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by timcobb 13 days ago
Well, no. If the project is being shut down because its target(s) went away, then that seems unavoidable.

It would be good, IMO, if people could come together and build out an open mobile platform not subject to SV hegemony, so I think what you're saying is the way to go, actually. Because building out AOSP and or just something forked/from scratch is... actually... accessible now in my opinion. I think it doesn't make sense _not_ to be oriented in this direction anymore. There's no reason to remain cautious because, well, right now we have _nothing_ :(. We are subject to the fancies of the behemoths that exist to self perpetuate. Working around them and depending on them is demoralizing and not fun.
2 comments
palata 13 days ago
> It would be good, IMO, if people could come together and build out an open mobile platform not subject to SV hegemony

It would, but I would argue that it wouldn't solve Briar's problem here.

The problem on Android is not that Google doesn't want P2P to work. It's that Android optimises aggressively for the battery. You can install a mobile Linux and run a P2P service on it, that's not a problem at all. But you will have to charge it multiple times a day, and nobody wants that from a phone.

Have you ever tried running an Android-based system without the Play Services (and without migroG)? Try running e.g. Signal without FCM, and see the impact on your battery life. You want to fork the OS to solve that? You will probably end up rebuilding something as centralised as FCM.

There is a fundamental question there: does it work, without major downsides, to have a P2P system where the nodes are mobile phones? Until now it has always been a tradeoff, and people clearly choose battery life. Also you don't need P2P for privacy.

> There's no reason to remain cautious because, well, right now we have _nothing_

Android is open source. There are big alternatives like LineageOS and GrapheneOS. I don't think we have nothing. There is a lot of great technical stuff in Android/iOS. While iOS is out of bounds because proprietary, Android is open source, so we have all that great stuff. We don't have nothing.

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klibertp 13 days ago
> It would be good, IMO, if people could come together and build out an open mobile platform not subject to SV hegemony

From what I understand (based on pretty basic research into using old smartphones (which I already have a full drawer of) as home appliances), the main problem is that device manufacturers only provide binary blobs for drivers and firmware, and they are not too happy to share them with non-Google parties. And it's non-trivial to handle those blobs, even if you get them (they weren't written for your tech stack, so you need infrastructure around them to make them useful).

> Because building out AOSP and or just something forked/from scratch is... actually... accessible now in my opinion.

Starting such a project, and even getting to 0.0.1 release, is now simpler than any time in the past.

Getting from 0.0.1 to 1.0-alpha did not get any easier at all. The current AI requires both a great harness and a skilled operator to add meaningful code to a large project without going nuclear on code quality.

It'll be quite a few years until things like "make me a custom ROM with AOSP modified to do X" result in anything other than absolute tragedy.

> We are subject to the fancies of the behemoths that exist to self perpetuate. Working around them and depending on them is demoralizing and not fun.

That's true, especially the "not fun" part. However, I expect the vast majority of users don't want any fun on their devices, aside from games (and even then, only with kernel-level anti-cheat). Normally, this is solved by companies offering one product for "casuals" and another for devs or power-users. This works, but breaks down for social things: a messaging app that won't run unless you buy a Pixel and flash a custom ROM is DOA as an app (it might function as a solution in case of people who are really desperate for the features the app provides, but that's probably too small a population to keep the project afloat).

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