Fairphone and Huawei: Ky's big phone book

kyller3030 · July 2, 2024, 10:45am

Did you know that people who are good at recognizing patterns might struggle with tasks that require active cognitive thinking and decision making? I want to link here some fancy study (here’s one: Scientists uncover a surprising conflict between important cognitive abilities) but truth be told I saw it on Instagram, Hashem Al-Ghaili has been doing this “science news as shorts on facebook and insta” for a long time.

So Tech Altar has an older video about european phone brands making a comeback, two of them are Fairphone and Blloc:

“Fairphone and Blloc are probably the best examples of the “niche brand” strategy, and the trick here is that unlike regional champions, these companies have a very unique niche product that has no direct competitors for now. Amsterdam-based Fairphone makes a phone that is modular, easy to repair and has as little negative impact on the environment and the people in their supply chain as possible. You know, as many conflict-free materials as possible, no child labor, you get the point.”

“Berlin-based Blloc has pretty standard hardware, but develops really unique software for it. In short, they have completely customized Android to make it as distraction-free and as non-addictive as possible. I like the idea behind both of these companies, they’re unique, and for now they don’t have very direct competitors. And a niche product is a high risk, high return strategy. It’s high risk because nobody knows if sustainable devices or distraction-free Android software is something that people actually want, and even if it is, it’s unclear whether these companies can actually build the stuff that they have envisioned. BllocOS is a cool concept and the team has made some great progress, but it’s still far from the universal solution that Blloc envisions for the future. That is still years of hard work away and success isn’t exactly guaranteed. In the same way, Fairphone has had unimpressive sales results in the last few years because they just couldn’t produce phones fast enough with their complicated manufacturing processes and supply chain. So these companies are highly risky, but of course the return is also pretty high because they don’t have a lot of direct competitors right now, which means that the prices they can charge are also pretty high.”

Here is the phone in action, space-food packaging and all:

“Now, all of this software is definitely still a work in progress. Many of the integrations are pretty buggy, there just aren’t enough integrations yet, and it’s unclear if Blloc can keep up with all the changes in the future. After all, Blloc is hacking these integrations into Android and into Android apps,so if those change the way they work, these integrations might just break. And if nothing else comes out of it, this phone will at least be a fantastic UI or UX design case study.”

Following along WVFRM’s Cyanogen video, the hosts go on to explain the reasons they stopped caring about ROMs around this time. After these years of experimentation, most performance improvements and notable features were rolled back into Android Open Source Project to benefit the entire ecosystem, and at the time, Google was so focused on making android better that they released the first Pixel with their name on it. And, two months later, Cyanogen Inc. went from being a big corpo with partners in China, India and about to enter the carrier-contract driven market of the US of A, to being very busy being dead and the community was picking up the open source pieces, which are all of them.
Even though Pixels come unlocked cough ahem, there was less to “get” out of ROMing, less enhancements to miss out on, with Huawei’s magic battery life on the market. Less push to be experimental. Side-loading, third party launchers exist too. This is why I wanted to showcase Blloc, it’s a good illustration of how most of their android modifications simply became part of AOSP, the tiles are the quick settings in the notification area, the advanced notification controls themselves, the quick media controls, the black & white filters, focus time etc.

They’re still around, making one of those aforementioned third-party launchers, Ratio, and their site looks impressive, having discovered yellow accents in the meantime.

Android’s slow creep towards being closed source continues on - open source elements deprecated

This video is important.

"Due to the slow erosion of functionality from AOSP, as well as the transfer of functionality from AOSP to closed-source Google applications and frameworks, we’re fast approaching a point where you can’t really state that AOSP is a full open source mobile operating system anymore.

Is a mobile operating system that can’t send messages or make phone calls really complete?"

RCS... 🤕 (expand)

I trust user comments so much more than the articles themselves it’s not even funny. It’s so validating that HTC was aware of how the smartest people were never the company employees as far back as the first XDA.
Apple is bringing RCS to the iPhone in iOS 18 | The Verge

Google’s version of RCS is non-standard, why would Apple implement Google’s non-compliant version of RCS? once encryption comes to the standard Apple will implement it, as they’ve said already.

Apple could easily call up Google and implement encryption between their two clients. Wonder why they won’t do that?

We’re talking about adding encryption here, not using “Google’s version” of RCS (which I guess means Jibe?). Google uses the Signal Protocol for encryption, which is an open standard.

darrsil:

Oh boy, here we go.

Google’s RCS uses Universal Profile, which is the standard. Anyone who uses Universal Profile, like Apple, will be able to talk to Google’s RCS on day one.

The RCS spec does not have encryption built-in. You say “once encryption comes to the standard” like it’s a certainty when it’s anything but - there are members of the GSMA that explicitly do NOT want E2EE built into the standard.

This is why the spec today says that encryption is up to the individual clients to implement, which is exactly what Google did. They built on top of RCS which is how it’s intended to be done.

Like I said in my previous comment, the encryption Google uses is the Signal Protocol. It is an open standard and not proprietary. Apple could easily work with Google to implement E2EE using the Signal Protocol across their two apps.

But Apple doesn’t want to do that because they SAY they want it added to the base spec - which like I said won’t happen. So Apple can say “well we tried” but still claim iMessage is a more secure messaging platform.

MorbidGod

We will just have to wait and see what Apple does. They usually a good to their word, but not always.

I am looking at you, FaceTime being “Open Sourced” and then pulling back on that promise.

apparatchiki ☭

Google doesn’t offer RCS encryption worldwide, it’s on a country by country basis, it makes little sense to depend on an unrelated third-party for encryption, why would Apple tie themselves to that logic? Not every Android phone out there has access to Google’s services either, for example in China, the largest smartphone market in the world.

Then again, if the GSMA consortium doesn’t come around to requiring encryption at the standard level, how is that Apple’s fault exactly? blaming Apple for that makes very little sense.

I’d agree though that they failed the market when back tracking on opening up the iMessage / FaceTime protocol to allow third-parties to use it. They could be the Whatsapp of the world by now if they would have wanted to.

BTW, Google using the Signal Protocol has nothing to do with this discussion at all, that doesn’t make their implementation a standard on any level.

darrsil

My comment was specifically replying to your points that Google is using a “non-standard” and “non-compliant” (???) version of RCS.

Google’s RCS uses Universal Profile, which is the standard. Google built on top of RCS to add E2EE into their client, which is how it is written in the standard. The encryption they use is the Signal Protocol, which is an open standard. Everything they’re doing is in line with standards.

I know Google doesn’t operate in China. Apple does, but let’s be real, they aren’t concerned with privacy in China in the first place because they give all of user iCloud data over to the Chinese government there anyway. Regarding your claim that Google doesn’t offer encryption everywhere, can you source something that shows they don’t use encryption in a region they operate Messages in?

And Apple said they don’t want to work with Google on adding E2EE between their two clients but want to rather work with the GSMA to add it into the spec. So if the GSMA doesn’t add it into the spec, then Apple failed and yes it’s their fault because they could have added E2EE into most of RCS by simply working with Google on adding it between their two clients.

spamabyss

It has been said before. And no one. Not one person outside the US uses iMessages. It’s Telegram, WhatsApp or Signal since many many years.

NoOrdinaryQuokka

RCS could make Messages and iMessage much more viable in Europe. Now people actually might try using the default Messages app (again).

frederick

Glad you guys have to juggle multiple apps to text people. Seems like a better default messaging app on all phones is better for everyone?

henlejeremias

The ‘or’ here is to be seen geographically more than anything else. In Europe, for example, WhatsApp is the one messaging service, it is more ubiquitous than iMessage in the US even.

And while I agree on your idea that a default messaging app on all phones is tempting, it’s also true that both iMessage and WhatsApp are awful apps UI-wise, which I could imagine is due to lack of competition (because of their monopolistic statuses).

A mutually agreed, modern messaging standard with multiple user-facing services to choose from sounds like a dream. Let’s see if it manifests with RCS.

Jonathan Horst, host of Mac Address also claims it was China that pushed Apple to adopt RCS. Is Apple even Apple anymore? - TalkLinked

MindTheGapps

Nowadays LineageOS still has 1.5 million users, significantly updated over AOSP, with optional GMS if you need them. They aren’t the young excited media people flashing cyanogen nightlies and just talking about it a lot, but

"there are still a lot of community members that are maintaining lineage for individual devices. If you go on the lineage website most popular phones on there, and it sort of works the same way as it worked on CyanogenMod where you buy a new phone, you decide you want it to be the guy that maintains it, you go on and you maintain it and it’s kind of fun but it’s being used a lot in industry now okay which is very different.
So I’m trying to figure out okay well what really happened to the modding community, right? Like, people stopped using this. Is it just because Android got mature and things got good, right? Now, you might have heard of this kind of conspiracy theory that’s been going around for a while, that Google has been taking things from AOSP, and instead of updating AOSP, they just update them in the Google apps. Right. And this is sort of a major thing that has been happening for quite a few years now. So yes, Android is open sourced. And if you want to use Android, you can use it, but it’s like the camera app is going to be from like Android eight. And this app is going to be from Android eight. I made a video about this."

Can You Trust Google? ~Marques Brownlee

And they started just using their own Google Photos and Pixel apps now and the messenger client in AOSP is different from Google Messages and like everything is like Google This , Google That versus the aosp versions. So there’s kind of this conspiracy theory that google intentionally… they need to make money off of android, right? They originally made it open source because they needed to get as much of a user base as possible. But then at one point they were like, “how do we monetize this? We can’t keep giving away all the good stuff that we’re making for free.” It’s the fourth time this has been brought up. Like somebody’s like, “we gotta be, I gotta make some money off of this.[Laughter] I really wanna. I really wanna do it.”
So I asked a lot of people right, I asked Michele, I asked the lineage guys, I was trying to ask them “Do you think this is the main reason that ROMing has gotten so not popular? You know, that Google’s like taking aosp and making it a lot harder to like build stuff off of?” and they actually think that it makes a lot of sense for Google to be doing this. Because the biggest reason that they say is that our phones are now a much more major part of the way that we live our lives, right. And back in the day, you could ROM your phone, you could do whatever you wanted. And you would still go to your bank, maybe, and there would be a banking app; but the banking app was really bad, It was very new. And as our phones kind of get more mature and have become a more integral parts of our lives, there have been people at those banking companies going like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This person is throwing an OS that we have no idea what it is, and the security features we have no idea what it is, and they’re using our banking app on “some phone”. And so, a big reason that both the lineage os people and people like Michele think that roming is getting a lot harder and people are not doing it as much is because now google has made it that, if you use a custom rom on your phone things like banking apps don’t work. Right and imagine your banking app doesn’t work like that’s a major reason not to rom your phone. You can’t use a lot of the core features that you would want to use on your device. Yeah it’s not worth it anymore, what are you gonna do you’re gonna unlock your Snapdragon processor and get “faster” performance like what does that even mean?
Yeah but I’ll have my flashlight! * chuckles *.
But early on when we’re talking about roming phones and doing it all the time and resetting it and the like, just so little of your life was on it back then, it was a device that’s an accessory. Your phone is everything about you at this point, there are so many insanely important things, and if something were to mess up on your phone, you could be really screwed for a while. It’s way scarier to also just do things to your phone now. So security is very important, there’s security patches and bug fixes all the time, it’s a rat race as soon as there gets there’s this bug that people find out about, they’ve got to patch it, and then people exploit it, and patch it, and exploit it, and this whole thing.
Random trivia question: There is a fast food app that does not work if you mod your phone, if you unlock your bootloader. […] McDonalds. It has to do with GPay(?)
Is it only McDonald’s that does the…? That was the one that Michelle pointed out in particular. Yeah, it could be other ones, too. It looks like Starbucks does a lot of the same stuff. Well, Starbucks is a bank. That’s what I was going to say. When you wrote that, and how many Starbucks gift cards… yeah, that made a lot of sense. That’s how Starbucks makes all their money, is by investing your money that you “add to your card” on the app. Insane. They’re… It’s. Insane. Yes. They’re literally a bank. That’s why it’s called Starbucks. badumtsss Hey! Sorry. Wow. Yeah. That felt horrible to say out loud.
Security is just becoming really important because our devices are this one-stop shop. They really are PDAs now. All of these apps are like, “I don’t want this unknown OS to be running my app, especially when it has things like your financial details on it.” Because if they get in trouble, they’re going to get in a lot of trouble. It’s risky. Yeah, so it’s getting more closed down. And surprisingly, people like the LineageOS team and Michele are like “Yeah that makes sense. We actually totally understand that right”. So it’s not as much of the like google is intentionally trying to make android harder to use, they really think that the reason is because of security. I’m sure they don’t want to be the ones to create something and then that winds up being the reason somebody loses a lot and then they have to think “that’s kind of our fault”. Not even legally, but just… that sucks to think like “yeah we did something that a bunch of people lost important things with it”.
Yeah, but it is a bummer because even RCS does not work in AOSP. Oh yeah. The messaging client of AOSP doesn’t have RCS support, that’s “funny”. You have to use Google Messages, which is crazy.

But, you know, the spirit of ROMing is not dead. There’s plenty of open source material that’s being published consistently. People like Stephanie are a huge open source, people, they really advocate for it. And I think that even if these ROMs like Lineage OS are not the level of CyanogenMod, like they used to be where the community was like, there were so many people and everyone was super excited about it all the time and flashing every single day. I think every community will always have enough people that want to maintain it. And just for the reason that they want to maintain it, right? They don’t have to make a company out of everything. And that’s kind of the magic of open source. Wise words. You don’t have to make a company out of this. “I Gotta make money out of this.”
I just remember, yeah, the modding days were fun.

It keeps going for a bit longer:

I had my, and I still have it, the original Motorola Droid that I had. And that phone, I can’t believe it’s still boots. That phone went through it. And that, my Galaxy Nexus, I had custom ROMs. I was overclocking those phones. I had custom kernels where you could choose like, all right, let me get up to 1100 megahertz when the screen is on, but then underclock down to 200 megahertz when the screen is off and have this refresh rate so that I can like cycle between those clock speeds quickly and end up with a faster phone with longer battery life with all these custom kernels it was insane yeah these phones were cooking in my pocket it’s unreal and I was flashing nightlies. That was quite a time, yeah.
When was the last time you tried to ROM a phone? I think right around the time that Cyanogen was done, I remember being on the nightlies, I remember doing a lot of Paranoid android and the like, because that was an ALT ROM Yeah. Right around when Cyanogen was super …(big?) Alt-rom. Yeah, it was like… Cyanogen was the big one. “It’s not a phase, mom.” [Laughter] But there was Paranoid Android on the side, which oh, it’s got these cool themes and a couple extra kernel features for my overclocking desires. But I definitely wasn’t doing it much after ~2015, 2016.
I did it once on my ERIS, that’s all I remember. Nice shout out to the ERIS. I just think it’s pretty incredible how important cyanogen mod ended up being to a lot of stuff that happened… Like OnePlus only really exists the way it does because of cyanogen mod. Yeah I mean it was a community-based thing that was also built off a different person that built something and then made it, it’s literally in the history of Android at this point and, like, Android phones in general. So that’s wild. Yeah. So while we might not do a lot of ROMing ourselves anymore, I think it’s beautiful that communities will still come together and make open source projects that are really cool. (one more trivia intermission about the name origin of Nexus. A piece of media with sleeping androids that may or may not dream of electric sheep. Also Bladerunner The model is "Nexus 6, and the Philip K Dick estate sued google over it.)
It was fun recapping on what happened from the birth of android up until now and how important the open source community was to all of that.

I mean as someone who wasn’t part of that community and did very little, knew just enough about it to know what cyanogen mod was, and then to know about it as in, like, inside of OnePlus and stuff yeah it’s fun. //Literally me fr fr
It was a crazy set of years dude.
Sounds like something I would have been into.
I was flashing cyanogen mod nightlies every single day, wiping my device every single day; I would lose all of my data, all of my photos, every single day, for no reason because I was a nerd. [Laughter]
Same, that’s you and me both, yeah simpler times simpler times but it was a good era of android. Zero points!

As per the website:

Individuality:
Customization is paramount to productivity. That’s why LineageOS promises to push for user personalization and preference. Everyone is unique and your device should be too.

Security
Your data, your rules. Along with monthly security updates to every supported device, we enhance existing privacy touchpoints around the OS and keep you informed of how the system shares your data. Trust helps you understand the state of your device’s security and warns you about possible threats. SELinux Enforcing.

Longevity
LineageOS extends the functionality and lifespan of mobile devices from more than 20 different manufacturers thanks to our open-source community of contributors from all around the world.

Power to you
Our open-source apps are here to help you get through the day. Want to do more with your device? Power users will enjoy Unix command-line utilities. Android developers will turn any device into the perfect device for apps development thanks to enhanced tools and debugging capabilities.

It feels weird how these are relegated to a “niche” and business to business solutions nowadays. My mom went through four vacuum cleaners that kept burning-out before finding one made in Poland for warehouses.

Cloud yelling session

So the bank’s been shutting down their previous online platform in favor of a new mobile app. That adds a “maintenance” monthly fee. The app was so bad they shut it down within a year and launched another one (to my branch’s credit, the branch’s boss was really trying to get it working, but the server was offline at the other end so there was nothing he could do). My millennial insistence on making payments on the PC looks increasingly silly, as they all need to be approved on the mobile authenticator anyway.
I want to put to pixels just how bad this digital payments thing has been lately. So I try to pay for food, and the debit card keeps getting declined, the mobile app keeps saying I forgot my PIN ( I didn’t). I walk to the closest bank branch, and there’s a crowd of people trying to get their salaries out of the ATMs. All but one are out of order. After 10 minutes I get the attention of a clerk (they were all bunched together around a laptop) and she tells me all the customer support issues should be handled through the app. The app doesn’t open, the only button I have is “Reset PIN” for which the clerk informs me that I can pay with cash…

Another day, my card was disabled because I haven’t used it in a while, so I had to go through the procedure of opening a new account. Verification codes, sent through the super-duper secure SMS, followed by a 40 page contract…PDF. That I was supposed to read on my phone, as the queue was forming up behind me. Gotta pay the App administration fee for all the months the card was disabled too. My card also gets blocked every time I go through Stripe as “unusual activity” even after approving it in the app, and I have to call human customer support. That’s probably the biggest lament here, that many branches get closed down, and the few that are left don’t carry any money. To withdraw cash, my brother had to call some of his old classmates to find one treasury that had any, as most branches kept insisting to just pay everything through the app. Because they think rural Romania is flush with POSs, I guess. In fact, it’s not unusual for all the ATMs within an hour’s drive to be out of service at the same time.
So all the enshittification of mobile software is happening in the name of security of this well oiled machine. I’ll tell you about the machine, we have these smarty “ROBOts” to handle basic tasks like paying bills and depositing money in the account. It was unresponsive. I asked for help and the clerk lady…unplugged the ROBOthing from the wall and plugged it back. And so, we were chilling for 10 minutes with the Windows 8 updater.

~ Customer survey: how was your experience with the staff?
I’m just saying, all the security buzzwords, widevine, attestations, safetynet and platform integrity checks* ring kinda hollow, when it’s all in the service of… displaying ads on the payment object. Isn’t that why we got the debit cards in the first place? To have a dedicated payment thing with security chips because integrating security into other things was too hard?
*oh yeah WebDRM is still going ahead on Android only. Summary of the whole mess.
I guess I’m supposed to log the bank account into Google Blank and forget about it, but most help pages about that start and end with “Works in USA and Germany”.
There’s a happy end, the situation on the ground isn’t that dire, at least here Revolut reached the market years before Apple and Google, so most people use that, with the bank-issued app as back-up. Revolut works fine on modifies androids, and my choice of rom fixed its attestation over a year ago, so the majority of payment systems work fine. Here’s the full list of user reports: [LIST] Banking Apps on /e/OS - Lists - /e/OS community

Here’s a few more banking adventure visuals, and the older ROBOts.

~What can I say, eastern europe prefers androids

Oh, one tablet security thing I do like: voting here is done with rubberstamp on paper, and the polling stations have a couple of tablets just to check if the same bulletin (ID paper) is used at multiple stations. We had cases in the past where the papers of dead people were used to vote in their name, touring many stations. As in, happening so much it has been parodied for at least a hundred years now.

Now, buy something or get out of here, the train’s leaving!