finally updating my Samsung tablet, and remembering my conspiracy theory that #Google and its partners deliberately made #Android and its entire ecosystem a total pile of shit to turn people off the concept of "open source" software.

"Pretend, Prevent, Profit" - a thread

what made me tweaked enough to post? realising that Google had installed a Bill Gates* in my head:

I'm upgrading a tablet released in 2014 from Android 5 (released in 2014) to Android 7 (released in 2017), and caught myself thinking of this as upgrading an "old" device to "new" software 🤬

i.e. the poisonous psychology that's sending us hurtling towards resource wars, climate destruction, and nonexistent computer privacy or security.

*of the infamous "Gates' Law Of Software" http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/Gatess-Law.html

#Google and #Samsung decided they could get away with stopping official updates for this tablet since 2015, so they did, and people are still buying their devices so I guess it worked 🤷

By comparison, and obviously #Apple are also gigantic fucking scumbags in other areas, the iPhone 6 released the same year got its last software update 3 months ago, in November 2021.

What does this "fuck it" attitude to #Android updates do?

#1 - Kills security and privacy. Next time someone is doing free PR for Google, crowing about how great Project Zero is, maybe ask how all that work stacks up against the millions and millions of internet-connected devices that Google has left out of security updates for the last *half decade* through their agreement with Samsung and other partners.

#2 - Makes absolutely fine hardware obsolete, planet-destroyingly early (but yay profits for Google and Samsung when people keep needlessly re-buying the same shit again). Extra shout-out to lazy capitalist app developers for playing their part here, taking advantage of Google's nonexistent backwards compatibility policy for the Play Store by dropping support for Android versions whenever the fuck they feel like – Rocket.chat, First Direct bank, looking at you! 👀

so, the corporations have failed us on #Android updates and it's up to the community to keep our hardware working for any kind of reasonable time. YAY OPEN SOURCE!!!111

Except... #Google and other Android-pushers have made working with the OS a totally hellish experience, and I wonder what tiny percentage of Android users will ever be able to install a custom OS image.

Why's it so awful? (Turning into a megathread here 😳)

"Why is #Android such a hellscape?" Part 1 - Licences

How much does "open source" mean if you have to go through 6 circles of legal hell to publish your work? "Not fucking much", I would say.

I've never had an Android device that doesn't require some kind of "proprietary blobs" to run, and the practical impact of this is a) building your own OS is a soupy hell (bless LineageOS devs for trying to make this easier, but it's still a nightmare) and b) once you've built your image, your choices of where to host it are limited to 1337-w4r3z-y sites that are going to (rightly) scare off almost everyone.

You'd think #Google, one of the world's biggest and creepiest companies could use its wide influence to make companies using Android play ball - "negotiate a licence so that people can freely distribute the drivers for your hardware, otherwise we'll change the first google result for 'samsung' to a dick pic" would be my suggested abuse of their monopoly power - but you would be wrong.

"Why is #Android such a hellscape?" Part 2 - tools

Even the most corporation-friendly interpretation of "open source" means that it needs to include the tools you need to build the software. Otherwise, what's the point?

#Google just about squeaks past on this, although the entire stack is pain... but #Samsung? "How on earth can they not release a Linux version of their tools to maintain a Linux phone", asks a wonderful naïf on XDA-developers... good question m8!

Cue a-million-and-one half-working alternatives, destined to live on in third-party purgatory for all eternity, thanks also to...

"Why is #Android such a hellscape?" Part 3 - open source, closed development

The entire history of Android has been #Google throwing things over a wall at high velocity (see also: Chromium), and with that fine example it's no surprise that device manufacturers have stuck a finger up to the entire concept of collaborative development 🖕

Want to file a bug on Samsung's desperately shitty "TouchWiz" UI? Hoping to see some of the gigantic sack of custom (allegedly open source) driver hacks needed by every device appear upstream? Bad news, comrade!

But still, credit to anything that is even *technically* "open source", as I wonder how much Google & co spent on lawyers to find a way to subvert even the limited protections of the GNU GPL - that if someone sells a thing into people's hands that's based on GPL software, they should have to provide the source code for _all_ of the software.

Anyone got a link to a repo for the Google Play Store? How about the Youtube app? 🤔🤔

"Why is #Android such a hellscape?" Part 4 - Google Play Services

I guess a logical extension of Part 3 - if you've realised that you can freely mix and match open source / closed source code... why not start #drawbridging core functionality into the proprietary bits too? 😈

#Google Play Services now powers so much functionality on Android (location, notifications, app installations) that it's routine for me to find devices completely non-functional until I install "Google Apps"; on this tablet, missing Google Play Services meant the setup wizard crashed for no legitimate reason.

Blessings and praise to the comrades trying to run an arms race with Google – I managed to get my tablet working with the "Nano" version of OpenGapps¹ – but Jeffrey Horatio Christ, how much Don't-Be-Evil-ade do you need to chug to think this still gives Google the right to call their software "open source" and their cartel the "Open Handset Alliance"?

¹https://opengapps.org/

"Why is #Android such a hellscape?" Part 5 - Locked Bootloaders

And another entry in "does this even count as 'open source' if ..." - how much "openness" is #Google's platform if they provide the tools for manufacturers to prevent people from installing better software, and there's no penalty for companies using them?

None.

I bought a second-hand Android phone earlier this year, released in 2015. There's a forest of better, newer Android builds for the phone... but unlocking the bootloader is entirely at the manufacturer's discretion.

I mean, bad luck and bad research from me that I didn't realise it before buying (after already doing an hour of research to decode all the ridiculous version numbers and feature differences)... but turns out I'm in the only region in the world where they just "computer says no" on unlocking.

Google never needed to allow this, regulators didn't either. Vile.

Anyway I think I'm now finally done with this death-by-wordcount rant.

Thanks again to #LineageOS, and #OpenGApps, and the people's army of posters on XDA-developers, who helped me drag this tablet a few years into the present 🙏

And some friendly new year's suggestions:

Don't work at predatory tech companies like Google and Samsung, ...

don't be friends with people who work at predatory tech companies like Google or Samsung, ...

don't do free PR for predatory tech companies like Google and Samsung...

...and maybe we'll live to see a better world ✊

@handle As a prompt for you to end on a call to action that isn't prefixed by 'Don't'

Do you have recommendations for manufacturers which makes products that built with more open design (both in architecture to replace parts, and software down to the OS level) so that one can reboot, repair and patch consistently?

#pinephone and #Fairphone come to mind? But I don't have enough of am overview to know if that's really the case