Google has news on what you will need to do for still being able to sideload apps:
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Apparently this is how you unlock the boot loader on a phone in order to install a different OS:
How to unlock the bootloader of an Android Phone
Unlocking the Bootloader allows you to install custom firmware on your Android phone and gives you full access privileges to make modifications to...
iFixit (www.ifixit.com)
And I thought having to turn off UEFI Secure Boot was offensive. Yikes! That's an awful lot of hoops to jump through, can't be done without first agreeing to the stock OS terms and conditions (my inner Stallman is very upset with that), and it requires a whole separate computer to do it with!
@argv_minus_one @FifiSch @grote Well, they made it more complicated than it seems. Running adb reboot bootloader is the fastest, most universal way to get to the bootloader, but every phone has a button combo you can use while turning it on. LineageOS instructions usually just tell you to do that I think.
The instructions do also make it sound more complicated than it actually is. When you get down to it, it really is "tap a few things, then copy and paste a couple of commands."
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They even have a video up where they try to make this all sound nice and positive:
- YouTube
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
(www.youtube.com)
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@nazokiyoubinbou @FifiSch @grote Consider the failure state. If a user fails to set up installing outside programs, they can still use their phone and make calls. If a user fails to install a new OS, they have no phone until they succeed.
@Epic_Null @FifiSch @grote That's the assumption, yes.
Two things.
First, you can just flash again if you for some reason did something stupid like yanking out the cord while it was transferring.
Second, modern Android devices usually use two separate partitions. When you flash it goes to whichever it's not currently using. So if you render it broken and for some reason can't flash again, you can still just boot the first.
Again, people have let themselves be convinced to be scared of things rather than trying them.
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@nazokiyoubinbou @FifiSch @grote sadly we don't have any other credible alternative.
bank and country already have great difficulty accepting the very hardened graphene os.
so don't expect linux phone or lineage to be allowed anytime soon

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@nazokiyoubinbou @FifiSch @grote just hope EU DSA wake up and make a stop to that in EU at minimum, could like GDPR trigger other block to do the same.
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Google has news on what you will need to do for still being able to sideload apps:
* enable developer options
* confirm prompt that you are not tricked
* restart phone and re-authenticate
* wait one day doing nothing
* confirm with biometrics or device PIN that you know what you are doing
* enjoy the last the few apps that still have developers that are motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with thisI wonder if by doing this you set out a flag that could trigger security alarms or block access to bank apps and DRM apps as Netflix, the same way as having the phone rooted or with a custom ROM
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@nazokiyoubinbou @FifiSch @grote just hope EU DSA wake up and make a stop to that in EU at minimum, could like GDPR trigger other block to do the same.
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Google has news on what you will need to do for still being able to sideload apps:
* enable developer options
* confirm prompt that you are not tricked
* restart phone and re-authenticate
* wait one day doing nothing
* confirm with biometrics or device PIN that you know what you are doing
* enjoy the last the few apps that still have developers that are motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with this@grote It would be very important to find out if banks and other critical apps will have the liberty to block users who have changed this setting, too.
It would be one thing to go through this whole ordeal once forever. And it would be another thing to do all of this, install my desired app, and then disable it again to get my bank app working on the daily, and then rinse and repeat for every new install I want to make a few weeks later.
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Google has news on what you will need to do for still being able to sideload apps:
* enable developer options
* confirm prompt that you are not tricked
* restart phone and re-authenticate
* wait one day doing nothing
* confirm with biometrics or device PIN that you know what you are doing
* enjoy the last the few apps that still have developers that are motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with this@grote @thornbill …for now, until they dictate some new hoops to jump through
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Google has news on what you will need to do for still being able to sideload apps:
* enable developer options
* confirm prompt that you are not tricked
* restart phone and re-authenticate
* wait one day doing nothing
* confirm with biometrics or device PIN that you know what you are doing
* enjoy the last the few apps that still have developers that are motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with this@grote 24 hours of not owning my phone is evil. This is stupid. I'm fine with everything but the pointless 24 hour wait and the biometric requirement. Give us your personally identifiable information and wait in phone purgatory for 24 hours to actually be able to own your device? Ridiculous.
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@grote Perhaps Windows and MacOS should do this for when you want to sideload Chrome, including corporate machines. Just so Google get depth to the feedback on this process.
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@nazokiyoubinbou @FifiSch @grote First problem: The user needs to know what an OS even is and that they're using one.
Second problem: The user needs to realize that they can use a different OS.
Third problem: The user needs to know the exact model/codename of their phone, find a suitable OS, unlock bootloader, probably install adb and/or other tools (if there is no WebUSB option), etc.Should I continue?
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Google has news on what you will need to do for still being able to sideload apps:
* enable developer options
* confirm prompt that you are not tricked
* restart phone and re-authenticate
* wait one day doing nothing
* confirm with biometrics or device PIN that you know what you are doing
* enjoy the last the few apps that still have developers that are motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with this@grote burn Google, burn Android. They are no longer useful to a human race.
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Google has news on what you will need to do for still being able to sideload apps:
* enable developer options
* confirm prompt that you are not tricked
* restart phone and re-authenticate
* wait one day doing nothing
* confirm with biometrics or device PIN that you know what you are doing
* enjoy the last the few apps that still have developers that are motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with this -
@grote @thornbill …for now, until they dictate some new hoops to jump through
@Kdude @grote @thornbill Jep, it will change. We can bet on how long it will take until the new normal gets worse.
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@grote 24 hours of not owning my phone is evil. This is stupid. I'm fine with everything but the pointless 24 hour wait and the biometric requirement. Give us your personally identifiable information and wait in phone purgatory for 24 hours to actually be able to own your device? Ridiculous.
@CalcProgrammer1 @grote The 24h waiting sounds the most reasonable part to me...
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@lumi I agree with a lot of what you wrote but would differ on some things, are you interested in back-and-forth here?
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@FifiSch @grote I don't really understand that. The instructions are so simple and detailed and the "new OS" is basically exactly the same thing right down to having the same basic startup configuration and etc. The only difference is the Google connections are optional and one can decide for themselves how far they want to go.
It's pretty much just tapping a few things, then copying and pasting two lines or so. Once it's booted you wouldn't tell it apart from stock other than its cleanliness. It's easier than installing Linux on a PC and that's actually a lot easier and less scary than people have been convinced.
I bet if people didn't let Google, Apple, and etc convince them that they are so scared of installing third party options we never would have reached this point.
@nazokiyoubinbou @FifiSch @grote as a person who has had to flash custom Android firmware in the past for work let me say: that is never going to be something that non-technical users do. There might be a market for selling refurbished devices with LineageOS preinstalled to provide an alternative, though.
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@Epic_Null @FifiSch @grote That's the assumption, yes.
Two things.
First, you can just flash again if you for some reason did something stupid like yanking out the cord while it was transferring.
Second, modern Android devices usually use two separate partitions. When you flash it goes to whichever it's not currently using. So if you render it broken and for some reason can't flash again, you can still just boot the first.
Again, people have let themselves be convinced to be scared of things rather than trying them.
@nazokiyoubinbou @FifiSch @grote
you can just flash again
Look that is comforting to someone who knows they can flash their phone. For someone who is doing it for the first time with exactly one device, that's essentially saying "If you find you do not have what it takes to do this, you can just do the thing you found you could not do to fix the mess you made!"
That is NOT going to be comforting to those who need that comfort.
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If the installation fails for some reason, and leaves your phone in an unbootable state, is there some way to recover it?
You can always recover a PC with a bricked operating system by booting from USB. Boot from USB is implemented in ROM, so no matter how horribly wrong things go, there's always a fail-safe.
I was under the impression that the equivalent to that ROM on phones is in writable storage and can be bricked along with the rest of the OS.
I dislike the new ARM Macs for the same reason, by the way: to install an OS from scratch, you need to feed it one over USB from *another* ARM Mac, which must be running macOS if I'm not mistaken.
If I can't recover from a bricked OS with nothing but a storage device containing an OS installer, then it's not a real computer and it doesn't deserve my hard-earned money.