[devsda]

It can and will most probably turn to indefinite time depending on the answer to the question "will we have a viable alternative to jump ship before that happens ?".

We don't need anything to completely capture the market, it has to be just enough to make Google hesitate or make it hard for Google to do it for legal reasons. Like how Firefox is ideally supposed to be for Chrome.

[microtonal]

Many alternative AOSP-based systems work fine today and do not have the new Android Developer Verifier (wow, already rolled out to 500M+ devices [1], though still dormant).

To be honest, it is quite scary that Google is able to remotely roll out an app like that to all GMS Android phones. Of course, we all knew that, but it highlights again that Google can remotely take away functionality that you had before, brick your phone, etc.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

[RobotToaster]

We used to call programs like this, that allow someone to remotely break your system, a Trojan horse...

[bpavuk]

and now people install Remote Access Trojans just to let GPT and Claude think and work for them, granting them shell and a11y access. really? after seeing that, nothing surprises me

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, really. The obvious answer that security maximallists deny even exists is, who is doing it and why. In LLM case, users are doing it themselves to allow a way of computing they want and find useful, in spite of platform locks designed to deny users just that.

[bpavuk]

I mean, go tell Anthropic to prompt Claude to make it adopt Landlock in Claude Code instead of regex-based filtering. actually adopt it, not how Codex did, but with controls on the level of some third-party harnesses and Pi plugins.

[ajross]

> To be honest, it is quite scary that Google is able to remotely roll out an app like that to all GMS Android phones.

Are any commercial mobile phone vendors not able to do such a thing? Do remember that this giant kerfuffle is all over the seeming preparation for the apparent removal of a developer feature that iPhones have never had at all.

[classified]

> brick your phone, etc.

Apple can do the same for iPhones. In terms of dark shit they can do there's no difference anymore.

[izacus]

Wait till you hear that your OEM can remotely rollout full OS updates with full access to all your data and drivers... carrying Google software and most of it Google code.

[microtonal]

Snarks do not lead to productive discussions. You also know that there is has always been an implicit social contract between users and vendors. The vendor rolls out updates as part of the service attached to the device (typically included in the purchase price) and that the vendor does not abuse the update mechanism to make things worse for the user.

If vendors use updates to restrict functionality that the user had before, puts existing features behind paywalls, etc. people are rightfully outraged, because it breaks the social contract.

It's just that the repeated offenses have made us insensitive. Imagine Debian rolling out some mechanism that only allows you to install software outside their repos with a 24 hour delay. It would destroy Debian.

[59percentmore]

>implicit social contract

Sounds worthless (in court).

[sunaookami]

And that's how you get a low-trust society.

[59percentmore]

Well, no. The low-trust society comes (partly) from corporations betraying the trust of consumers, not consumers recognizing that the corporations saying, "Trust us," are probably bullshitting them.

The initial assertion that there has "always" been a social contract is inaccurate.

[birdsongs]

I get the analogy but it's a false one. Google covers about 90% of Mozilla's funding. Firefox only survives because of Google, and that's so they don't hit antitrust problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing

[devsda]

> Firefox only survives because of Google, and that's so they don't hit antitrust problems.

Yes, that is what I meant. They should be hesitant to lockdown completely and (grudgingly even) allow alternative options and/or workarounds due to legal concerns like anti-trust.

Firefox was existing before Chrome, but in this case we either need a different OS or need an android based option like Graphene/3rd party stores gain enough marketshare to trigger anti-competitive laws.

[atif089]

Google is working on a new recaptcha strategy to counter that. Essentially any non Google flavor of Android OS will fail recaptcha validation

[stein1946]

> will we have a viable alternative to jump ship before that happens ?

Here is a better question:

"Is the EU going to stop this?"

[sunaookami]

No because the EUDI Wallet needs Google Play Services. People need to come to the realization that the EU has no interest in regulating the freedom of devices because the EU itself is benefitting from the closed-down ecosystem.

[ChocolateGod]

Why would the EU stop it?

[fsflover]

> "will we have a viable alternative to jump ship before that happens ?"

GNU/Linux phones already exist. Sent from my Librem 5.