Guys, work on improving Linux phone instead. Google is taking Android away from you and it just isn’t worth arguing with them about it. Let them hang themselves. Build a better alternative.
Platform is not the issue, apps are. Even on a Linux phone you will have to run android apps and you will have to install them from somewhere. And for most apps Play Store is the only place where apps are uploaded.
Nobody needs apps. We had a world without them before. We can do it again.
Ok, you go and tell all the companies to stop using apps.
My car charger? Controlled with an app.
Location of car chargers? In an app.
My bike GPS? Controlled with an app.
My gym entry? An app.
Climbing wall? An app.
You tell all those companies to stop using apps and add control panels to everything, go back to paper maps and RFID entry cards. I’m sure they will do it if you explain to them that there are dozens of users that don’t want to register with Google. Dozens!
it sounds like you chose to patronize places that force you to use an app – there are alternatives that don’t require apps.
they’re sometimes inconvenient AF, but convenience is literally the reason why we’re brining climate change down upon us and how the epstein class has so much control over us.
I guess you’re right. I will buy a gasoline car so I don’t have to use apps to charge it and I will drive to a gym in a different town couple times a week so I don’t have to use an app to enter it. This will sure help climate change.
I’ve said this before, there should be a way to make VPN-Style VM that on the spot/on the fly emulates Android and is tricked into thinking your phone is a certain model gives it all bullshit details or is fuckin’ stupid enough you pay 1$ a year for a service plan that has a bunch of burner androids and you connect to one and your graphene is temporarily using an emulator that is also live connected to the device (like live booting from USB) to use said device’s verified details to trick the android servers into giving you permission to use the apps through graphene on the emulator.
Idk but at that point you’re better off having a burner android to reverse engineer the apps you want for graphene.
The endless challenge is that a phone needs to talk to the phone network. The radio manufacturers are deeply in bed with the surveillance state and they are absolutely opposed to free communication. Which means they will never allow a cell phone radio to work with free software.
That part works fine
Including voicemail, and RCS? Wow I need to check out this ecosystem again, thats exciting!
I dont even need a phone that can make calls anymore, i guess there’s a lot of sms TFA
Calling is something that works in e.g. Postmarket OS. The trickier parts are NFC payments, lack of apps. So it comes with huge drawbacks. Some apps can even require that your device is verified by google and you have no way of hijacking it.
Proprietary camera software is also a huge thing. Software can do so much thing and you pay for the software also, not just the hardware but you lose the software when you install something other than the factory default.
And battery optimization is very young in desktop grade linux OSes, you won’t get that good battery life as with android.
For myself I don’t consider NFC payments or the few apps that require device integrity auth. Not everyone falls into this category but a good percentage are. We need more modern open hardware. To the larger software point there is a lot of good Foss software out there even for phones. What we need is a open software center like a flathub that makes them easy to find and deploy.
NFC and battery life are absolutely huge concerns. Cell tower stuff isn’t great either but if you absolutely had to many of us can live without cellular and just do VOIP.
Apps aren’t that big an issue, waydroid is a thing and the appification of the internet is detrimental anyway. Do it in a browser.
If we can get enough people to use Linux phones though, they’ll be pressured to allow them. However, most people won’t use Linux phones as their daily driver because of that. So it’s unfortunately a circle…
The problem is that most people are passive consumers now, but it’s slowly changing. Many of my friends who used to be regular normies having absolutely zero interest in technologies have recently switched to linux or FOSS apps and are now thamsalves FOSS enthusiasts. Heck, even my 80 year old grandma uses DeltaChat now.
You wish it’d be that easy. Building a phone isn’t the difficult part; building an ecosystem around is a huge task.
Where I live, you are almost forced to own either an Android or an iPhone, otherwise it’s tough luck getting banking, secure net identification, way to interact with the government agencies, bus or train tickets, etc.
That’s not a tech problem, that’s a regulation problem. If I am required to have something to use a service, private or public provided, that service needs to provide what I need to use it. I’m not buying my bank an interface to me. I’m not buying my employer a way to log in. I’m not paying for someone else’s problems.
Agreed — but from the point of view of a private person, it doesn’t much matter what epithet you need to prefix the word “problem”, it still remains a problem.
From the point of view of a potential phone manufacturer, it also means that whatever you do and no matter how great your product is, very, very few people are ever going to use it at all unless they can use it in whatever they need to do; and that means you will probably fail as a manufacturer.
chucked postmarket os on an old shitbox tablet and its great 👍🏻
looking forward to a spyware free future.
Which tablet is it? I’m considering buying something used and cheap to test pm os out.
Disregarding the fact that Android phones are Linux phones, a so-called Linux phone will have exactly the same problems as a degoogled AOSP phone will, plus a bunch more
If you depend on proprietary google-dependent android apps then switching to a so-called Linux phone won’t help you because you will still need those apps, and if you’re willing to forego those apps and become “FOSSed up” then there is a vibrant free software ecosystem for AOSP-type operating systems.
Android forked a lot of code off Linux back in the day, but it’s very much its own thing. It was developed under totally different design pressures with different goals and solved problems a different way.
Android is NOT Linux. It could be argued it’s a descendant of Linux though.
Android is NOT Linux.
It very much is, by the most basic technical definition of being an operating system based on the operating system kernel called Linux. I am sorry if this upsets Linux fans but this fact is easily verifiable.
Note that when I say Linux I mean only the kernel, i.e. the thing actually called Linux, and not any of the assortment of operating systems built around it (this includes Android) or any Linux-adjacent projects like GNU, systemd, GNOME, wayland, etc. Any operating system that includes those is a Linux operating system if it’s built on the kernel called Linux, but only the kernel is a prerequisite for being “Linux.”
Regardless it’s not an answer to the problem posed by the OP, which is that “Play Store blocks Aurora Store.” Anyone using Aurora Store is doing so because they require an app from Google Play Store. Whether they are using a “Linux phone” or not is irrelevant at this point because if they are, they are probably using an Android environment to run proprietary Android apps that come from Google Play Store and require Google Play Services.
This is why I say “Linux phones” are for the most part a red herring in the mobile software freedom discussion. A “Linux phone with Waydroid” is just an Android phone with extra steps. It’s not like Wine/Proton which isn’t Windows but an entirely independent implementation of Windows API. It’s literally just running Android in a container. They would be nice to have at the final step of the freedom ladder after you’ve already removed yourself from the google ecosystem, but they are not the first step on the ladder.
no, the andorid kernel is no more a linux kernel than a linux kernel is a unix kernel. thats like saying macos is BSD.
Downgraded to Aurora Store 4.8.3 and now working well for the moment.
- GrapheneOS isn’t John Android. Stop black and white thinking. You don’t have to fit in with people when you post to .ml.
- If you have read the thread you are posting (relevant message 18 hours ago as opposed to this post 13 hours ago), you would have seen that you can just press “reload accounts” to fix it.
people treating graphene like the only android OS drives me up the fucking wall, i’m sure it’s great but holy SHIT lineage has existed for years and years but… now it’s suddenly irrelevant?
Leaves a bad taste in my mouth
Just wait til the next time you’re arrested and the cops easily get into your phone.
Lineage and GrapheneOS are not even in similar levels here. Yes, LineageOS (or any of its commercial forks) is great I’d you have anything other than a Pixel phone. Definitely beats having any stock Android. But having the choice and telling people that “GrapheneOS is not the only option” without context is intentionally guiding people that could potentially have a much more secure and way more private mobile experience look somewhere else just “because”.
I don’t pretend to know what tour reasons are, could be because of Micay, could be because the GOS team of developers has no filter, I don’t know. But even Louis Rossmann, who openly chose to get away from GOS because of Micay’s actions has said, time and again, that nothing even comes close.
yeah, regular AOSP-likes that need you to manually flash them after support for your device is finally added are not particularly relevant compared to a security-focused fork that’s supported by several flagship phones at release. the latter can actually make it into the hands of the average person. the former, not so much. imagine trying to explain to your elderly mother how to flash lineage onto her phone.
Which flagship phones support graphene OOTB with no bootloader unlocking? I certainly haven’t seen any
GrapheneOS and Motorola are currently working on making their next flagships launch with GOS out of the box.
Classic Graphene users, making this all about themselves. This hurts Aurora users, period.
Ironically, this hurts Graphene users the less because they can sandbox their google play services.
Classic Graphene users, making this all about themselves. This hurts Aurora users, period.
Edit: I ran into the same issue. For now, refreshing the anonymous Aurora account solved it.
It’s working fine for me while logged in. It’s always been crap when logged out. This is nothing new.
Isn’t the whole point of it to get apps without login/anonymously?
Install it so I don’t have to have Google Play. Yes, Google can see what apps I have installed, but they don’t have their code running on my device. I consider it a 99% harm reduction.
for some people maybe, but if that was the whole point of the project then why would they even have the option to log in?
It appears Google tries to degrade alternative application stores to just another app offered through the Play Store, and therefore subject to Google’s policies (including an annual $5,000 fee for policy and security reviews). So I wouldn’t be surprised this is very much intentional: as to force application stores through a channel controlled by Google, to technically allow competition (at Google’s discretion) while ultimately killing “side-loading” through other sources.
Remember when Microsoft was forced to give a “select your web browser” prompt when setting up a Windows computer?
Quaint times, those were…
It’s on fdroid.
I recommend blocking play store.
They are not blocking the download of the app from playstore. It was obviously not available there in the first place. They blocked API access to the google servers where aurora store was getting the apk files from. They just killed the concept of aurora store (and any alternative playstore frontend) entirely.
What?
What is on fdroid??
this app called ‘aurora store’ which is a foss playstore client
I’m having trouble installing most apps from Aurora since last Sunday.
just tested it, at first i got rate limited(?) “server busy” but a minute later the updates went through fine
Misleading title. After reading the linked Gitlab discussion it’s more likely a backend change from Google side. Aurora does use burner account but early reports seem to suggest they are not flagged or rate limited.
How is it misleading?
Google actively blocking Aurora Store would be much worse than them simply changing their backend. The latter can likely be quickly resolved while the former might lead to a cat and mouse game, where it gets increasingly difficult for Aurora Store to continue to work.
And what makes you think it’s the latter and not the former?
Is this sealioning? 🫴🦋
LOL yes, anyone asking you questions you can’t answer about the shit you’re saying is “sealioning”.
The thing is, it’s already been answered. The conclusion was made based on reading the gitlab discussion. 🤷♂️ I didn’t read that myself but maybe try doing that if you’re curious. 😉🫶
The thing is, the conclusion is not going to be in any discussion outside of a Google internal chat or meeting. We know what happened, we don’t know why it happened, or what it means.
The linked gitlab discussion suggests it. There’s intermittent successes, and the particular errors align with a backend change.
Yes. once again, we know there was a backend change. The question is “why was it changed”? We already know Google manipulates YouTube for the explicit purpose of breaking Firefox, adblockers and yt-dlp. Who’s to say this is different? Certainly not anyone on GitLab.
Ah, I think I understand you a bit better. It’s true that the reason for the change is unclear, and it definitely could be malicious. However, that lack of clarity is what makes the OP article title misleading.
The article title claims the certainty that Google has blocked the Aurora store outright. I think you’ll agree that frequent errors with some successes is not the same as an intentional, simple block.
We may find that, yes, Google is intentionally blocking Aurora. It is just misleading to say so at this point.
I noticed these intermittently, but retrying later has seemed to resolve the updates.
all updates were failing to download here.
rebooted the device, and i just tested one update right from the app’s details page and that went on ok. will try the others from the update ui later, after the battery gets charged up.
edit to update: broken. updates not coming in, nor are they one-at-a-time from the app pages, either.
Seems to be working for me (in the EU).
Seems to be working again, but the last couple of days there was no good solution.
Well looks like its time to start making alternatives or scream for Linux to come out with a phone.
Linux phones work, but they depend on many Google Android apps to be daily usable by normal people.
Honestly, at this point we just need alternatives to some of these Google apps in general.
The google apps themselves are largely replaceable, but stuff like banking and communication (WhatsApp, Outlook) is where things tend to get problematic. You can run Android apps in Linux, but it might not be the most convenient thing to keep running at all times, and many banking apps will fail as they recognize the device as “insecure”.
PostnarketOS sends their regards
But does it actually work like a phone? Calling, texting, no issues?
entirely depends on the phone and the setup you go with, postmarket is kinda more of a platform than a single specific OS, like if fedora made you choose one of their spins.
I’ve only used it on a pinephone (which isn’t exactly the ideal hardware…) and my experience on that was that you could probably survive using it as a fancy feature phone.
See that’s my gripe with Linux. I don’t want a PDA, I can do all of that tinkering on PC.
I’m out of breath by this point. You want to scream now of all times?
What alternative are you going to make? My bank only publishes their app on Play Store. I can either use Play Store app or Aurora to install it. You think that if you build alternative, open source store my bank will publish their app there? You think any bank will? F-Droid already exists, do you see any banks publishing their apps there? Do you see any of them dong Linux version of their apps?
The alternative here would be some other corporation building independent app store and getting everyone to publish their apps there. Amazon tried that many years ago. Maybe Samsung could do it now. It’s definitely not something we can make.
Why not use their mobile site?
It’s not as convenient as the app.
I get the issue with the bank apps. Especially if your someone who needs to do a lot of transactions over the phone. But all these other apps, at this point we should have alternatives, its ridiculous.
Thats why we need an alternative.someone, some company, anyone that can make software that dosent rely on Google just to work.
Its crazy that even in the degoogle world, we still have to rely on Google. if the whole point is to not use Google, then what’s the point? We should have our stand alone apps should we not? We can’t make them but someone our there can.
We should have our stand alone apps should we not?
We should but I’m afraid that ship has sailed and without EU’s intervention it’s not going to change. I was trying to buy a train ticket recently and the app for local train requires Google account now. It will just keep getting worse and more and more apps will rely on Google services and require play services and google accounts. This will not be solved by open source apps. Legal solution is required.
I don’t know about FOSS stores but banks have been known to make apps and publish them on alternate stores (Samsung, Huawei, Amazon) if there are enough users. Off the top of my head, Revolut and ING Turkey have apps on the Huawei app store right now.
IMO this needs a regulatory push. If the EU encourages or requests EU-based app stores with relevant twists (regional for example), they will appear, and Google will have to accept them, and the banks will put their apps there.
No app developer wants to deal with Google Play, it’s ass and a pain in the. If a company has a local audience (like a national bank) and they get a store that caters specifically to that country and it’s easier to publish (and cheaper) than Google Play, they will use it.
Local stores don’t have to accept all apps, either. They can be regulated stores that are only open to certain entities in that country like banks, government apps, telecom, utility, public transport etc. That would take care of the most immediate needs for their citizens and liberate those from Google’s control.
100% agree that regulatory push is needed. Everything uses an app now and it’s not possible to force all the different developers to support deGoogled devices just by user pressure. There’s simply not enough of us. EU has to treat it as strategic issue for their US tech sovereignty and start acting.
Everything uses an app now
Speaking of which, that’s an issue in itself. The vast majority of “apps” are basically webviews. And yet I’ve seen banks deprecate their website in favor of app-only access, which firmly locks them (and us) into the Google and Apple ecosystem, even when the website and the bank UI are one and the same.
I guess they won’t learn until there’s a major outage. I’ve had apps installed from Play that refused to start and were unusable for a whole week because Google fucked up something accidentally about the dev’s account. If that were to happen to a bank’s app they’d understand the issue. Especially if it’s one of the banks that are exclusively online, like Revolut.
On one hand apps are convenient. It’s nice to have my flight info and boarding passes on my phone when traveling. It’s nice to confirm my transaction with a finger print instead of writing codes that I get in SMS. It’s nice to buy a ticket in my app rather than stand in like to some machine. But it’s only nice when it works without tracking and mandatory google accounts. More and more apps are tied to google but since almost everyone is using them the alternatives (like websites) are slowly disappearing.
I was in the same situation, but I slowly started to get rid of android/ios only services. Now my new bank offers every service on their web page + it has very convenient REST API where I can monitor my account.
Seems like clickbait but the graphene devs recommend against aurora store in favor of using a second profile with the sandboxed play store
The Play Store requires a Google account. Using a second profile is extremely inconvenient.
Graphene recommending this at all is extremely sus. My objective of using your operating system is to avoid giving Google any information I possibly can. Don’t know why they always recommend using Google shit in a sandbox like those packets aren’t still coming from my IP.
Its not sus. They’re just hyper-aware of security. And Aurora is just not terribly secure. Its just that you’re now choosing between privacy and maximum security. And I prioritize privacy, personally.
They pretty much only recommend Accrescent.
I agree. Specifically, it’s privacy AND freedom (free software development model).
If these two are against maximum security, GrapheneOS consistently chooses security. Which is unfortunate for me, because I would consistently choose freedom. (Especially due to long-term considerations.)
You can disregard their recommendation if you wish, I do sometimes. If they were here, I imagine they’d say they don’t see privacy and security as contradicting each other, just that there are different threat models. I think they subscribe to the idea that not everyone is going to be sufficiently informed in order to make a rational judgement, so instead they default to lowering potential risk. They do value accessibility for the tech illiterate as well.
how is Aurora less secure than PlayStore directly? GOS devs literally never make sense, and of course they recommend a app store that doesn’t even properly label non open/free apps distincly, it is not like they evwr cared about FOSS just vague “security” theater
because aurora store isn’t developed by a big team of professionals with a massive budget, and aren’t getting security audits by other teams of well-funded professionals.
the point isn’t that aurora store is insecure, the point is that the play store is VERY secure (it’ll just also merrily sell your data to palantir)
Isn’t the aurora store just a wrapper around the play-store using an anonimized account? That is exactly the reason that google can easily block them. They obviously found a way to stop the burner accounts that Aurora makes from accessing the store. It would be equal to making a container for each time you renew the anonymous account.
In other words, unless the aurora app has a backdoor (and I believe it is FOSS, so that should show itself easily), it is as secure as the play store ( which has debatable security, I believe it served malware on several occasions )
But please correct me if I’m wrong
AFAIK aurora store is a completely separate implementation, it’s certainly not based on the play store in any way since it’s open source.
because graphene devs don’t know what they are talking about, they never do
where’s your Pegasus-proof OS, then?
Nothing is 100% pegasus/quadream/candiru proof. Up-to-date and BFU Graphene is Cellebrite proof, though.
So that is why my Aurora store have been having trouble latley :(
How time flies, happy 1st cake day :)
Thanks! It has been a wonderful year here on the Fediverse!
