Concerns over US-China relations may push Xiaomi, Oppo, vivo, and OnePlus to prepare a 'Plan B' for their Android software.
  • apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Before anyone gets too excited, the headline is clickbait. The bigger Chinese phone brands looking for de-googled Android. They are still going to use Android.

    several prominent Chinese smartphone manufacturers, including Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus, are exploring the possibility of developing versions of the Android operating system that do not rely on Google Mobile Services.

    Chinese laptop makers are also in search of an OS that isn’t Windows. Queue a race to prop Linux with Android support on that side of things.

    • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Gurl let me spill the tea, there’s word floating round in China that some bde powa playas be considering maybe kinda putting something together.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Pretty soon they’re going to pencil in a meeting about possibly arranging a committee to discuss preliminary plans to do a feasibility study.

    • cauthon117@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      German brand Volla has phones with Ubuntu Touch. Even allows dual boot with their own degoogled Android OS. Might be worth checking out.

    • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Honestly, I think the old FirefoxOS could do well these days. Literally everything an app can do can be done by a browser with a decent caching/local storage scheme. Slap a decent camera on that and it would be amazing.

      • hazypenguin@feddit.nlEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        If you can implement an equivalent to Apple’s Secure Enclave on a device running that, I’ll be interested. I haven’t seen even a device running Android doing that yet though.

        • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Samsung actually added Knox to their Android implementation a few months before iOS added Secure Enclave. I think Qualcomm had some sort of trusted execution environment around that time, too, if I recall correctly. And Google added Trusty to the AOSP two years ago. So it’s already running on Android, and has been for ages.

          But I’m not convinced a TEE would be necessary for a device that doesn’t run any third-party native code. Browser tab sandboxing is already pretty robust; I haven’t heard of an escalation exploit being found in ages on any major JavaScript engine, meaning that the risk of data exfiltration or bootloader compromise are extremely remote, and would be much quicker (and less risky!) to patch via browser updates than firmware/OS updates.

          The only other reason I know of that you’d need a TEE is for DRM, and I’d be willing to wager most people who would want a FirefoxOS phone would actively prefer not to have that on their device.

    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I would love to have a phone that I could just plug into a USB C dock and use as a normal computer. They’ve got plenty of processing power for that now. Every single program I use except for games could run on a phone if it used normal GNU/Linux.

        • philpo@feddit.orgEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Was about to say that - while it’s sadly proprietary and most FOSS Apps are not well supported, it is a nice showcase. But I don’t think it’s actually used much by people.

          Which is kind of sad.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I don’t believe that they’re likely to do GNU/Linux. I bet that they’re going to do a fork of Android off AOSP or something like that.

      Android’s had a huge amount of work put into it to make it suitable to be a consumer mobile phone OS, and the companies here aren’t doing this because they want stuff that GNU/Linux does, but rather because they’re Chinese companies worried about a US-China industrial decoupling and its risks for them. Like, they were okay with the technical status; what changed was that they started to worry about having the rug pulled out from them.

      That being said, I can at least imagine that helping GNU/Linux phone adoption. So, think about what happened with video games. There were some major platforms out there – MacOS, iOS, Windows, various consoles, Android, GNU/Linux. That fragmented the market. Trying to port software to all platforms became a huge pain. What a lot of game developers did was to target a more-or-less platform-agnostic engine and let the engine handle the platform abstraction.

      If the mobile OS space fragments further – like, Android splits into “Google Android” and “China Android” — my guess is that that’ll help drive demand for platform-agnostic engines to help improve portability, and porting one engine to GNU/Linux is a lot easier than every individual program.

        • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Seems pretty polished, but I genuinely don’t know. None of my devices support it, so I haven’t had the opportunity to test drive it.

          At some point, “normies” are just going to have to break down and learn something.

        • bdonvr@thelemmy.clubEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          No. I have a second phone with it just to play with.

          It’s functional, but rough. App support is lacking, VoLTE doesn’t work still which means on countries like the US which shutdown 2/3G you cannot make or receive calls. The UI is clunky and dated.

          I think a lot of these issues would go away pretty quick if it got a lot of attention. But then it’s unlikely to get much attention without that stuff. Vicious cycle. It’s a good base to build on.

    • A_norny_mousse@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      We need phones with standard Linux.

      Already exists. Several iterations are active and work as a daily driver: phone, sms and mobile networking works reliably, apps exist. Just not as many as on Android, and some features are not part of the OS. This is enough for many to declare them “a failure”. That and limited hardware support.

      Google has coddled us for way too long, and at what price.

    • hazypenguin@feddit.nlEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Let me know when there’s a phone with Linux that has a security implementation that matches Apple’s Secure Enclave.

    • redlemace@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Exact! And please no bloatware!!

      Oh wait, before anything else : NO, and I really mean NO AI and/or VR shit. Just none. None A T A L L

  • Teknikal@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Harmony Os will probably end up taking over realistically just due to everything going on in the world.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Harmony Os will probably end up taking over realistically just due to everything going on in the world.

      For Huawei but their competitors have no interest in that. Just look at the degoogled Android phones for the domestic Chinese market: Everyone ships their own app store and replacement APIs for PlayServices (not compatible to Google’s). So app developers need to target each vendor’s flavor of Android individually. It’s insane.

      The logical way would be to create a joint venture for a common app store and PlayStore replacements but they don’t. Maybe this story is about exactly that but it should tell you that Xiaomi and the others have no interest in being controlled by a 3rd party.

  • network_switch@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Anything closer to supporting regular Linux applications the better. Though I’d expect anything like this to just be Android with well funded alternatives to Google applications/services. Whatever happens will be good for non-Google/Apple/Microsoft directed platforms

  • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    It makes sense for Chinese smartphone OEMs to move away from the Google version of Android. In the medium to long term you are setting up yourself for failure if you are reliant on an American company.

    Unfortunately, the United States cannot be trusted.

      • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        Sure, but with China everyone more less knew this. The US has used up the last benefit of the doubt that they had in the past 5 months.

      • AES_Enjoyer@reddthat.comBannedEnglish
        02·
        3 months ago

        It’s not like China can be trusted either

        What exactly are you talking about? China has at no point in my lifetime exerted economic violence or taken violent policy turns towards harming other economies. They’ve been a reliable trading partner since they opened up to trade in the Deng Xiaoping/Nixon years, and done absolutely nothing remotely comparable to the US tariffs of recent (or economic embargoes to “enemy” countries like Venezuela).

        • pycorax@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic here. I hope you are. If not a quick search on Wikipedia would show China’s aggressive behaviour towards its neighbouring countries.

          • AES_Enjoyer@reddthat.comBannedEnglish
            01·
            3 months ago

            Are you aware that Wikipedia is predominantly edited by western males below 50 years of age using western media as sources for information?

            If there was an online encyclopedia predominantly edited by Chinese users using Chinese news sources, would you take it at face value when discussing geopolitically-charged topics about the USA? May I remind you that the US has military bases in Philippines, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea?

            Regardless of your opinion on this, if you read my previous comment again, you’ll notice I’m talking about economic violence.

  • flop_leash_973@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    We are going to move away from Google, by basing our new future on AOSP, which is also primary maintained by Google…I smell another FireOS level product on the horizon. Still Android, but worse.

  • Libra00@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    You probably should’ve led with the fact that this is Chinese phones, not like Samsung and shit.