[bayindirh]

When Google first announced sideloading restrictions, somebody told “but we have ADB”, and who disagreed with them was criticized harshly.

Now, I’m waiting for a workaround to enable ADB, so sideloading can be handled now, too.

Android is not more open that iOS for a very long time now. The trend will continue.

Again, this is not a technical problem (the mindset of Google), so technological solutions won’t help.

[matheusmoreira]

Android became a lost cause the second they introduced hardware remote attestation.

Even if there was a way to install your own software, there's no point in doing so. You're "tampering" with the device. Fail attestation and you're untrusted. You get banned from everything. If you hack, you're ostracized from digital society. You're a second class citizen. Can't communicate. Can't bank. Can't stream. Can't play video games. Can't do pretty much anything.

That's the future of Android. GrapheneOS is quite literally the last hope for Android, and only because by some miracle there are companies out there who started trusting Graphene's attestation keys. If that hope ever dies then we might as well buy iPhones.

[mayama]

> and only because by some miracle there are companies out there who started trusting Graphene's attestation keys.

Are the bank apps trusting graphene keys or google them self? Isn't play attestation completely in the hands of google.

[izacus]

Play Attestation is a Google hosted database of build keys/hashes for known Android builds. Android-side of this attestation is an API which calculates and returns those hashes to the app.

There's nothing preventing the app from verifying the build itself against its own database. So they can allowlist GrapheneOS builds if they want - but of course that means that all other ROMs are still banned.

[fsflover]

> GrapheneOS is quite literally the last hope for Android

Don't they support the idea of the hardware attestation and having no root?

[handedness]

All of this has already been explained to fsflover in detail numerous times, but for any onlookers here are some of the project's thoughts on the subject of hardware attestation:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116550899908879585

https://attestation.app/about

On the subject of root, it completely breaks the security model of the OS, and for very valid reasons they have no interest in having official installations with widely varying security models.

They also have no opposition to people creating their own forks to do so, and they publish comprehensive build instructions: https://grapheneos.org/build

Lo and behold: https://github.com/schnatterer/rooted-graphene

[Cider9986]

Agreed, GrapheneOS is underrated.

[wartywhoa23]

> Again, this is not a technical problem (the mindset of Google)

This is not even Google's mindset, the control strings of this mindset stretch far beyond its management and board of directors.

That's the OBEY from the timeless Carpenter's classic.