Technology

60047 readers

2790 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

1252

Custom ROMs have had just about enough of being Android's second-class citizens (www.androidauthority.com)

submitted 4 months ago by FutileRecipe to c/technology

252 comments fedilink hide all child comments

TL;DR

Efforts like Graphene OS face increasing pressure from apps that refuse to run on non-standard Android.

The custom ROM project characterizes Google’s approach to device attestation as incomplete and flawed.

Graphene OS is prepared to take legal action if Google won’t let it pass Play Integrity checks.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I mean, as long as it's in a pretty robust sandbox and it's either firewalled or has no network access (if possible for the app in question), I would think security implications are minimal. Like, even if the version of Android inside the container is compromised, the app could only take over its own container, which is non-privileged and doesn't have access to anything you didn't explicitly give it (in terms of user data).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But almost every app is going to crash because they're built on needing the information those APIs return.

His example of not being able to control some wireless speaker? Supporting that app is going to be a mess, best case.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

You'd need some sort of translation layer to allow older versions of the Android userland drivers in the container to talk to the modern Android userspace drivers. Or you could write new userspace drivers inside the container that interact directly with the hardware, but this would likely be expensive and insecure. Definitely doable tho, especially for a company as large as Google.

Especially on Pixels, with the generic system image feature (allows for booting generic, non-device-specific android images), if the container is built with the same userland drivers as a generic system image, it might not even need any special effort/attention to run, though iirc GSIs are pretty recent, so you wouldn't be able to run software for anything before like,, Android 12 or 13 probably.