The title is a bit misleading here. The article is actually arguing against the title.
Europe is so heterogeneous that any claims about it as a whole are misleading at best. Germans are probably the most privacy conscious people in the western world, for reasons which should probably be obvious given their history.
> Europe is so heterogeneous that any claims about it as a whole are misleading at best.
I don't think that's the case, especially among the younger generations which are largely English speaking and grew up with the internet.
Also, for example, if you looked at the US in detail you'd find just as many cultural difference between individuals states, it's likely true of any large country or federation.
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I don't think that's the case, especially among the younger generations which are largely English speaking and grew up with the internet.
In Germany and as far as I am aware also in France and Spain - all three are among the largest EU countries - the younger generation is hardly largely English-speaking. Only the more educated people (who studied at a university) are typically somewhat confident in their English, and at least in these three countries English is nevertheless only used as a second/"helper" language.
With UK having left the EU, the only EU countries where English is an official language are Ireland and Malta; in both of these countries English is only one of the official languages, not the only one.
> the younger generation is hardly largely English-speaking
I agree. While I don’t have any direct contact with younger people, our fantasy stores went from being 50/50 English/German products to having 99% in German.
That indicates that there is no strong preference of English over German, but not that the people buying German products aren't largely English-speaking. If only 20% of German speakers don't speak English, then a store can expect a 25% boost in sales by offering a German version. And assuming German-English bilinguals are indifferent to the language, there's then little reason to offer the English product anymore. It's a winner-takes-all situation.
(FWIW, first-time university students have consistently made up >50% of Germans in their respective age cohort for the past decade, so most ≈20–30 year-olds are in that university-educated English-speaking group.) https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bildun...
Point taken. Though my experience in university (2005ish) was that most people could hold a conversation, but were often struggling with vocabulary and grammar.
> And assuming German-English bilinguals are indifferent to the language
Well, I stopped going to those stores because I prefer English, but I’m not exactly representative ;)
> I don't think that's the case, especially among the younger generations which are largely English speaking and grew up with the internet.
Have you been to Europe outside of its big touristy capitals? To describe the younger generation as "largely English-speaking" is absurd. I'm from a medium-sized city in northern France. Go there and try speaking English to the young people in the street. See where that gets you.
OK, maybe I should have been a bit more specific. Most young people speak some English is what I meant, not that it was their primary language, which is obviously not the case.
I'm here in coastal Croatia and English ability is common, if mixed, with younger people being mostly proficient. Of course the French are in a class of their own when it comes to (not) speaking English, but I'd still posit there are plenty of young French people who speak or understand English to some degree. If I needed help on your streets with only English I'm sure there would be someone who would be able to help me out.
France is an exception. In most parts of Europe the young people speak excellent English or are even fluent. France takes a sort of cultural pride in the French language that other cultures don't.
I've traveled a lot in Europe. People like to harp on France, but I've found that in most countries, outside big cities, English proficiency was not widespread.
Not been my experience but I guess it depends a lot on what you mean by proficiency. Also depends where you are and who you talk to. In the Nordics I never encountered a young person who wasn't nearly fluent in English. In bigger countries like Germany you can easily find people who don't speak English but they tend to themselves be immigrants and e.g. working in shops. Germans themselves learn it in school and do better.
>Germans are probably the most privacy conscious people in the western world
Yeah, that's why every morning on the tram I see the average Germans texting on Tinder, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Telegram, and mindlessly scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, the most privacy focused apps on the planet. Sounds very privacy conscious, handing your most intimate data to US & Chinese companies.
Also, A lot of German are really into digital banks and brokers lately like N26, Scalable Capital, etc. which report everything to the Government authorities anyway, so I'm not buying the whole privacy angle. Cash usage at small businesses is mostly to enable tax fraud.
Their lack of privacy consciousness doesn't imply that they aren't the world's most privacy conscious people, in a world where almost no one seems to care at all about their privacy.
Germany is well known for giving support to political endeavors which help to ensure the privacy of citizens. Try looking around Munich on Street View.
May be true, but if you ever being to Berlin, and you want to go to a restaurant, you better bring cash. No body accepts cards or electronic payments there.
It is a breath of fresh air for privacy focused people.
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Yeah, that's why every morning on the tram I see the average Germans texting on Tinder, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Telegram, and mindlessly scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, the most privacy focused apps on the planet. Sounds very privacy conscious, handing your most intimate data to US & Chinese companies.
I know German people who will completely quit or at least strongly avoid contact to people who have an account at such services.
Germany is the second to last country for IM apps usage in EU, with a mere 60% [0]. It is also the second to last country for social network accounts, with 47.7% of the population being on a social network[1].
Cash is still king[2].
Germans care about their privacy - maybe not everybody has clear all the implications of modern applications, but you cannot dismiss the care of privacy with just saying that your experience on a bus doesn't match this.
>Germany is the second to last country for IM apps usage in EU, with a mere 60%
That's mostly due to German older generations being tech-illiterate and skewing the statistics, like the boomer politicians who want to have their internet "printed", and my 50 year old ex-manager who refused to use Jira and had me send him a weekly email with the tasks in progress and their status.
On the other side of the spectrum, if you look at Germans under 30-35 they're all super connected via privacy shoddy apps like Telegram.
>Cash is still king
>[...]if you ever being to Berlin, and you want to go to a restaurant, you better bring cash. No body accepts cards or electronic payments there.
That's only due to rampant tax fraud in Germany's gastronomy sector and other small businesses.
So privacy there means privacy from the taxman, which is unfair for those who have to pay their fair share of (not small) taxes and support the burden of the social system.
No citation, just my anecdotal time working in the gastronomy sector as a student and that of several of my friends as well.
Seeing the owners at the end of the night carrying home buckets full of cash out of the restaurant that will never be seen in any tax declarations is a common sight, and will just be dumped into cars and real estate later.
This isn't restricted just to gastronomy and hospitality either. Lots of businesses deals in Germany are done on a handshake, with sums declared in the contract at, say 10k Euros, with the actual payment for the services being something like 50k Euros, meaning only 10k gets taxed, the rest is tax free for you. You get the point.
In case you're wondering why real este buying prices in Germany are so high and seem completely disconnected from the median wages, that's one of the reasons why. Lots of undeclared black money sloshing around the economy looking for a safe parking space.
>but it doesn't seem that tax fraud in Germany is particularly high
Meh, irrelevant. That statistics looks at offshore untaxed wealth. Most small business owners dealing in cash won't have accounts in Bermuda or Panama for that.
> which is unfair for those who have to pay their fair share of taxes and support the burden of the social system.
You (as a government) want people to be honest with their taxes? Set up the taxation laws so that "being honest" is incredibly easy. Instead Germany has one of the most convoluted taxation laws in the world.
This alone should provide strong evidence that all the talk about "tax fraud" is just some pretense to adopt new surveillance laws and/or make them socially acceptable to adopt.
Something being difficult and complicated, like doing your taxes, is no excuse for braking the law. It's unfair that those with formal employment can't dodge taxes because they only get the NET amount in their bank account, and those with cash businesses can. Either legalize tax fraud for everyone or crack down on it for everyone.
Simplifying tax bureaucracy will not happen in Germany as it's the bread and butter of many companies who make their living on helping you deal with the complex system, and if the system were to be reformed, all these parasites would go bust. That aint gonna happen.
Another reason why it aint gonna happen is that it's what the majority of Germans voted for. They prefer having a system where that enables some businesses to dodge taxes masquerading as "privacy", so the politicians can't take this away and still expect to get reelected.
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Another reason why it aint gonna happen is that it's what the majority of Germans voted for.
In 2005, Angela Merkel (CDU) gave the campaign promise to simplify the taxation system immensely (using a system that the renowned export Paul Kirchhof (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kirchhof) developed). Independently, at the same time, Friedrich Merz, Merkel's "frenemy" at the CDU, independently made his own proposals to strongly simplify the taxation system ("Bierdeckelsteuer" [beer coaster tax]; meaning that for a typical citizen the whole tax declaration should fit on a beer coaster).
I know a lot of young people who voted for the CDU in the 2005 election exactly because of the ideas of Paul Kirchhof to simplify the taxation system despite otherwise not being attracted to the election goals of the CDU.
In 2005, the CDU became the strongest party in the German Federal Parliament. But Angela Merkel and the CDU broke this campaign promise. In other words: these politicians are nothing but mere fraudsters who deserve to rot in the jail for breaking such a campaign promise.
Thus: The problem is not that the Germans did not vote for this, but the problem is that the politicians are fraudsters breaking election promises and thus belong in jail instead of the parliament.
In general, the low IM app usage just means that mobile phone plans are cheap. It's not like the US where you have to take a payday loan to send more than five SMS a month.
That's a recent thing. I remember spending a semester in the US a decade ago. My cheap student ass was surprised to see how expensive every mobile plan was. It was literally cheaper to buy a roaming plan in my own country for six months than to buy a plan in the US.
Just FYI, here I pay 10€ for unlimited calls, text, and data, and 25GB roaming abroad per month.
I don't buy this. I've had unlimited SMS messages included for as many years as I can remember but pretty much exclusively use IMs. The media integration and things like that are just much better.
Germans in general are also highly reluctant towards digital payments, commonly citing "privacy" as a reason. However, the same people often have no qualms about using the - hilariously named - Payback loyalty programme, which keeps a record of individual consumer purchase behaviour.
> However, the same people often have no qualms about using the - hilariously named - Payback loyalty programme, which keeps a record of individual consumer purchase behaviour.
Living in Germany, I know no one from my circles who uses Payback. This is in my gut feeling also a central reason why such loyalty programs push/nudge so hard to get people as customers - because so few people want them.
The only time when such loyalty programs were tried out by quite some people in Germany was when in 2001 the Rabattgesetz [discount law; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabattgesetz] was abolished. Then, for a short time, quite some people tried out the now upcoming loyalty programs, but soon stopped using them because quite some people were very vocal about telling the privacy implications of these loyalty programs.
Rather: "Thanks. Do you have a Payback card?" - the person holds a speech about the privacy implications of Payback when there is a long queue at the checkout. :-D
More often than not, "privacy" is merely used as an argument to avoid change and slow down progress, though.
During the pandemic, for example, remote work tools were routinely criticised or even banned in Germany due to their supposed privacy implications - with schools and public administration often having been the worst offenders.
There were civil servants who were "working from home", but in fact couldn't do any actual work because they were not allowed to access their department's intranet from home.
There were even teachers who refused to use video conferencing solutions for teaching their classes.
While some of that criticism regarding privacy issues with some of those tools might even have been valid, without suggesting a viable alternative, such criticism is pointless and detrimental, because all it achieves is to promote inertia and the status quo.
Yes it's impossible until it isn't. I'm sure people swore that Nokia was also unassailable in its time.
What the EU (or someone) needs to provide is a much better product, and personally I think iOS and Android are pretty bad. People are stuck in those ghettos but those with imagination can envisage something much better.
Genuine question: do you think iOS and Android are pretty bad from looking at the UX, or from looking at the actual architecture in the underlying codebase?
Said differently: do you have any kind of idea about the complexity of the system below the UI? When you imagine something much better, does it involve the security model/team, for instance? Because that's the first thing: you don't ship to billions of devices with a nicer UI: you need a solid system below.
The second thing is lock-in effect. Does your much better system require a brand new app store with brand new apps? Because that's how Windows phones failed. Or does your better system reuse Android apps (in which case how is it much better than Android)?
First mover advantage. Android and iOS are too entrenched. It would take one of those to lose its competitive edge, like Facebook did versus Tiktok. Or for Europe to borrow a page from China and force their citizens to use this European mobile operating system while shielding it from outside competition, until perhaps it gains enough traction worldwide to challenge the dominance of the other two.
It's the same story across industries. Europe missed the fifth generation fighter aircraft boat, so now everyone is buying F-35s. Even if FCAS and Tempest ever get off the ground, the F-35 will be too entrenched in allied air forces to be dislodged.
Rockets too. Europe missed the reusable rocket boat, and now SpaceX is eating the Ariane's lunch, for the most part, except for politically sensitive European projects for which they still use more expensive Ariane launchers. The rocket market is more prone to disruption however, because launches are a one-and-done kind of thing. Switching launch provider is easier than switching operating system or the composition of an air fleet.
Neither android nor iOS are the first movers though. They both came after the other players were already struggling trying to make it happen without reaching critical mass.
Microsoft, BlackBerry, Symbian, Nokia, Palm. They all 'moved' before Android and iOS and at various points in time where the leading players in their market segments. Yet they all rested on their laurels and fell to Android and iOS.
Agreed, but not by being first. Apple won by waiting till the time was right, all the technology was mature and then executing everything better than everybody else. And if we look across the past decade or so we'll find plenty of times that Apple and iOS copied features first seen in Android phones.
I think that, if you look at the first iPhone, the technology was not at all “mature”. The first versions had some decidedly undesirable workarounds in both hardware and software. There’s even an interesting argument that Apple’s reliance on a somewhat outdated, non-“modern” language (ObjC) was an advantage when switching to low powered mobile hardware. What Apple did was succeeded in a more concept driven paradigm change - usable soft keyboard, multi touch, usable “full web” browser. Also rejecting dubious technologies like Flash that were considered de facto at the time. Basically packaging standard technologies into a far better conceived whole. This was their successful business model for a long time. It’s only recently that Apple has been leading technology in terms of innovation, and that only happened once they became so dominant, which only happened after the iPhone
The EU is a big enough market to strong-arm manufacturers and developers into suppporting their OS:
- an extra import duty on phones not running EU OS unless an equal number of EU OS phones is imported
- all EU-sponsored projects must run on EU OS
- if you're a software dev in the EU making phone apps, you get a tax break if you support EU OS
- and so on
I mthink realistically, as long as Google can abuse its market position to make any other mobile OSs nonviable by withholding access Gmail and Youtube and so on, nothing can challenge Android and iOS (which has the critical mass so that Google can't do this to get rid of it).
Even Microsoft with its infinite money failed when competing, because a monopoly to most of the Internet's email and video is just that powerful.
I'm amazed at these posts. Where have you been in Europe? I live in France and near everyone's personal email is @gmail.com. Youtube is still king (though twitch and tiktok are killing it with the younger people).
I'm Hungarian. While I do know a few people who make a living as YouTubers, I don't feel that it's for everyone. And while Gmail is well-known, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have more than 50% of the email market here. When I've been in Germany, it seems like no one uses Gmail at all.
If I was making an OS in Europe, I definitely wouldn't mind shipping Google's gmail + youtube Android apps in a non-Google OS. I have very little doubt that the EU's anti-trust would side with me.
I use a de-Googled Android system (/e/ OS) with NewPipe (instead of YouTube) and K-9 to fetch my gmail. I even fetch my Google calendar with CalDAV!
At least for the mail, that's perfectly fine. I could imagine that heavy users of YouTube don't like NewPipe, maybe? Works fine for me.
Really, the only thing is that I don't have Google Maps (but I love OSMAnd and Organic Maps). To me that's fine, but many people find it hard to move to OpenStreetMaps.
I have tried Cyanogen in the past, then Lineage, and always went back to the stock Android. I must say that /e/ OS is the very first one that I consider almost at the level (requires to accept NewPipe, K-9 and OSM, but no weird update flow or tuning or crashes or anything like that).
And creating a Google-free fork of Android for the European market would be relatively easy. You'd basically just need a European Android App Store to replace Google Play. The rest is details.
> Let’s think of it this way: would you switch to a phone that didn’t have a native Gmail app? Or Twitter? TikTok? Instagram? It would take an inordinate amount of time just for those companies to port over their software — and they’re some of the best-resourced organisations in the world. “
The funny thing is, these services all have fully functional websites and have no specific elements that need to be native. A PWA would be enough, except perhaps for Instagram and the camera/movie filters, and TikTok for the movie editor which could need to be separate apps.
WhatsApp would be the only thing you couldn't replace with a web version, since you need to use WhatsApp on your phone to verify your session.
Sites like Instagram will also become increasingly aggressive in pushing you towards the app as you use the mobile web version until it eventually denies you new content. I believe Twitter and TikTok are the same.
I use Instagram mostly through the web interface (because uBlock Origin), and while it works pretty well on desktop, on mobile Firefox its super buggy and generally not a great experience. It's worth it for me to see what's going on without adds, but I can't imagine most people would accept the tradeoff.
There's a bunch of other social media services (Line does something similar, mixi does too) that force some anchoring to a mobile phone, probably to guarantee access to the phone number and be sure to have you use the service on the go.
I think they care less about being native than having direct access to your phone and data. An alternative OS giving similar privileges to PWA could probably be rubber stamped by these services. (do we want that though ?)
> would you switch to a phone that didn’t have (...)
Of course, I already did. I've been using GNU/Linux smartphones since 2008: first Neo FreeRunner, then Nokia N900, now Librem 5. I don't feel like I'm missing anything at all.
Sounds good. Now all it needs is a dramatic reduction price; it's about ten times what I paid for my Moto G30 a couple of years ago which has more RAM, more storage, more and higher resolution cameras.
I'm not against the idea, but as it stands it's very much a niche product for people who can afford, and are willing, to pay considerably more than average for less capable hardware.
What strikes me is, these questions have already be solved: our desktops have access to banking, and they can have good cameras.
Inherently, these are not technical problems. On the other hand, they become social problems when the services firmly cuts off web access and anything that's not iOS or Google's android. IMHO generic customer banks shouldn't be allowed to do that.
Not included in the list but unfortunately the mobile-focused browser version of Google Maps does not have the same functionalities as the desktop-focused version of the same app. More exactly I cannot access the "Saved Maps" (or whatever it's called) menu/section on mobile via the browser, the same way as I can when using my desktop computer. I don't know why that happens.
Funnily enough, the functionality has recently stopped working for me on desktop, too, I get a "Server error" message whenever I try to access any of the maps from the "Saved Maps" menu.
I intentionally don’t use the gmail app on my iPhone because it’s terrible and never seems to work well. Their mobile website works better than their app.
I think there might be room for a phone that only has those top 5-10 apps on it, out of the box, even if just a PWA at first. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone and adding a ton of complication that non-technical people don't like anyway.
But everyone still wants their banking app, maybe a local public transport app, their favorite newspaper, a few simple games maybe, some local government apps if we're talking about the EU... (Looking at my non-technical family members.)
This. I have a phone precisely for a few specific apps that will not be rewritten for a new platform (e.g. WhatsApp, Signal, public transport).
I am happy with /e/ OS (which is Android, I don't get why they talk about a "separate OS"), but the only way I could imagine using e.g. PostmarketOS is with waydroid. Which kind of emulates Android.
Is PWA the solution? I don't know: will WhatsApp/Signal/<those apps I need> write a PWA app and test it on exotic OSes? I would guess not, and therefore PWA do not seem to solve this problem.
Funny thing is, I haven't used any of those apps ever except gmail at least 5+ years ago. Maybe that's just me but in Europe I don't know if people are as dependent on these apps as the author suggests and europe is big and there are other popular social media
> would you switch to a phone that didn’t have a native Gmail app? Or Twitter? TikTok? Instagram?
There are people who would love that, but they are a very small minority. I for one would love to do that, but I need most of the popular apps to do my job.
This is the approach that Windows Phone pushed. When they realized they were late to the party, pushing "standardized" PWAs made most sense. They even had quite a lot of tools to make it easy to encapsulate a normal website in a PWA and submit it to their store. But still it didn't catch on... I don't really see why this time would be different.
Good performance, UI and other nice features don't "need" to be there, really. But an audience of real people will choose a product that has a lot of these pesky, not really necessary things.
I do not use any of those apps. I do use Gmail and used to use Twitter. There is and was zero reason to use Twitter app. Or youtube app, website is literally better.
And I don't use Gmail app, because it was taking too much space.
Yeah, I only use it for “casting” videos to tv, not watching on the phone. This is all true for most content-focused apps: they are more usable as a website, which has possibilities of tabs, in-page search, deep bookmarks, … Apps, as a general rule, suck.
> would you switch to a phone that didn’t have a native Gmail app? Or Twitter? TikTok? Instagram?
Yes. I don't use any of those services. Occasionally friends link me to Twitter and I read the web version. The fact it makes that experience shit with pop-ups and limited message history is actually benefit.
I sometimes use G-suite apps, but they're also better as web apps on a desktop/laptop than phone apps.
Same for me but that's missing the point. I don't use those particular services but I don 't have to look very far to find apps for which I wouldn't buy a phone lacking them. For me that's Spotify, Whatsapp, Google Maps, my banks, 1password, etc.
The even funnier thing is, Gmail supports standard mail protocols, and can be interacted with using just about any mail client, and Twitter has a billion custom clients for it as well. The problem is that Google is hiding the SMTP/IMAP options deep behind needing a 2fa and "app passwords", and all the others are actively rejecting or working against letting people create custom apps for the services easily.
There's no need for any of these companies to create any new software for any new OS, they choose to prevent people from doing so, and that's actively harmful in the current walled garden of an ecosystem we've created.
If you put 2 labels on an email, then it is represented twice over IMAP.
IMAP is folder based, not label based.
And what this means is that if you remove an email from a folder, you don't actually remove it completely, you just remove the label, and the email continues to exist elsewhere.
(I might be wrong about this behavior: the behavior of deleting an email over IMAP depends on whether it has labels left or not).
Update: good read about how the system doesn't behave like you think it does
My take on why a third mobile OS is hard is that phones don't have a standard BIOS type system that gets all basic I/O working on it. So having an OS that can install on existing phones is a bunch of work.
And there were previously other OSes. Microsoft has windows phone with its tiles. There was WebOS. And some others. At the commercial phone OS level, it seems it's hard to be profitable unless you have tons of users.
For the Linux like phone OS, I'd love to see one, but I feel like we get back to my original point, supporting existing hardware is hard due to device specific BSPs needed.
> My take on why a third mobile OS is hard is that phones don't have a standard BIOS type system that gets all basic I/O working on it. So having an OS that can install on existing phones is a bunch of work.
You can have AOSP-based OS (nowadays "smartphone OS" covers a whole bunch of stuff that isn't in AOSP so I don't consider that it's the same OS) that re-uses original Android OEM drivers. You can take pretty much any Android smartphone (assuming it doesn't prevent you from running your own software) and run an AOSP-based OS on it with literally 0 effort. That's called Project Treble, or GSI. You'll find dozens of ROMs (both Google Android, and Google-less) that will work on pretty much any modern (less than 4 yr old) Android smartphone.
Even better, it is possible to use those drivers meant for Android on GNU/Linux through Halium. There are even tech demos where you don't need original kernel source or anything, you just flash it, and it mostly works on any modern-ish Android smartphone that lets you flash your own software.
Really, the drivers and hardware support has no reason to be a blocker in the 2020s (I'm not saying it's totally free though) to make a new mobile OS, except that you're stuck to support a wide range of rather old vendor Linux kernels.
PS: The future is brighter, and in few years you'll probably be able to make a really brand new OS, that will run in a VM with drivers running in another VM alongside yours
I call those Android flavours. Those are not separate OSes. Windows Mobile was a third mobile OS. /e/ OS is not.
Just like there are not tens of different browsers out there: all the Chromium-based are essentially Chrome with small changes (that people care about, but still small changes).
- a SMS app
- a Maps app or API
- a location API
- a web browser
- an alarm app
- Remote notification system
- app store
(and there are many many other examples)
can be called a smartphone OS. Yet AOSP doesn't contain (Google/)Android version of those.
So yes, I dare say AOSP-based OS can be non-Android.
Good to know that AOSP lets you just build ontop of it now. To me this means not really a different OS, but closer to something like a different window-manager (this is more akin to Gnome vs KDE, not Linux vs FreeBSD).
Third mobile OS is hard because people lack ideas.
Reality is, if you have some clear vision for an OS that's different to Android you can just take Android and fork it until it meets your vision. Toss out what gets in your way, keep the stuff that you don't disagree on. There's no need to build an entire new OS from scratch. You can deviate as far as you like that way.
People don't do this and Android forks are all pretty similar because, ultimately, these platforms are pretty good and Google/Apple don't miss many tricks. That's why this /e/ OS is trying to differentiate on vague promises like privacy or being European. They don't have any deep ideas for ways to make the end user's life better.
Not a criticism of them, by the way. I don't know what I'd change if I was given a big pile of money and told to make a new OS, fork of Android or not. But that's the point. Not many people do.
It sounds like it's basically an Android fork in which case it's arguable that it "challenges Android" although, like Amazon's Fire OS, it challenges parts of the ecosystem built on top of Android.
Microsoft has a big advantage though due to their size. Microsoft has the resources to fix bugs, implement new standards, and add new features themselves without using any new Google work. They've got the resources to make it so the relationship of Edge to Chromium is like the relationship of Chromium to Webkit, or of Webkit to KHTML.
Small companies making a fork of a big Google project like Chromium or Android are much less likely to be able to do that. They are likely to have to keep porting over much from Google to keep their project relevant.
That makes it a lot harder to really challenge the Google project.
Creating a simple app for iOS or Android is way too complicated.
And the EU DMA's legislation sucks at replacing the entire OS, it will just cement the existing oligopoly, without any right for the end user to have a app store where you can replace the OS, only the apps.
It's also the problem that Microsoft's HTML Applications were trying to solve. Also the problem that Microsoft's VBScript was trying to solve. Also the problem that Chrome PWA were trying to solve. Also the problem that Apple HyperCard was trying to solve. Also the problem that Borderland Delphi was trying to solve. Also the problem that Bubble(.io) was trying to solve.
It's an old problem. Nobody's yet solved it for good.
The problem isn't the tech stack. Claiming that switching to python or whatever would solve the problem is similar to claiming that switching to a different accounting tech would solve inflating healthcare costs. The problem is a social one and requires a social solution.
> There is space for a new runtime, a Python phone. Creating a simple app for iOS or Android is way too complicated.
I disagree. Just hire software devs who are not overwhelmed by languages other than Python, and that's it.
Then you seem to completely miss the point that Python is a programming language, not a mobile SDK. How do you plan to replace the Android SDK with Python? If you just call the same underlying libraries, then you just changed the language, but you did not change at all the complexity of writing an app.
> There is space for a new runtime, a Python phone.
There's Kivy. Although I made an Android app with it years ago, then one day the build system I was using (Buildozer) was suddenly broken for no apparent reason (I assume something it was downloading changed and broke it), and that was the end of that.
The tech sector in Europe is really pathetic. The only arguments that European tech products use to support themselves are "it's European" and "protects your privacy" (as in, it follows the GDPR, as any other product from other countries would).
Just look at this article: it doesn't say "a third mobile OS can't challenge..." but "a European mobile OS can't challenge...". They aren't even shooting for "good" anymore, just "European"
>Just look at this article: it doesn't say "a third mobile OS can't challenge..." but "a European mobile OS can't challenge...". They aren't even shooting for "good" anymore, just "European"
> They aren't even shooting for "good" anymore, just "European"
This can also be interpreted differently: there is so much distrust with respect to the privacy that US or Chinese products provide that it does not have to be "good" to still get accepted.
IMO Europeans have much less "we MUST scale to infinity and beyond" mentality than SV culture. Once you have a working product that pays 10 people, just being able to pay those 10 people + a little margin can be enough. And not trying to scale to infinity means cash is used more efficiently, thus small ad revenu can be enough.
No, there isn't, because if there was, people wouldn't use those apps. People may yak and yak about how they distrust the apps, but their actions say that they don't really distrust them.
> People may yak and yak about how they distrust the apps, but their actions say that they don't really distrust them.
My experience is different: I know quite some people who are very vocal about how much they distrust the apps, but are very consequential in their actions: they at least strongly avoid using such apps; sometimes they even attempt to cease staying in contact with people who broadcast sensitive data around by using particular apps.
One could have similar arguments for the US: Huawei phones got banned because they were getting too big, DJI drones got banned because everyone else in the Western world (including the US) is 10 years behind... TikTok is eating Facebook's lunch...
To me, the real question is how this differs from Graphene OS, which has the advantage of already working- so much, so, it seems, that they get security patches faster than almost any other Android phones. And then it's a game of re-Googling your de-Googled phone for most people, it seems.
Privacy-respecting phones already exist in the US market (I think it's pretty much illegal in Europe to get cell service without government ID, but that's not firsthand). If you think you care, buy https://inteltechniques.com/book7a.html, get a Pixel phone, and try for yourself.
Ironically, they're handicapped by Google's SoCs being quite bad (though seemingly not much worse than most recent Qualcomm flagship products, this most recent generation excepted).
> To me, the real question is how this differs from Graphene OS, which has the advantage of already working
/e/ OS already works, I've been using it for 2 years flawlessly.
What's the difference with GrapheneOS? They target a slightly different audience. GrapheneOS is really into security, and for that they only target Pixel phones. CalyxOS is based on Graphene and tries to make it more user-friendly (at the cost of being less secure: different users, different threat models). /e/ OS is based on Lineage (I believe), and also tries to make it more user-friendly.
They all have a focus on privacy (as in, not being tracked by Google & Co), but they do it differently. I would argue that they are all on the same side.
as far as i understand the key difference is that /e/OS removes any connections made to google, whereas grapheneOS considers that in itself problematic because that changes the fingerprint of the phone, therefore grapheneOS has toggles to allow making a GrapheneOS device appear to be an AOSP device (from: https://grapheneos.org/features )
so it seems that /e/OS implements less security features than grapheneOS.
i haven't used grapheneOS so i don't know if there are any other differences.
/e/OS certainly is more userfriendly (compared to the lineageOS it is based on)
Let's be honest here, European <any software tech> can't really challenge the global industry right now. We have a few Spotifys and SAPs as outliers, but due to the legal context, administrative hurdles and reasons much better explained in googleable articles there are ample reasons why the tech sector of the EU is severly challenged, despite still having quite a good amount of brain resources left.
Mobile - with its close integration needs with other high tech industries and cutthroat margins - is near the tip of that huge iceberg.
It could be that legal requirements are a constraint, but I think that the lack of investors is the real issue. Because we're not really comparing Europe to "all of the US", we're comparing all of Europe to Silicon Valley -- I doubt Europe is a worse place to start a tech company than, say, Nebraska.
> Nebraska is an at-will employment state. This means employees can be dismissed for any reason at any time and without notice when an employment contract or other governing principle is not in effect.
Do you really think Lincoln, Nebraska is automatically a better place to start a company than, say, Stockholm?
Talent availability and local startup ecosystem don't count for anything? All that matters is that you can dismiss employees for any reason at any time?
It's 2023, best talent in tech works from home anyway. A developer in Stockholm would rather work for a corp from Delaware for $200k as a contractor than for a local company where he would be lucky to make $70k post-tax.
The first part, yes. I'm currently in Israel, and although tech salaries here can be quite high, the overall comparison with remote US positions still works the same way.
Is 100 EUR per hour mid market for contractor jobs that keep you in full employment for years, offer stock options and PTO and are actually a regular job in everything but the name and taxes? Because that's what I meant by “contractor” in my original comment. Should have explained it right away, my bad.
There's a lot more to running a business than how easy it is to fire people.
For all that America likes to proclaim how varied it's culture is from state to state, I'm a 2 hour train ride from switching currency and language, in addition to substantial cultural norms.
Such things seem much more significant to me than notice periods.
You only have to look at Snapchat's slap on the wrist for wilfully mis-informing its customers about the ephemerality of messaging to show the difference between the two places.
The USA is a much more attractive environment for investment and hence startups and the EU would struggle to offer the same without losing its soul.
It is, though. The EU has a unified single market for goods, but not for services. And since most software tries to provide a service, or integrate with businesses that do, EU software companies often struggle to expand to other member states than their native one. There are legal and lingual differences, obviously, but also different ecosystems of private entities that you're expected to integrate with. The EU is really good at making stuff that goes in boxes, though.
> The EU has a unified single market for goods, but not for services.
It's definitely possible and easy for a company in EU country X to provide a service to individuals or companies in another EU country. What makes you think otherwise?
The EU itself admits that. Their attempts at a digital market for services never really went anywhere. It's one reason the UK left and economic impact was less than some people claimed it would be. A services heavy economy wasn't benefiting from the EU single market so much to begin with. For example trying to sell legal or financial services across the EU is painful.
Yeah, this is it right here. EU investors are terrified of risky bets, or throwing a lot of money at untested business ideas to see if they'll catch on.
Investors in the US will throw millions or even billions of dollars at an innovative new business, even if it doesn't make that money back for years. They'll invest in consumer facing businesses, like consumer tech products, apps, social media sites etc.
EU ones won't do that. They'll invest fairly tiny sums in safe, conservative businesses with a proven (but arguably limited) business model, and that won't be enough to get the kind of unicorns Silicon Valley specialises in.
I think it's a fairly deep cultural difference. In the US there's a cultural sense that anyone can make it, that if you just put in enough effort it'll work. Arguably there's even a culture of it being your right to try anything to make money, there are very few businesses that the US would disallow. The former is obviously hubris, and the latter creates some of the worst exploitation in the US, but sometimes these factors create hits.
In the EU the culture is much more cynical, and the belief in individual impact is much lower. There's also more of a sense of there being things that one just does not try to exploit, types of business that could be considered morally distasteful (see the healthcare industry for the clearest examples of what I mean).
These are very broad generalisations, they don't apply evenly across the US or the EU, and while they all sound quite negative they are really trade-offs and it's up to individuals to decide where they prefer to sit on these trade-offs.
Yeah Europe it's facing an excessive taxation plus excessive regulation. Regulation it's good but it should be small and precise. The excess of regulation in Europe it's only being benefitial to huge corps, that have money to either pay the small fines, or an army of lawyers to either comply or circumvent regulations.
For example, they forced brands to switch to Type-C, everyone here cheered up the EU. This will come back to bite us in the a*. EU's actions were excessive and in the future will hurt innovation since brands will now have to ask permission to EU to come up with new standards if needed.
Regulation it's always destructive. It's always meant to forbid/enforce some actions. Some light regulations can be bad for climate but good for companies and economy and vice-versa, it's up to the politician to find the balance.
European politicans can't do that since they're busier trying to win next elections.
I am gonna have to strongly disagree, the major reason tech companies struggle in Europe is because of access to funding. Investors are way more risk averse and 'VCs' are closer to business angels than VC's in terms of level of funding rounds.
In the same way, for EU companies to really play ball and have access to US based VCs they at some point have to incorporate in Delaware or NY to be taken seriously.
The only exceptions to what I described that I have seen seem to gravitate around fintech.
It’s baffling to me why the entire world in the 1900s was eventually able to compete with Detroit in auto manufacturing…even after being decimated during WW2 (Europe, South Korea and Japan have no trouble competing in automotive)…why have they not been able to compete with Silicon Valley?
Manufacturing cars is far more capital intensive than anything in software, so I don’t think funding is at the heart of the issue.
Either there’s something fundamentally different about computers/software or the rest of the world is about to finally wake up and start competing.
It's partly the war dividend. Auto industry got well established prior to WW2, around the turn of the century. WW2 and the aftermath changed everything in Europe:
- Much of the continent was a hotbed of dictatorships and extremists well into the late 20th century. Large parts were locked behind the iron curtain; skilled but poor. No way for them to compete. Spain and Greece were dictatorships until ~1975. Italy experienced continuous political instability post-war and arguably still does. Germany was split in two with a giant razorwire wall down the middle. This situation is not conducive to establishing new successful companies.
- Netherlands and Norway became (to some extent) petro states.
- The British population had been subjected to years of wartime propaganda in which all government failures were covered up, so naturally concluded that governments must be pretty great at running things. Even now, previously unknown wartime disasters are still being declassified, one stopped being secret only a few years ago. The British economy became steadily more socialist from the 1940s to the 1980s, being changed only when the economy was on the brink of collapse and Thatcher came in. During the 1970s when HP and Intel were establishing themselves in Silicon Valley the UK government was being toppled by openly communist unions, there were rotating power outages, 3 day weeks, trash piling on the streets, an IMF bailout. Thatcher righted the ship but not before the UK lost most of its heavy industry including its auto industry to militant unionism, along with the drive to set up new industries. Even when a nascent domestic computing industry developed it was partly driven by the BBC wanting to educate kids, and came way late compared to the Valley firms who were by then already large and powerful.
- Europe decided that the best way to avoid a repeat of the war was to unify under a single government, but the form of that government was heavily influenced by the French and their love of protectionist big government subsidies and tariffs. That shapes everything and the EU doesn't hesitate to do things that are blatantly anti-industry or anti-innovation if they think it will advance their agenda of further "integration" i.e. movement of power away from national governments towards the EU institutions. That always takes priority. The US government doesn't have the same goal of abolishing the individual states, so Congress and the Supreme Court often rule in ways that enable local divergence and policy innovation. The EU in contrast sees those things as problems to be solved, not opportunities or constitutional rights.
- Elitist distrust of the population is sadly a long term feature of European culture. After the war Germany decided it needed strong anti-nazi/anti-holocaust speech related laws. Partly as a consequence Europe doesn't have the first amendment or strong free speech culture, and frequently doesn't have any concept of fair use in copyright law, but large parts of Silicon Valley since 2000 aren't really possible without these things. The animating values of early Facebook, Google, Twitter etc are populist in nature and these companies turn towards widespread speech control only came very recently in the grand scheme of things.
And a non-war factor: in some countries an pervasive problem with cultural elitism in which American things are crass and commercial, unlike the refined reasonableness of all things Euro. It's not true so causes people to search around for talking points to try and prop it up. In the tech world this is often privacy and you see the results in the article, where the author interprets criticism of a privacy focused OS nobody cares about (iOS and Android privacy is good enough) as a criticism of making a "European" phone OS.
I don't automatically agree with either of those points, but, I absolutely welcome this perspective on HN ( sometimes it feels we don't always understand why things are set up in a given way and some historical context is helpful ).
"Europe" is not a cohesive social structure. You see even less entrepreneurship in Asian countries. These are cultural issues.
The simple truth is that dropping out and starting companies for example is not deemed as an acceptable path in life by most of polite society in these places.
And well, there must be a number two after Silicon Valley. Who would you say that is?
France had a strong computing industry until the 90s, at which point it attempted to expand into the US, borrowed heavily – and was killed by protectionism.
Since then, France has been very timid in the domain.
The only successful rival to Apple's iOS came from Google, a planet-spanning company with almost infinite resources. In turn, even Microsoft—also world-girdling, also with Scrooge McDuck's coffers—couldn't compete against Android and iOS despite spending tens of billions including buying Nokia.[1] What other entity in the US—let alone Europe—is anywhere in the ballpark in terms of having the financial, technological, and brand-awareness resources to have a chance?
[1] Heck, might be tens of billions even excluding Nokia
Sure, but have you tried using OS generated for MS phone? I remember looking at their phones and their one distinct advantage was an amazing ( for the time ) screen with crazy resolution and excel integration. That was it. Everything else was the same Windows, but more locked ( that at least was my first impression; after that I did not care enough to keep track of it. ).
It is almost like they failed, because this 'phone' project was an afterthought and it was more important to take down Nokia.
To answer the title: Maybe because they consistently go months without providing basic security updates to their users, phoning home to Google out of the box despite advertising otherwise, selling devices that are already end-of-life, and even leaking user-data to other users as I note in my list with cited sources here: https://divestos.org/misc/e.txt
However, every single time I read about it, it is from the author. Not by explaining why I should like DivestOS, but by explaining over and over again why other Android alternatives are so very very very bad.
To me it's a bit like those people who keep telling everyone and their dog that "Signal is ridiculously insecure because they require your phone number". I guess in the hope of converting them to their own secure messaging app that nobody has ever heard about and that requires 17 steps to add a contact. But in reality, I'm pretty sure that they push people back to WhatsApp/Telegram. That is counter-productive IMHO, because they would benefit from people getting open to Signal (if people refuse to install Signal, they probably won't remotely consider those exotic super-secure apps).
Same thing here. If my parents can move to /e/ OS, that's great for all the alternative Android flavours, because it means that they moved away from Google/Samsung/etc. But if you go tell my parents that they need GrapheneOS, with a Pixel phone, and that their most important apps don't run there "for security", then my parents will just stay on the Android from Samsung.
I guess DivestOS is a nice idea, but honestly the behavior of the author (criticizing all efforts I can see out there) does not make me want to look into it.
It only happens to seem that way because there are sadly a lot of companies portraying themself as helpful open source projects when they really just want to sell insecure devices to pad their pockets.
Sure, you just say ("disclaimer, I write divestOS (link)") and then start spitting on the project ("I told them, but they haven't updated their default PDF app in at least 2 months!!!! That's absolutely ridiculous, look at my list of complaints (link)! Note that it's a huuuuge list because I keep all the complaints and just mark them as [FIXED] when they are not relevant anymore").
> But this is just wrong, GrapheneOS has superior compatibility compared to systems shipping microG.
Can you install, say, WhatsApp through the store on GrapheneOS? Can I install my public transport app (hint: it's not on F-droid) or my banking app?
And can I use GrapheneOS with my Samsung phone?
It's great if GrapheneOS fits your needs. But think that other people may have other needs. Which may involve compromising on security/privacy for the sake of convenience.
> they really just want to sell insecure devices
It's not black and white, is it? There is no such thing as a "secure device" (what would that mean? "Cannot be hacked and will not leak any data ever"?). Devices can be more or less secure, that's a gradient.
Maybe you want a more secure device (at some cost, e.g. you don't install a third-party keyboard and you only use a Pixel phone), but others want a more convenient device.
The whole point of projects like /e/ OS (which you don't seem to begin to grasp) is to provide more privacy while keeping as much convenience as possible. For "normal" people, not for people who like spending their free time writing lists about when the default PDF app was last updated. Because normal people don't care as much.
You're shifting goal posts, the devices they're selling are end-of-life by manufacturer or are years behind _available_ firmware/blob updates.
> not for people who like spending their free time writing lists about when the default PDF app was last updated.
I don't know why you're focused on the PDF viewer when they went _eleven_ months without updating the browser and system webview, one of the most important programs on any computer.
> The PDF renderer in their PDF viewer is from 2016 and has dozens of long-known security issues.
I don't care, I uninstalled it and installed another one.
> Yes you can, maybe you should read their documentation
Good to know, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't the case a few years ago when I considered GrapheneOS (see "Sandboxed Google Play is close to being fully functional"). But that seems great indeed!
> You're shifting goal posts, the devices they're selling are end-of-life by manufacturer
Mine is not end-of-life at all.
Some are, but that's a feature: it's great to be able to not change phone every 2 years because the manufacturer just wants to sell more.
> or are years behind _available_ firmware/blob updates.
Mine is not at all.
Some have less support, I suppose. If it matters to you, you can probably contribute.
> they went _eleven_ months without updating the browser and system webview
I think it's mitigated by the fact that you can install your favourite browser, so only the webview is an issue. But yes, that's a problem. Doesn't make the whole project crap: they are successfully making a nice-to-use de-Googled phone. That's a step in the right direction. That does not make them perfect.
My complaint about your behavior is that IMHO, you sound like you are trying very hard to tell people that the whole project is crap. I'm sure you have a ton of interesting and constructive criticisms you could share. But when I read "DivestOS", my thought is not "oh, that interesting Android fork?" but rather "oh, that's the guy who goes on other people's forums to tell them that their project is crap".
There is Sailfish OS, been using it for a couple of years now... works pretty great. Not free, but that's kind of the point, you pay for a product so they don't have to get your money in some hidden way.
There are native apps, and you can download Android apps from open app stores. I was surprised how many companies deploy to these open stores, like my own bank.
> With Sailfish OS you can run beautiful gesture-based native apps powered by Qt framework
I wonder how Qt mobile apps can remotely compete with iOS/Android ones. Like... do they actually have mobile devs willing to write mobile apps in Qt? That's a genuine question. I, for one, wouldn't want to.
The ecosystem is not great, I think Jolla doesn't really have the resources to promote good mobile applications, and none to dedicate to convince existing mobile developers to create QtQuick versions. Despite that, the hobbyists are making things, and they work decently well most of the time.
I find it funny to see a GDPR banner on the privacy oriented website. It means that they are storing more PII and/or longer than is really needed, the question is why.
> Let’s think of it this way: would you switch to a phone that didn’t have a native Gmail app? Or Twitter? TikTok? Instagram? It would take an inordinate amount of time just for those companies to port over their software — and they’re some of the best-resourced organisations in the world
Another reason, many of these apps collect lots of user data to monetize it. Judging by the way they reacted to iOS privacy changes, we can guess how a more privacy focused OS will be treated.
Even if /e/OS has android app compatibility, there's no guarantee that these vendors will not cripple functionality when they detect that the OS is not android.
> Even if /e/OS has android app compatibility, there's no guarantee that these vendors will not cripple functionality when they detect that the OS is not android.
/e/ OS is Android. Just without the Google & Co trackers. /e/ OS does not prevent apps from leaking your data: it removes the trackers from the system. Then you have to choose your apps wisely, like on any other OS.
Yes, but, note for comparison how, firefox, chrome or its derivatives are treated when they try to use Origin, NoScript and the like. Websites don't like it. It used to be they would try to fail gracefully, but that is increasingly not the case. More often than not, I get an error suggesting I don't use firefox ( the error is not really about firefox since website works just fine with extensions turned off ).
Right. Yeah sure, apps can cripple functionality if they detect that there are no Google Services. In fact some apps just crash.
In my 2 years on a de-Googled phones, I have had only 2 apps that crashed (presumably because I don't have the Google Services), one of which I did not really care about. The other is my banking app though, so I just had to get used to not having it :-).
Do you have a blog where you keep a record of your experiences running de-googled device? Right now I kept going for the extremes ( either full on vendor lock in or pinephone ), but I don't think I tried middle ground yet. Maybe that would be something I should try.
I don't. Maybe it would be worth writing one some day?
But quickly here: I used CyanogenMod on a Galaxy S2 10 years ago, then Lineage on an S4. I liked them, but clearly that was "experimenting with alternative ROMs". I had bugs, crashes, sometimes the camera would not work, etc.
I have tried a PinePhone for fun in 2020, which was mostly a good opportunity to learn about PostmarketOS. That's a nice Linux project, but it didn't work as a phone for me.
Two years ago, I got a FairPhone 3+ Murena (i.e. with /e/ OS pre-installed). The experience has been extremely close to a vendor ROM: I essentially have not touched/tuned/reinstalled anything, I use it like any vendor Android I've had in my life. That's a big change from my previous experiences where I was expecting things to go wrong.
The big difference with Google-Android is that I don't have the Play Store and the Play Services (so GMail and Google Maps won't work). /e/ OS has their own store ("App Lounge") which works really well and can connect to the Play Store. I am not a very heavy user of my phone (I'm a dev, so my main is the computer): messaging apps, web browser, public transport app, stuff like this. Most work, I have only had to give up on my banking app a month ago (presumably an update makes it crash because I don't have the Play Services?).
I had to adapt a few things though. I use CalDAV to fetch my Google Calendar (for work), the /e/ OS Mail app (which is a fork of K-9 Mail) to fetch my Google Emails (works great). I use Organic Maps (open source fork of MAPS.ME) and OSMAnd instead of Google Maps (it's a bit different, but OpenStreetMaps is an amazing project). I use NewPipe instead of YouTube, and that's about it. For the rest I use the normal apps (WhatsApp, Signal, Threema, public transport, PeakFinder, Lichess... Maybe I had to get Spotify Lite instead of Spotify (I don't see a difference).
Overall, with the way I use my phone, I don't think I've really had to compromise. I would say that the biggest thing is probably Google Maps which sometimes works a bit better than my alternatives (which are great). But that's mostly stuff like friends making fun of me because I need 1 minute to find something on the map when their Google Map just spontaneously showed it because it knew they were thinking about it :-).
My advice would be: choose a phone that is supported by the OS you want. Murena is a great program for /e/ OS, I'm sure CalyxOS says which phones they support. GrapheneOS is a bit more aggressive in terms of security, so I think you would have to compromise a bit more. That's why I went for /e/ OS in the first place, and I'm super happy. CalyxOS seems similar, but I don't have experience there.
unfortunate accident because the previous name had a trademark issue. so they used this temporary name until they could get a new name that is trademark safe. my guess is that they chose a horrible name intentionally, in order to avoid trademark risks and make it easier to change the name later.
that new name appears to be Murena, but it looks like they decided to use Murena only as a brand for the phones that they sell themselves, leaving /e/OS as the name of the actual software.
As a mobile developer: The two primary OS ecosystems are already difficult to develop for. And we already kind of have a third if you count Amazon Fire, as they run Android without Google services, which creates all kinds of edge cases specific to this OS flavor.
What could end up happening is the smaller OS markets would end up getting a lower quality of service because it's hard for product teams to justify the dev and maintenance time investment for smaller user bases. Stretching us thiner than we are will mean a lower quality of service for all app users unless it becomes easier to develop for multiple OS flavors at once. And no, RN and Flutter are not silver bullets here: they come with their own tradeoffs that each team must assess for their product.
> And we already kind of have a third if you count Amazon Fire, as they run Android without Google services
Genuine question: how is that different than e.g. /e/ OS? It's not like there are tons of alternative Android SDKs. I essentially see this:
- iOS
- Android with Google Services
- Android without Google Services
- others
Of course you need to support the first two. Apparently you do support the third, which is great. But then I would think that if it works on Amazon Fire without the Google Services, it will work on a de-Googled /e/OS, CalyxOS or GrapheneOS.
Real world example: One of the app teams I work with has apps for iOS, Android with Google Services, and Android without Google Service (FireOS). The FireOS app is behind the Google app and here's what one of the Android devs had to say about it:
"There are a few libraries we use that aren't supported on Amazon, but the big ones are that it doesn't have access to the Google Play store or Google Play Services. Amazon has their own app store and subscription system, which isn't too bad conceptually, but it does require restructuring the subscription code to have a more generic store interface, and implementing that for the Amazon store
Google Play Services is more of a pain. They've become much more integral to Android apps generally since we last updated the Amazon app, and we've also become more heavily dependent on things like Google Analytics/Google Tag Manager. The native APIs for those rely on Google Play Services. The suggestion from Amazon seems to be to use the javascript versions, which I think means creating a dummy webview and invoking javascript through it."
So there is a time cost associated with maintaining this bifurcation which may not match up with the potential return.
Granted, this maintenance may be a one-time investment or can be thought of when designing a new app, but many apps have been around for years at this point and have plenty of baked in assumptions about the OS ecosystem that it's running on.
I'm not saying alternate OSs can't be done, but it will be a hard sell for many app product teams unless engineers add support out of love for the project on their own time.
> Google Play Services is more of a pain. They've become much more integral to Android apps generally since we last updated the Amazon app, and we've also become more heavily dependent on things like Google Analytics/Google Tag Manager.
Yeah, that's exactly the goal of Google: lock-in. The Play Services are nice, so you use them, and then your users are stuck with Google. You don't really care about the few users who would use your app on a de-googled phone, so in the end, the user is screwed.
> So there is a time cost associated with maintaining this bifurcation which may not match up with the potential return.
Right. But what I don't get, really, is this: you seem to say that you already support FireOS (which has a cost), and that you can't afford supporting another de-googled Android flavour. But my point is that if it works with FireOS, then it should work on any de-googled Android flavour.
Also moving away from the Play Services is definitely hard. Ideally one would not start using them in the first place. For instance many apps use Google Analytics because managers somehow like to look at statistics, but I am convinced that in many case they don't do anything remotely useful with them (except confirming their biases and showing nice graphs in presentations).
>Yeah, that's exactly the goal of Google: lock-in. The Play Services are nice, so you use them, and then your users are stuck with Google. You don't really care about the few users who would use your app on a de-googled phone, so in the end, the user is screwed.
Yes.
> Right. But what I don't get, really, is this: you seem to say that you already support FireOS (which has a cost), and that you can't afford supporting another de-googled Android flavour. But my point is that if it works with FireOS, then it should work on any de-googled Android flavour.
We were approached by Amazon to build a FireOS app in the early days in exchange for prominent featuring back when the Fire Phone was launching, and it hasn't really panned out as valuable since then.
> Also moving away from the Play Services is definitely hard. Ideally one would not start using them in the first place. For instance many apps use Google Analytics because managers somehow like to look at statistics, but I am convinced that in many case they don't do anything remotely useful with them (except confirming their biases and showing nice graphs in presentations).
Agreed in theory, although actually getting away from that can be harder in practice.
> although actually getting away from that can be harder in practice.
Sure. A rational company will say "the more profitable way is to reinforce Google's position, so we will do that". At the end of the day, the goal of a company is not to build a nice product, but to make money. If making money means going with the monopoly, so be it.
The only way to change it is to make it more profitable for the company to support the alternative. But in this case I can't see how a law could enforce it (how would it even formulate that?), so the monopolies win. That's sad, but that's how it works.
That's also precisely why tech is part of the climate change problem and not of the solution: we don't build tech that help the world, we build tech that makes money. And making money means using energy, which means burning fossil fuels. Technology destroys the planet because the rules incentivize it to do so.
I think these points are fair, and we are just following market forces. If a new phone OS suddenly popped up with a ~20-30% market share we would obviously need to support it; we are in the business of building apps and not smart phones or their OS.
Begin rambling rant / feel free to not respond to any of this:
Imagine for a moment that you are trying to build and distribute something as big as an OS: How would you fund it? Would it be non-profit, state driven, or open-source? Or would it be a for-profit company with for-profit incentives? If it's the latter, market forces will likely dictate lock-in and closed-source development. This isn't necessarily meant to be nefarious to users: it's just how it has to work if it's going to work at all.
On the topic of free software / open OS's and user habits in general: Most users don't want to toil in the fields of setting up a custom OS for the sake of privacy or software freedom: The vast majority of users just want a convenient way to check their messages, find restaurants, hotels, and flights, engage with social media, play a casual game, maybe use a niche app or two, and check the news. Users get complacent when they build habits, so if you want users to switch they need a 10x better reason to switch to consider breaking their habit.
I don't know how something like /e/OS is going to become popular enough to actually pull it off without government intervention, and then we're just trading one market bully for another. Sure we have examples of privacy focused companies seeing success like Duck Duck Go, but think about how much easier it is for the average user to switch to a new search engine over a phone.
> Begin rambling rant / feel free to not respond to any of this
It actually reads like a constructive opinion IMO ;).
> This isn't necessarily meant to be nefarious to users
I think it tends to be. That's why we need governments and laws: market forces don't have any notion of ethics, they will use slavery if they are allowed to. Laws set a framework. Laws are supposed to reflect what we want as a society, and then market forces are supposed to play in this framework. Of course it's difficult: players who are too big/rich to fail can abuse laws with impunity, and that's an unsolved problem.
If you want companies to stop abusing the privacy of their users, you need laws for that. But laws are voted by politicians who represent the people. So you need to convince the people that they need privacy, so that they put pressure on their politicians to vote laws. But it's hard to convince the people, because they typically don't give a shit. Even if their life is at stake (see climate change).
> Most users don't want to toil in the fields of setting up a custom OS
That's where I'm tempted to say that you judge /e/ OS without having ever seen it. Am I right? The way I use /e/ OS is that I bought a Fairphone 3+ that came with /e/ OS installed, and that's it. There was absolutely nothing to setup. Of course, /e/ OS comes without the Play Services, so I have to accept that I don't have Google Maps. But that's part of the deal: I got /e/ OS because I did not want Google.
Yes, most users are happier not giving a shit and using the Google apps. But that's not a problem of being technically savvy at this point, it's just about giving a shit. My parents can use /e/ OS without a degree in Computer Science. They can use all of their apps (WhatsApp, Signal, web browser, public transport, banking, e-mails) except the ones that depend on the Play Services (I haven't found a single app that they need and cannot use because of that).
> Users get complacent when they build habits, so if you want users to switch they need a 10x better reason to switch to consider breaking their habit.
I totally agree with you there: people are way too lazy to even consider trying an alternative to apps coming from abusive Big Data. IMO it's a bit like if my neighbour had honeybees and offered to sell me some honey, and I answered "no thanks, I prefer to get the one from China at the supermarket, it's easier for me".
It's a bit unfortunate, though. Ethics should be a reason to consider changing habits.
The title is confusing, because it's a quote of yet another article. The linked article explains why they believe this is wrong.
That has the interesting side-effect of revealing who has been commenting here without reading the article, though :-). Which is kind of funny, because the original article that was criticizing /e/ OS did not actually really know what /e/ OS was... it seems like no one is interested in hearing the others, just sharing their uninformed opinion.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadThis is probably because /e/OS IS Android. It also contains microG, an open source framework that talks to Google Play Services.
Europe is so heterogeneous that any claims about it as a whole are misleading at best. Germans are probably the most privacy conscious people in the western world, for reasons which should probably be obvious given their history.
I don't think that's the case, especially among the younger generations which are largely English speaking and grew up with the internet.
Also, for example, if you looked at the US in detail you'd find just as many cultural difference between individuals states, it's likely true of any large country or federation.
In Germany and as far as I am aware also in France and Spain - all three are among the largest EU countries - the younger generation is hardly largely English-speaking. Only the more educated people (who studied at a university) are typically somewhat confident in their English, and at least in these three countries English is nevertheless only used as a second/"helper" language.
With UK having left the EU, the only EU countries where English is an official language are Ireland and Malta; in both of these countries English is only one of the official languages, not the only one.
I agree. While I don’t have any direct contact with younger people, our fantasy stores went from being 50/50 English/German products to having 99% in German.
(FWIW, first-time university students have consistently made up >50% of Germans in their respective age cohort for the past decade, so most ≈20–30 year-olds are in that university-educated English-speaking group.) https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bildun...
> And assuming German-English bilinguals are indifferent to the language
Well, I stopped going to those stores because I prefer English, but I’m not exactly representative ;)
Have you been to Europe outside of its big touristy capitals? To describe the younger generation as "largely English-speaking" is absurd. I'm from a medium-sized city in northern France. Go there and try speaking English to the young people in the street. See where that gets you.
I'm here in coastal Croatia and English ability is common, if mixed, with younger people being mostly proficient. Of course the French are in a class of their own when it comes to (not) speaking English, but I'd still posit there are plenty of young French people who speak or understand English to some degree. If I needed help on your streets with only English I'm sure there would be someone who would be able to help me out.
Yeah, that's why every morning on the tram I see the average Germans texting on Tinder, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Telegram, and mindlessly scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, the most privacy focused apps on the planet. Sounds very privacy conscious, handing your most intimate data to US & Chinese companies.
Also, A lot of German are really into digital banks and brokers lately like N26, Scalable Capital, etc. which report everything to the Government authorities anyway, so I'm not buying the whole privacy angle. Cash usage at small businesses is mostly to enable tax fraud.
Germany is well known for giving support to political endeavors which help to ensure the privacy of citizens. Try looking around Munich on Street View.
It is a breath of fresh air for privacy focused people.
I know German people who will completely quit or at least strongly avoid contact to people who have an account at such services.
Cash is still king[2].
Germans care about their privacy - maybe not everybody has clear all the implications of modern applications, but you cannot dismiss the care of privacy with just saying that your experience on a bus doesn't match this.
[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/ISOC_CI_AC_I_...
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/ISOC_CI_AC_I_...
[2]: https://www.bundesbank.de/en/press/press-releases/payment-be...
That's mostly due to German older generations being tech-illiterate and skewing the statistics, like the boomer politicians who want to have their internet "printed", and my 50 year old ex-manager who refused to use Jira and had me send him a weekly email with the tasks in progress and their status.
On the other side of the spectrum, if you look at Germans under 30-35 they're all super connected via privacy shoddy apps like Telegram.
>Cash is still king
>[...]if you ever being to Berlin, and you want to go to a restaurant, you better bring cash. No body accepts cards or electronic payments there.
That's only due to rampant tax fraud in Germany's gastronomy sector and other small businesses.
So privacy there means privacy from the taxman, which is unfair for those who have to pay their fair share of (not small) taxes and support the burden of the social system.
Of course, there is no way to know exactly how much tax fraud there is, but it doesn't seem that tax fraud in Germany is particularly high: https://www.taxobservatory.eu/repository/estimating-internat...
No citation, just my anecdotal time working in the gastronomy sector as a student and that of several of my friends as well.
Seeing the owners at the end of the night carrying home buckets full of cash out of the restaurant that will never be seen in any tax declarations is a common sight, and will just be dumped into cars and real estate later.
This isn't restricted just to gastronomy and hospitality either. Lots of businesses deals in Germany are done on a handshake, with sums declared in the contract at, say 10k Euros, with the actual payment for the services being something like 50k Euros, meaning only 10k gets taxed, the rest is tax free for you. You get the point.
In case you're wondering why real este buying prices in Germany are so high and seem completely disconnected from the median wages, that's one of the reasons why. Lots of undeclared black money sloshing around the economy looking for a safe parking space.
>but it doesn't seem that tax fraud in Germany is particularly high
Meh, irrelevant. That statistics looks at offshore untaxed wealth. Most small business owners dealing in cash won't have accounts in Bermuda or Panama for that.
You (as a government) want people to be honest with their taxes? Set up the taxation laws so that "being honest" is incredibly easy. Instead Germany has one of the most convoluted taxation laws in the world.
This alone should provide strong evidence that all the talk about "tax fraud" is just some pretense to adopt new surveillance laws and/or make them socially acceptable to adopt.
Simplifying tax bureaucracy will not happen in Germany as it's the bread and butter of many companies who make their living on helping you deal with the complex system, and if the system were to be reformed, all these parasites would go bust. That aint gonna happen.
Another reason why it aint gonna happen is that it's what the majority of Germans voted for. They prefer having a system where that enables some businesses to dodge taxes masquerading as "privacy", so the politicians can't take this away and still expect to get reelected.
In 2005, Angela Merkel (CDU) gave the campaign promise to simplify the taxation system immensely (using a system that the renowned export Paul Kirchhof (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kirchhof) developed). Independently, at the same time, Friedrich Merz, Merkel's "frenemy" at the CDU, independently made his own proposals to strongly simplify the taxation system ("Bierdeckelsteuer" [beer coaster tax]; meaning that for a typical citizen the whole tax declaration should fit on a beer coaster).
I know a lot of young people who voted for the CDU in the 2005 election exactly because of the ideas of Paul Kirchhof to simplify the taxation system despite otherwise not being attracted to the election goals of the CDU.
In 2005, the CDU became the strongest party in the German Federal Parliament. But Angela Merkel and the CDU broke this campaign promise. In other words: these politicians are nothing but mere fraudsters who deserve to rot in the jail for breaking such a campaign promise.
Thus: The problem is not that the Germans did not vote for this, but the problem is that the politicians are fraudsters breaking election promises and thus belong in jail instead of the parliament.
Just FYI, here I pay 10€ for unlimited calls, text, and data, and 25GB roaming abroad per month.
Sometimes it's better to just say nothing.
Living in Germany, I know no one from my circles who uses Payback. This is in my gut feeling also a central reason why such loyalty programs push/nudge so hard to get people as customers - because so few people want them.
The only time when such loyalty programs were tried out by quite some people in Germany was when in 2001 the Rabattgesetz [discount law; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabattgesetz] was abolished. Then, for a short time, quite some people tried out the now upcoming loyalty programs, but soon stopped using them because quite some people were very vocal about telling the privacy implications of these loyalty programs.
"Will you pay cash or with credit card?"
"Why, cash of course!"
"Thanks. Do you have a Payback card?"
"Certainly."
> "Certainly."
Rather: "Thanks. Do you have a Payback card?" - the person holds a speech about the privacy implications of Payback when there is a long queue at the checkout. :-D
During the pandemic, for example, remote work tools were routinely criticised or even banned in Germany due to their supposed privacy implications - with schools and public administration often having been the worst offenders.
There were civil servants who were "working from home", but in fact couldn't do any actual work because they were not allowed to access their department's intranet from home.
There were even teachers who refused to use video conferencing solutions for teaching their classes.
While some of that criticism regarding privacy issues with some of those tools might even have been valid, without suggesting a viable alternative, such criticism is pointless and detrimental, because all it achieves is to promote inertia and the status quo.
oh that is where I knew the name from. I have very fond memories of Mandrake.
But why does this article has "— Gaël Duval — December 1st 2022" at the end, if it's supposedly published on March 27 2023?
What the EU (or someone) needs to provide is a much better product, and personally I think iOS and Android are pretty bad. People are stuck in those ghettos but those with imagination can envisage something much better.
Said differently: do you have any kind of idea about the complexity of the system below the UI? When you imagine something much better, does it involve the security model/team, for instance? Because that's the first thing: you don't ship to billions of devices with a nicer UI: you need a solid system below.
The second thing is lock-in effect. Does your much better system require a brand new app store with brand new apps? Because that's how Windows phones failed. Or does your better system reuse Android apps (in which case how is it much better than Android)?
only the US can spy on everybody and secretly subpoena US companies
can't control everything, who'll then believe they're the leader of free world?
It's the same story across industries. Europe missed the fifth generation fighter aircraft boat, so now everyone is buying F-35s. Even if FCAS and Tempest ever get off the ground, the F-35 will be too entrenched in allied air forces to be dislodged.
Rockets too. Europe missed the reusable rocket boat, and now SpaceX is eating the Ariane's lunch, for the most part, except for politically sensitive European projects for which they still use more expensive Ariane launchers. The rocket market is more prone to disruption however, because launches are a one-and-done kind of thing. Switching launch provider is easier than switching operating system or the composition of an air fleet.
Microsoft, BlackBerry, Symbian, Nokia, Palm. They all 'moved' before Android and iOS and at various points in time where the leading players in their market segments. Yet they all rested on their laurels and fell to Android and iOS.
Agreed, but not by being first. Apple won by waiting till the time was right, all the technology was mature and then executing everything better than everybody else. And if we look across the past decade or so we'll find plenty of times that Apple and iOS copied features first seen in Android phones.
And a lot of EU and CN "start ups" are just copies of well known US companies
- an extra import duty on phones not running EU OS unless an equal number of EU OS phones is imported - all EU-sponsored projects must run on EU OS - if you're a software dev in the EU making phone apps, you get a tax break if you support EU OS - and so on
Even Microsoft with its infinite money failed when competing, because a monopoly to most of the Internet's email and video is just that powerful.
These days I’d also think the bigger question would be availability of popular streaming music & video apps and Tik Tok.
At least for the mail, that's perfectly fine. I could imagine that heavy users of YouTube don't like NewPipe, maybe? Works fine for me.
Really, the only thing is that I don't have Google Maps (but I love OSMAnd and Organic Maps). To me that's fine, but many people find it hard to move to OpenStreetMaps.
I have tried Cyanogen in the past, then Lineage, and always went back to the stock Android. I must say that /e/ OS is the very first one that I consider almost at the level (requires to accept NewPipe, K-9 and OSM, but no weird update flow or tuning or crashes or anything like that).
The funny thing is, these services all have fully functional websites and have no specific elements that need to be native. A PWA would be enough, except perhaps for Instagram and the camera/movie filters, and TikTok for the movie editor which could need to be separate apps.
Sites like Instagram will also become increasingly aggressive in pushing you towards the app as you use the mobile web version until it eventually denies you new content. I believe Twitter and TikTok are the same.
I think they care less about being native than having direct access to your phone and data. An alternative OS giving similar privileges to PWA could probably be rubber stamped by these services. (do we want that though ?)
Well you _could_, they just don't want you to. I very rarely use Whatsapp on my phone. Then again, I very rarely use Whatsapp :P
Of course, I already did. I've been using GNU/Linux smartphones since 2008: first Neo FreeRunner, then Nokia N900, now Librem 5. I don't feel like I'm missing anything at all.
I'm not against the idea, but as it stands it's very much a niche product for people who can afford, and are willing, to pay considerably more than average for less capable hardware.
Inherently, these are not technical problems. On the other hand, they become social problems when the services firmly cuts off web access and anything that's not iOS or Google's android. IMHO generic customer banks shouldn't be allowed to do that.
Funnily enough, the functionality has recently stopped working for me on desktop, too, I get a "Server error" message whenever I try to access any of the maps from the "Saved Maps" menu.
Surely Google wouldn't intentionally release a crippled mobile website to force you to use their app and lock you out of competitors' OSes.
I am happy with /e/ OS (which is Android, I don't get why they talk about a "separate OS"), but the only way I could imagine using e.g. PostmarketOS is with waydroid. Which kind of emulates Android.
Is PWA the solution? I don't know: will WhatsApp/Signal/<those apps I need> write a PWA app and test it on exotic OSes? I would guess not, and therefore PWA do not seem to solve this problem.
There are people who would love that, but they are a very small minority. I for one would love to do that, but I need most of the popular apps to do my job.
In the hypothetical situation that it was needed though, PWAs are probably more common now than when Microsoft tried that
And I don't use Gmail app, because it was taking too much space.
Yes. I don't use any of those services. Occasionally friends link me to Twitter and I read the web version. The fact it makes that experience shit with pop-ups and limited message history is actually benefit.
I sometimes use G-suite apps, but they're also better as web apps on a desktop/laptop than phone apps.
Same for me but that's missing the point. I don't use those particular services but I don 't have to look very far to find apps for which I wouldn't buy a phone lacking them. For me that's Spotify, Whatsapp, Google Maps, my banks, 1password, etc.
IMAP is folder based, not label based.
And what this means is that if you remove an email from a folder, you don't actually remove it completely, you just remove the label, and the email continues to exist elsewhere.
(I might be wrong about this behavior: the behavior of deleting an email over IMAP depends on whether it has labels left or not).
Update: good read about how the system doesn't behave like you think it does
https://www.tomscott.com/fix-gmail-labels-threads/
I have the issue you describe with ProtonMail's labelling, but not Gmail's.
Not anymore
And there were previously other OSes. Microsoft has windows phone with its tiles. There was WebOS. And some others. At the commercial phone OS level, it seems it's hard to be profitable unless you have tons of users.
For the Linux like phone OS, I'd love to see one, but I feel like we get back to my original point, supporting existing hardware is hard due to device specific BSPs needed.
You can have AOSP-based OS (nowadays "smartphone OS" covers a whole bunch of stuff that isn't in AOSP so I don't consider that it's the same OS) that re-uses original Android OEM drivers. You can take pretty much any Android smartphone (assuming it doesn't prevent you from running your own software) and run an AOSP-based OS on it with literally 0 effort. That's called Project Treble, or GSI. You'll find dozens of ROMs (both Google Android, and Google-less) that will work on pretty much any modern (less than 4 yr old) Android smartphone.
Even better, it is possible to use those drivers meant for Android on GNU/Linux through Halium. There are even tech demos where you don't need original kernel source or anything, you just flash it, and it mostly works on any modern-ish Android smartphone that lets you flash your own software.
Really, the drivers and hardware support has no reason to be a blocker in the 2020s (I'm not saying it's totally free though) to make a new mobile OS, except that you're stuck to support a wide range of rather old vendor Linux kernels.
PS: The future is brighter, and in few years you'll probably be able to make a really brand new OS, that will run in a VM with drivers running in another VM alongside yours
I call those Android flavours. Those are not separate OSes. Windows Mobile was a third mobile OS. /e/ OS is not.
Just like there are not tens of different browsers out there: all the Chromium-based are essentially Chrome with small changes (that people care about, but still small changes).
- a SMS app - a Maps app or API - a location API - a web browser - an alarm app - Remote notification system - app store (and there are many many other examples)
can be called a smartphone OS. Yet AOSP doesn't contain (Google/)Android version of those.
So yes, I dare say AOSP-based OS can be non-Android.
No offense, but you should re-think your definition of "OS"
Reality is, if you have some clear vision for an OS that's different to Android you can just take Android and fork it until it meets your vision. Toss out what gets in your way, keep the stuff that you don't disagree on. There's no need to build an entire new OS from scratch. You can deviate as far as you like that way.
People don't do this and Android forks are all pretty similar because, ultimately, these platforms are pretty good and Google/Apple don't miss many tricks. That's why this /e/ OS is trying to differentiate on vague promises like privacy or being European. They don't have any deep ideas for ways to make the end user's life better.
Not a criticism of them, by the way. I don't know what I'd change if I was given a big pile of money and told to make a new OS, fork of Android or not. But that's the point. Not many people do.
Small companies making a fork of a big Google project like Chromium or Android are much less likely to be able to do that. They are likely to have to keep porting over much from Google to keep their project relevant.
That makes it a lot harder to really challenge the Google project.
Creating a simple app for iOS or Android is way too complicated.
And the EU DMA's legislation sucks at replacing the entire OS, it will just cement the existing oligopoly, without any right for the end user to have a app store where you can replace the OS, only the apps.
It's an old problem. Nobody's yet solved it for good.
What we have now is 2 giants imposing the programming language we have to use.
The "problem" that all those technologies are trying to solve is that people want to be productive without learning the tools.
I disagree. Just hire software devs who are not overwhelmed by languages other than Python, and that's it.
Then you seem to completely miss the point that Python is a programming language, not a mobile SDK. How do you plan to replace the Android SDK with Python? If you just call the same underlying libraries, then you just changed the language, but you did not change at all the complexity of writing an app.
There's Kivy. Although I made an Android app with it years ago, then one day the build system I was using (Buildozer) was suddenly broken for no apparent reason (I assume something it was downloading changed and broke it), and that was the end of that.
Just look at this article: it doesn't say "a third mobile OS can't challenge..." but "a European mobile OS can't challenge...". They aren't even shooting for "good" anymore, just "European"
That's the original NextWeb article title.
This can also be interpreted differently: there is so much distrust with respect to the privacy that US or Chinese products provide that it does not have to be "good" to still get accepted.
Does this mean that EU apps all charge subscriptions or are advertising heavy in order to provide their service and data privacy?
They are not charities so if they are not selling their data, they have to be making money some other way
My experience is different: I know quite some people who are very vocal about how much they distrust the apps, but are very consequential in their actions: they at least strongly avoid using such apps; sometimes they even attempt to cease staying in contact with people who broadcast sensitive data around by using particular apps.
Privacy-respecting phones already exist in the US market (I think it's pretty much illegal in Europe to get cell service without government ID, but that's not firsthand). If you think you care, buy https://inteltechniques.com/book7a.html, get a Pixel phone, and try for yourself.
Ironically, they're handicapped by Google's SoCs being quite bad (though seemingly not much worse than most recent Qualcomm flagship products, this most recent generation excepted).
Edit: this site suggests that there are quite a few countries in Europe where you don't have to register: https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Registration_P...
/e/ OS already works, I've been using it for 2 years flawlessly.
What's the difference with GrapheneOS? They target a slightly different audience. GrapheneOS is really into security, and for that they only target Pixel phones. CalyxOS is based on Graphene and tries to make it more user-friendly (at the cost of being less secure: different users, different threat models). /e/ OS is based on Lineage (I believe), and also tries to make it more user-friendly.
They all have a focus on privacy (as in, not being tracked by Google & Co), but they do it differently. I would argue that they are all on the same side.
so it seems that /e/OS implements less security features than grapheneOS.
i haven't used grapheneOS so i don't know if there are any other differences.
/e/OS certainly is more userfriendly (compared to the lineageOS it is based on)
Mobile - with its close integration needs with other high tech industries and cutthroat margins - is near the tip of that huge iceberg.
https://www.mightyrecruiter.com/recruiter-guide/at-will-empl...
Almost any american state is a vastly better place to start a company than almost any european country.
Talent availability and local startup ecosystem don't count for anything? All that matters is that you can dismiss employees for any reason at any time?
The average non-contractor salary is much lower and it's rare to find startups hiring contractors, I assume since they don't have as much money.
For all that America likes to proclaim how varied it's culture is from state to state, I'm a 2 hour train ride from switching currency and language, in addition to substantial cultural norms.
Such things seem much more significant to me than notice periods.
The USA is a much more attractive environment for investment and hence startups and the EU would struggle to offer the same without losing its soul.
It's definitely possible and easy for a company in EU country X to provide a service to individuals or companies in another EU country. What makes you think otherwise?
EU investors will invest in a working idea.
We have far fewer ridiculous startup ideas or companies that can't scale, but the flip side is that we have fewer winners too.
Investors in the US will throw millions or even billions of dollars at an innovative new business, even if it doesn't make that money back for years. They'll invest in consumer facing businesses, like consumer tech products, apps, social media sites etc.
EU ones won't do that. They'll invest fairly tiny sums in safe, conservative businesses with a proven (but arguably limited) business model, and that won't be enough to get the kind of unicorns Silicon Valley specialises in.
In the EU the culture is much more cynical, and the belief in individual impact is much lower. There's also more of a sense of there being things that one just does not try to exploit, types of business that could be considered morally distasteful (see the healthcare industry for the clearest examples of what I mean).
These are very broad generalisations, they don't apply evenly across the US or the EU, and while they all sound quite negative they are really trade-offs and it's up to individuals to decide where they prefer to sit on these trade-offs.
For example, they forced brands to switch to Type-C, everyone here cheered up the EU. This will come back to bite us in the a*. EU's actions were excessive and in the future will hurt innovation since brands will now have to ask permission to EU to come up with new standards if needed.
Is there a compelling argument to be made that it's not the inverse of this? Perhaps other jurisdictions are facing destructively light regulations?
European politicans can't do that since they're busier trying to win next elections.
In the same way, for EU companies to really play ball and have access to US based VCs they at some point have to incorporate in Delaware or NY to be taken seriously.
The only exceptions to what I described that I have seen seem to gravitate around fintech.
Here’s an article from 30 years ago doing a postmortem: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/07/business/why-european-com...
It’s baffling to me why the entire world in the 1900s was eventually able to compete with Detroit in auto manufacturing…even after being decimated during WW2 (Europe, South Korea and Japan have no trouble competing in automotive)…why have they not been able to compete with Silicon Valley?
Manufacturing cars is far more capital intensive than anything in software, so I don’t think funding is at the heart of the issue.
Either there’s something fundamentally different about computers/software or the rest of the world is about to finally wake up and start competing.
Although the UK still punches above its weight in computing.
- Much of the continent was a hotbed of dictatorships and extremists well into the late 20th century. Large parts were locked behind the iron curtain; skilled but poor. No way for them to compete. Spain and Greece were dictatorships until ~1975. Italy experienced continuous political instability post-war and arguably still does. Germany was split in two with a giant razorwire wall down the middle. This situation is not conducive to establishing new successful companies.
- Netherlands and Norway became (to some extent) petro states.
- The British population had been subjected to years of wartime propaganda in which all government failures were covered up, so naturally concluded that governments must be pretty great at running things. Even now, previously unknown wartime disasters are still being declassified, one stopped being secret only a few years ago. The British economy became steadily more socialist from the 1940s to the 1980s, being changed only when the economy was on the brink of collapse and Thatcher came in. During the 1970s when HP and Intel were establishing themselves in Silicon Valley the UK government was being toppled by openly communist unions, there were rotating power outages, 3 day weeks, trash piling on the streets, an IMF bailout. Thatcher righted the ship but not before the UK lost most of its heavy industry including its auto industry to militant unionism, along with the drive to set up new industries. Even when a nascent domestic computing industry developed it was partly driven by the BBC wanting to educate kids, and came way late compared to the Valley firms who were by then already large and powerful.
- Europe decided that the best way to avoid a repeat of the war was to unify under a single government, but the form of that government was heavily influenced by the French and their love of protectionist big government subsidies and tariffs. That shapes everything and the EU doesn't hesitate to do things that are blatantly anti-industry or anti-innovation if they think it will advance their agenda of further "integration" i.e. movement of power away from national governments towards the EU institutions. That always takes priority. The US government doesn't have the same goal of abolishing the individual states, so Congress and the Supreme Court often rule in ways that enable local divergence and policy innovation. The EU in contrast sees those things as problems to be solved, not opportunities or constitutional rights.
- Elitist distrust of the population is sadly a long term feature of European culture. After the war Germany decided it needed strong anti-nazi/anti-holocaust speech related laws. Partly as a consequence Europe doesn't have the first amendment or strong free speech culture, and frequently doesn't have any concept of fair use in copyright law, but large parts of Silicon Valley since 2000 aren't really possible without these things. The animating values of early Facebook, Google, Twitter etc are populist in nature and these companies turn towards widespread speech control only came very recently in the grand scheme of things.
And a non-war factor: in some countries an pervasive problem with cultural elitism in which American things are crass and commercial, unlike the refined reasonableness of all things Euro. It's not true so causes people to search around for talking points to try and prop it up. In the tech world this is often privacy and you see the results in the article, where the author interprets criticism of a privacy focused OS nobody cares about (iOS and Android privacy is good enough) as a criticism of making a "European" phone OS.
Silicon Valley isn’t replicated because the investor culture isn’t replicated
Without an ethos of continuing to invest after getting liquidity, new companies don’t get funded
Speaking of liquidity, that’s also not prioritized across Europe, shareholdings are quite illiquid and companies are forever homes
The simple truth is that dropping out and starting companies for example is not deemed as an acceptable path in life by most of polite society in these places.
And well, there must be a number two after Silicon Valley. Who would you say that is?
The Northeast Corridor.
Since then, France has been very timid in the domain.
[1] Heck, might be tens of billions even excluding Nokia
It is almost like they failed, because this 'phone' project was an afterthought and it was more important to take down Nokia.
Noting my bias as having my own Android fork.
However, every single time I read about it, it is from the author. Not by explaining why I should like DivestOS, but by explaining over and over again why other Android alternatives are so very very very bad.
To me it's a bit like those people who keep telling everyone and their dog that "Signal is ridiculously insecure because they require your phone number". I guess in the hope of converting them to their own secure messaging app that nobody has ever heard about and that requires 17 steps to add a contact. But in reality, I'm pretty sure that they push people back to WhatsApp/Telegram. That is counter-productive IMHO, because they would benefit from people getting open to Signal (if people refuse to install Signal, they probably won't remotely consider those exotic super-secure apps).
Same thing here. If my parents can move to /e/ OS, that's great for all the alternative Android flavours, because it means that they moved away from Google/Samsung/etc. But if you go tell my parents that they need GrapheneOS, with a Pixel phone, and that their most important apps don't run there "for security", then my parents will just stay on the Android from Samsung.
I guess DivestOS is a nice idea, but honestly the behavior of the author (criticizing all efforts I can see out there) does not make me want to look into it.
Because I'm not trying to shill my project, but instead provide factual information about others in a thread about them.
> because it means that they moved away from Google/Samsung/etc.
But they didn't as my link describes.
> most important apps don't run there "for security"
But this is just wrong, GrapheneOS has superior compatibility compared to systems shipping microG.
> criticizing all efforts I can see out there
Yet I have pages dedicated to recommendations of projects, thanking people who made it possible, along with many contributions back:
- https://divestos.org/pages/recommended_apps
- https://divestos.org/pages/patch_levels#secure
- https://divestos.org/pages/about
It only happens to seem that way because there are sadly a lot of companies portraying themself as helpful open source projects when they really just want to sell insecure devices to pad their pockets.
Sure, you just say ("disclaimer, I write divestOS (link)") and then start spitting on the project ("I told them, but they haven't updated their default PDF app in at least 2 months!!!! That's absolutely ridiculous, look at my list of complaints (link)! Note that it's a huuuuge list because I keep all the complaints and just mark them as [FIXED] when they are not relevant anymore").
> But this is just wrong, GrapheneOS has superior compatibility compared to systems shipping microG.
Can you install, say, WhatsApp through the store on GrapheneOS? Can I install my public transport app (hint: it's not on F-droid) or my banking app?
And can I use GrapheneOS with my Samsung phone?
It's great if GrapheneOS fits your needs. But think that other people may have other needs. Which may involve compromising on security/privacy for the sake of convenience.
> they really just want to sell insecure devices
It's not black and white, is it? There is no such thing as a "secure device" (what would that mean? "Cannot be hacked and will not leak any data ever"?). Devices can be more or less secure, that's a gradient.
Maybe you want a more secure device (at some cost, e.g. you don't install a third-party keyboard and you only use a Pixel phone), but others want a more convenient device.
The whole point of projects like /e/ OS (which you don't seem to begin to grasp) is to provide more privacy while keeping as much convenience as possible. For "normal" people, not for people who like spending their free time writing lists about when the default PDF app was last updated. Because normal people don't care as much.
The PDF renderer in their PDF viewer is from 2016 and has dozens of long-known security issues.
> Can you install, say, WhatsApp through the store on GrapheneOS? Can I install my public transport app (hint: it's not on F-droid) or my banking app?
Yes you can, maybe you should read their documentation: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play
> It's great if GrapheneOS fits your needs.
I don't use GrapheneOS.
> There is no such thing as a "secure device"
You're shifting goal posts, the devices they're selling are end-of-life by manufacturer or are years behind _available_ firmware/blob updates.
> not for people who like spending their free time writing lists about when the default PDF app was last updated.
I don't know why you're focused on the PDF viewer when they went _eleven_ months without updating the browser and system webview, one of the most important programs on any computer.
I don't care, I uninstalled it and installed another one.
> Yes you can, maybe you should read their documentation
Good to know, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't the case a few years ago when I considered GrapheneOS (see "Sandboxed Google Play is close to being fully functional"). But that seems great indeed!
> You're shifting goal posts, the devices they're selling are end-of-life by manufacturer
Mine is not end-of-life at all.
Some are, but that's a feature: it's great to be able to not change phone every 2 years because the manufacturer just wants to sell more.
> or are years behind _available_ firmware/blob updates.
Mine is not at all.
Some have less support, I suppose. If it matters to you, you can probably contribute.
> they went _eleven_ months without updating the browser and system webview
I think it's mitigated by the fact that you can install your favourite browser, so only the webview is an issue. But yes, that's a problem. Doesn't make the whole project crap: they are successfully making a nice-to-use de-Googled phone. That's a step in the right direction. That does not make them perfect.
My complaint about your behavior is that IMHO, you sound like you are trying very hard to tell people that the whole project is crap. I'm sure you have a ton of interesting and constructive criticisms you could share. But when I read "DivestOS", my thought is not "oh, that interesting Android fork?" but rather "oh, that's the guy who goes on other people's forums to tell them that their project is crap".
There are native apps, and you can download Android apps from open app stores. I was surprised how many companies deploy to these open stores, like my own bank.
https://sailfishos.org/
"Sailfish OS is a European alternative to dominating mobile operating systems"
> With Sailfish OS you can run beautiful gesture-based native apps powered by Qt framework
I wonder how Qt mobile apps can remotely compete with iOS/Android ones. Like... do they actually have mobile devs willing to write mobile apps in Qt? That's a genuine question. I, for one, wouldn't want to.
Another reason, many of these apps collect lots of user data to monetize it. Judging by the way they reacted to iOS privacy changes, we can guess how a more privacy focused OS will be treated.
Even if /e/OS has android app compatibility, there's no guarantee that these vendors will not cripple functionality when they detect that the OS is not android.
/e/ OS is Android. Just without the Google & Co trackers. /e/ OS does not prevent apps from leaking your data: it removes the trackers from the system. Then you have to choose your apps wisely, like on any other OS.
In my 2 years on a de-Googled phones, I have had only 2 apps that crashed (presumably because I don't have the Google Services), one of which I did not really care about. The other is my banking app though, so I just had to get used to not having it :-).
But quickly here: I used CyanogenMod on a Galaxy S2 10 years ago, then Lineage on an S4. I liked them, but clearly that was "experimenting with alternative ROMs". I had bugs, crashes, sometimes the camera would not work, etc.
I have tried a PinePhone for fun in 2020, which was mostly a good opportunity to learn about PostmarketOS. That's a nice Linux project, but it didn't work as a phone for me.
Two years ago, I got a FairPhone 3+ Murena (i.e. with /e/ OS pre-installed). The experience has been extremely close to a vendor ROM: I essentially have not touched/tuned/reinstalled anything, I use it like any vendor Android I've had in my life. That's a big change from my previous experiences where I was expecting things to go wrong.
The big difference with Google-Android is that I don't have the Play Store and the Play Services (so GMail and Google Maps won't work). /e/ OS has their own store ("App Lounge") which works really well and can connect to the Play Store. I am not a very heavy user of my phone (I'm a dev, so my main is the computer): messaging apps, web browser, public transport app, stuff like this. Most work, I have only had to give up on my banking app a month ago (presumably an update makes it crash because I don't have the Play Services?).
I had to adapt a few things though. I use CalDAV to fetch my Google Calendar (for work), the /e/ OS Mail app (which is a fork of K-9 Mail) to fetch my Google Emails (works great). I use Organic Maps (open source fork of MAPS.ME) and OSMAnd instead of Google Maps (it's a bit different, but OpenStreetMaps is an amazing project). I use NewPipe instead of YouTube, and that's about it. For the rest I use the normal apps (WhatsApp, Signal, Threema, public transport, PeakFinder, Lichess... Maybe I had to get Spotify Lite instead of Spotify (I don't see a difference).
Overall, with the way I use my phone, I don't think I've really had to compromise. I would say that the biggest thing is probably Google Maps which sometimes works a bit better than my alternatives (which are great). But that's mostly stuff like friends making fun of me because I need 1 minute to find something on the map when their Google Map just spontaneously showed it because it knew they were thinking about it :-).
My advice would be: choose a phone that is supported by the OS you want. Murena is a great program for /e/ OS, I'm sure CalyxOS says which phones they support. GrapheneOS is a bit more aggressive in terms of security, so I think you would have to compromise a bit more. That's why I went for /e/ OS in the first place, and I'm super happy. CalyxOS seems similar, but I don't have experience there.
I hope this helps!
that new name appears to be Murena, but it looks like they decided to use Murena only as a brand for the phones that they sell themselves, leaving /e/OS as the name of the actual software.
What could end up happening is the smaller OS markets would end up getting a lower quality of service because it's hard for product teams to justify the dev and maintenance time investment for smaller user bases. Stretching us thiner than we are will mean a lower quality of service for all app users unless it becomes easier to develop for multiple OS flavors at once. And no, RN and Flutter are not silver bullets here: they come with their own tradeoffs that each team must assess for their product.
Genuine question: how is that different than e.g. /e/ OS? It's not like there are tons of alternative Android SDKs. I essentially see this:
- iOS - Android with Google Services - Android without Google Services - others
Of course you need to support the first two. Apparently you do support the third, which is great. But then I would think that if it works on Amazon Fire without the Google Services, it will work on a de-Googled /e/OS, CalyxOS or GrapheneOS.
"There are a few libraries we use that aren't supported on Amazon, but the big ones are that it doesn't have access to the Google Play store or Google Play Services. Amazon has their own app store and subscription system, which isn't too bad conceptually, but it does require restructuring the subscription code to have a more generic store interface, and implementing that for the Amazon store
Google Play Services is more of a pain. They've become much more integral to Android apps generally since we last updated the Amazon app, and we've also become more heavily dependent on things like Google Analytics/Google Tag Manager. The native APIs for those rely on Google Play Services. The suggestion from Amazon seems to be to use the javascript versions, which I think means creating a dummy webview and invoking javascript through it."
So there is a time cost associated with maintaining this bifurcation which may not match up with the potential return.
Granted, this maintenance may be a one-time investment or can be thought of when designing a new app, but many apps have been around for years at this point and have plenty of baked in assumptions about the OS ecosystem that it's running on.
I'm not saying alternate OSs can't be done, but it will be a hard sell for many app product teams unless engineers add support out of love for the project on their own time.
Yeah, that's exactly the goal of Google: lock-in. The Play Services are nice, so you use them, and then your users are stuck with Google. You don't really care about the few users who would use your app on a de-googled phone, so in the end, the user is screwed.
> So there is a time cost associated with maintaining this bifurcation which may not match up with the potential return.
Right. But what I don't get, really, is this: you seem to say that you already support FireOS (which has a cost), and that you can't afford supporting another de-googled Android flavour. But my point is that if it works with FireOS, then it should work on any de-googled Android flavour.
Also moving away from the Play Services is definitely hard. Ideally one would not start using them in the first place. For instance many apps use Google Analytics because managers somehow like to look at statistics, but I am convinced that in many case they don't do anything remotely useful with them (except confirming their biases and showing nice graphs in presentations).
Yes.
> Right. But what I don't get, really, is this: you seem to say that you already support FireOS (which has a cost), and that you can't afford supporting another de-googled Android flavour. But my point is that if it works with FireOS, then it should work on any de-googled Android flavour.
We were approached by Amazon to build a FireOS app in the early days in exchange for prominent featuring back when the Fire Phone was launching, and it hasn't really panned out as valuable since then.
> Also moving away from the Play Services is definitely hard. Ideally one would not start using them in the first place. For instance many apps use Google Analytics because managers somehow like to look at statistics, but I am convinced that in many case they don't do anything remotely useful with them (except confirming their biases and showing nice graphs in presentations).
Agreed in theory, although actually getting away from that can be harder in practice.
Sure. A rational company will say "the more profitable way is to reinforce Google's position, so we will do that". At the end of the day, the goal of a company is not to build a nice product, but to make money. If making money means going with the monopoly, so be it.
The only way to change it is to make it more profitable for the company to support the alternative. But in this case I can't see how a law could enforce it (how would it even formulate that?), so the monopolies win. That's sad, but that's how it works.
That's also precisely why tech is part of the climate change problem and not of the solution: we don't build tech that help the world, we build tech that makes money. And making money means using energy, which means burning fossil fuels. Technology destroys the planet because the rules incentivize it to do so.
Begin rambling rant / feel free to not respond to any of this:
Imagine for a moment that you are trying to build and distribute something as big as an OS: How would you fund it? Would it be non-profit, state driven, or open-source? Or would it be a for-profit company with for-profit incentives? If it's the latter, market forces will likely dictate lock-in and closed-source development. This isn't necessarily meant to be nefarious to users: it's just how it has to work if it's going to work at all.
On the topic of free software / open OS's and user habits in general: Most users don't want to toil in the fields of setting up a custom OS for the sake of privacy or software freedom: The vast majority of users just want a convenient way to check their messages, find restaurants, hotels, and flights, engage with social media, play a casual game, maybe use a niche app or two, and check the news. Users get complacent when they build habits, so if you want users to switch they need a 10x better reason to switch to consider breaking their habit.
I don't know how something like /e/OS is going to become popular enough to actually pull it off without government intervention, and then we're just trading one market bully for another. Sure we have examples of privacy focused companies seeing success like Duck Duck Go, but think about how much easier it is for the average user to switch to a new search engine over a phone.
It actually reads like a constructive opinion IMO ;).
> This isn't necessarily meant to be nefarious to users
I think it tends to be. That's why we need governments and laws: market forces don't have any notion of ethics, they will use slavery if they are allowed to. Laws set a framework. Laws are supposed to reflect what we want as a society, and then market forces are supposed to play in this framework. Of course it's difficult: players who are too big/rich to fail can abuse laws with impunity, and that's an unsolved problem.
If you want companies to stop abusing the privacy of their users, you need laws for that. But laws are voted by politicians who represent the people. So you need to convince the people that they need privacy, so that they put pressure on their politicians to vote laws. But it's hard to convince the people, because they typically don't give a shit. Even if their life is at stake (see climate change).
> Most users don't want to toil in the fields of setting up a custom OS
That's where I'm tempted to say that you judge /e/ OS without having ever seen it. Am I right? The way I use /e/ OS is that I bought a Fairphone 3+ that came with /e/ OS installed, and that's it. There was absolutely nothing to setup. Of course, /e/ OS comes without the Play Services, so I have to accept that I don't have Google Maps. But that's part of the deal: I got /e/ OS because I did not want Google.
Yes, most users are happier not giving a shit and using the Google apps. But that's not a problem of being technically savvy at this point, it's just about giving a shit. My parents can use /e/ OS without a degree in Computer Science. They can use all of their apps (WhatsApp, Signal, web browser, public transport, banking, e-mails) except the ones that depend on the Play Services (I haven't found a single app that they need and cannot use because of that).
> Users get complacent when they build habits, so if you want users to switch they need a 10x better reason to switch to consider breaking their habit.
I totally agree with you there: people are way too lazy to even consider trying an alternative to apps coming from abusive Big Data. IMO it's a bit like if my neighbour had honeybees and offered to sell me some honey, and I answered "no thanks, I prefer to get the one from China at the supermarket, it's easier for me".
It's a bit unfortunate, though. Ethics should be a reason to consider changing habits.
The EU could put some cash into an open solution.
That has the interesting side-effect of revealing who has been commenting here without reading the article, though :-). Which is kind of funny, because the original article that was criticizing /e/ OS did not actually really know what /e/ OS was... it seems like no one is interested in hearing the others, just sharing their uninformed opinion.