything easier.

Having the well-defined base OS with verified boot and clear separation between the OS and applications which are sandboxed and offered capabilities via a permission model is crucial. It's not an advantage for security to completely do away with that. It's important to implement each feature / capability in a way that fits into the overall security model. Developers love taking shortcuts and doing this in a lazy / negligent way, and you can see exactly that with how people implement features via the shortest path of depending on app-accessible root instead of doing it properly, even when that's a niche thing.

[chupasaurus]

Attestation of what? Software security is inferior in Android (hello leaky API), hardware is untrusted in Librem sinde Day 0. Show me a TPM chip with open firmware or it's a security disaster on my board. Seccomp is a thing. Also, Flatpak is the last thing I would concider to use.

[ocdtrekkie]

Indeed. I'm tired of each new attempt to fix Android and make it usable and safe. Apps written for Android are written to work with Google's expectations and assume the presence of Google's servers and proprietary APIs, and that's getting worse, not better.

Librem is going the right way, and there are a handful of other companies working along the same path. Necunos is another I heard of as well: https://necunos.com/community/

[ForHackernews]

Also https://postmarketos.org/blog/2017/05/26/intro/ - "Aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones" using mainline Linux kernels.

[ocdtrekkie]

Yeah, and pmOS adds an interesting angle that they're adding legacy Android hardware to these companies' work on their own hardware, all running real Linux.

Note that Necunos' phone could actually be bought with pmOS preloaded as well, so you can really start to see how a few of these different projects are starting to work together and build on each other.

Hopefully we can have a truly FOSS mobile ecosystem in the next couple of years.

[juliangoldsmith]

pmOS should support the Librem 5 when it comes out, as well. We have several contributors working on them.

[Tepix]

What's wrong with AOSP? It's fully open source, supported by a huge amount of phones and has a snappy UI. The only other open source UI that has managed that so far is Sailfish OS.

Just dump all the proprietary Google add-ons and enjoy the F-Droid app store. You will have amazing battery life, less detractions, less ads and a lot more security and privacy.

I enjoyed this with CopperheadOS (the GrapheneOS predecessor) on a Nexus 5X until the project folded. Google stopped supporting the Nexus 5X with updates a few months later.

[yorwba]

> Currently my Samsung Android device is at Dec 2018 patchlevel and nothing I can do about it.

Have you checked whether there's a LineageOS build for your device? https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#samsung (Darker links indicate a build is maintained and available.)

[kbenson]

Unfortunately, based on how the devices are supported by volunteer work, supported hardware has large gaps.

My Samsung galaxy S6 (march 2018 patch level) wasn't supported the last few times I checked, but older galaxy models were.

[dingaling]

Lineage are quite aggressive in dropping older hardware since they pivoted towards 'experience'. My 2013 Galaxy S4 is no longer supported.

[markstos]

I hope Librem remains viable. As someone who needs some specific apps for work, I won't be able to switch for practical considerations unless those services work well enough on the device. For example, Slack.

I could carry a second device for personal use, but am unlikely to.

[wowtip]

Exactly. How much I like the idea of a truly open phone platform there are some obstacles:

- Decent hardware available at competitive price

-- While I could make do with some degraded performance for a truly open phone concept, most people would not, especially if price point is similar to, or higher, than established closed platform brands

- Must have apps available - needed for wide acceptance

-- My personal examples of must have apps:

-- BankID (Swedish e-id, needed for banks, taxes, government sites, payments)

-- Swish - Swedish app for personal micro transactions

-- Public transportation apps (tickets/timetable)

-- Bank application

-- Signal

Without these apps, a open platform phone would be next to useless to me. And I am a big proponent of open platforms.

And looking at how reluctant BankID were to even support older version android phones, I am not optimistic to them adding a completely new platform to support.

I know people who were forced to upgrade from "old" phones because BankID no longer supported their Android version, and phones would not get newer Android version.

[ocdtrekkie]

Specific app needs have killed dozens of potential third party mobile OSes. I suspect that PWAs may finally help with that.

[nerd7473]

I'm really excited for it. I also have my eyes on the Pine phone project.

[jammygit]

I don’t fully understand why it was not easier to build a fork of aosp, but it is exciting at least

[vasili111]

The big problem is the price which too high.

[chupasaurus]

R&D and a small batch size are the only reasons.

[vasili111]

I am not blaming them for that, I understand that but I understand also customer who does not pay twice as more as for other phone.