Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one

@1br0wn Yes indeed, it would be great to have a community controlled version of #AOSP. The hard part is that Google still is the largest contributor to Android by a large margin. The ROM projects have started to work together, but not enough to get community control. The #CalyxOS team has put quite a bit of effort into trying to get this idea going. The key would be to get companies to switch to a community-controlled version, e.g. Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, etc.

@danslerush I agree, it is definitely a not good. My guess is that Google is feeling the heat from the #DigitalMarketsAct and other monopoly-busting actions around the world. So they are scrambling for ways to keep control of those massive monopoly profit margins. If they cared about streamlining development, they would go fully open. That's well established and proven as a way to efficiently develop large software projects, e.g. Linux, Chromium, Firefox, GNU/Linux distros, etc.

"Exclusive: Google will develop the Android OS fully in private..."

Looking again at https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-aosp-3538503/ I really think that was a PR piece, e.g. #Google's PR firm put together the story for #Android Authority. Its got all the markings, the "Exclusive" part, the uncritical eye "Google is simply consolidating its development efforts into a single branch", minimizing harm to custom ROMs, "custom ROMs will largely also see little change" etc

#AOSP #PublicRelations #FreeSoftware #ClosedSource

@michaelharley I'm feeling quite good about it, I've been using #FDroid as my main app store for years now. But of course, I'm biased ;-)

@johns nice! Is this feature documented anywhere? I couldn't find it.

#apksigner v35.0.2 is now in #Debian trixie. The v3.1 signer rotation stuff needs testing. Please try it out!

Getting apksigner from Debian has two key advantages over the Google binaries:

* They are reproducibly built.
* They have an actual free software license.

I'm starting to think I must be a bot. I'm no longer human. I see so many prompts on the internet asking me if I'm human, or triggering "anti-bot" protections.

@Bubu A very nice write up, I like the approach. I think the key is that he simply asked them for support. Lots of FOSS devs don't want to ask, I know that from myself. Asking for donations, or even nagging, is well know to work. Like Wikipedia. I wonder if it would be possible to eliminate the friction to donating so much that FOSS devs could make a living without having to learn how to run fundraising campaigns? Maybe it just isn't possible.

@korkeala @a_sator sure, that's a real effect, and I'm definitely not saying it was a great time. What I am saying it that it is a better option than being systematically destroyed by that more powerful neighbor, like what is happening in Ukraine today.

The upcoming #Debian trixie release will ship with apksigner v35.0.2, which supports the APK v3.1 signer rotation. It is also reproducibly built, of course. I'll make a backport for bookworm too.

@Di4na The sad part is that we still really need an organization like Mozilla. I think Mozilla goes to show you that non-profit status and free software are not enough to overcome the organization's roots in the Silicon Valley startup culture.

Kudos to Jean-Michel Aphatie for taking a stand. The colonial powers did in fact commit all sorts of atrocities and massacres. There is far too little recognition of this in Europe. On the topic of Nazis, we are taught they were a distinctly German phenomenon. What is too often overlooked is that the racial theories came from places like Stanford University. And Napolean and others set the example of militaristic state brutally conquering for its own gains.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/09/jean-michel-aphatie-quits-after-comparing-french-algeria-to-nazi-massacre

@cryptax just uploaded #droidlysis v3.4.7 to Debian. If you make a new release very soon, I can get it into the upcoming stable release "Trixie"

@bjst The European competitors are also too focused on luxury cars and government bailouts, and they are also failing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/04/australia-chinese-electric-vehicles-byd/

@network_is_reliable @fdroidorg we're working on that right now. The hard part is that the only way to prove that something is reproducible is to actually run the build yourself. Other than that, you just have to trust someone else to run it. So we need to understand how users think about this trust relationship in order to properly represent reproducible builds. It would be trivial to just put "✅ reproduced" in the UI. But what are users' expectation behind that? Any ideas?