Well they're going to be shipping GOS on Motorola and I think some other devices, so basic things like the messaging app need to actually have some polish to them. I really like GrapheneOS overall as-is, but the messaging app felt like baby's first texting app. Not necessarily their fault since it's pretty much straight out of AOSP if I understand correctly. But any time I've installed GrapheneOS, the messaging app is one of two things I must replace every time (the other being the downright bad AOSP keyboard).
If they fix(ed) their messaging app and their keyboard, then they've really eliminated a lot of potential complaints if a less tech-savvy crowd ends up buying future Motorolas.
Really? I mean, yeah, it's probably written by an LLM, but it's hardly the worst that I've seen. Looks way more straight forward than the modern README featuring a ton of badges, emojis, confusing out-of-context screenshots, "trust me bro" installation instructions, vague elevator pitches, "used by netflix, nasa, disney, good morning america, alex jones, the church of scientology", and other verbiage to create the illusion that the author won't immediately get bored and abandon their glorified dissertation piece. They all scream "give me your github stars" whereas this one doesn't. But I still get what you mean when it comes to the particular 'isms.
I think these AI platforms would guarantee bigger wins for themselves if they figured out how to give these models more of an object-conceptualization of their input than they currently have. Solving math puzzles is cool and all, but 99% of customers don't need to solve math puzzles like that; they're asking the model to answer questions about thins and to translate ideas into a real UI. A model that could reliably determine if/how its input/output isn't visually matching up to a design would be a big deal. Sure, we kind of have that now, but it's still in gimmick territory.
Even if a urinal doesn't splash, there's usually (always?) a decent amount of fine droplets that eject out from the stream since the flow is rather turbulent. On top of that, the fleshy opening is never completely stable.
Why would they even care? 99% of people aren't going to be installing Linux on their Macbook. If Apple did care, they'd have stopped allowing dual booting a long time ago.
FUD based in no actual facts. Recently with the new Golden Gate OS update, Asahi boot was made inoperable. Apple basically helped the Asahi folks work around a flag in the boot loader that they had not figured out how to handle in their reverse engineering. This doesnt strike me as the actions of an organization that is planning to close down the ability for asahi to boot after years of allowing it.
I hope they replace the AOSP keyboard with FUTO keyboard. I'm mostly fine with the other stock apps, but that keyboard was the one thing I absolutely had to end up replacing due to its jenky behavior.
AFAIK everything FUTO makes is open source? I haven't seen a counter-example (I have not looked hard though!), and https://futo.tech/about claims the following:
>All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open source or develop a plan to eventually become so. No effort will ever be taken to hide from the people what their computers are doing, to limit how they use them, or to modify their behavior through their software.
>You may modify the software only for non-commercial purposes such as personal use for research, experiment, and testing for the benefit of public knowledge, personal study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur pursuits, or religious observance, all without any anticipated commercial application.
Violates clause 3 (Derived Works) and clause 6 (No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor) of the Open Source Definition [0].
>You may distribute the software or any part of its source code only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.
Violates clause 1 (Free Redistribution) and clause 6.
>Notwithstanding the above, you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.
Violates clause 3.
It is a "source available" license, not Open Source.
Thanks for sharing this! I spoke out of ignorance, having only considered the source code being available but not the licensing. (though I find narrowly defining "open source" to be rather pointless) I haven't tried every open-source Android keyboard, I've been very happy with FUTO Keyboard. Kinda too bad it's not compatible with being shipped with GrapheneOS, but it's also understandable why they'd license it this way.
It is not open source. They use a custom source available license. There's no way any Android distribution would include it. A layman's reading is that FUTO could claim license violation on account of the distribution accepting donations (non-commercial use only) and there's a weird clause about not accusing FUTO of patent infringement.
Right, they are adhering to a definition of open that includes free as in liberty, so licensing matters. What good is it to read the source if I don’t have rights to modify and redistribute?
curious: what are the advantages of futo vs leantype? i use the latter but never looked deep into it, it just seemed the easiest better than aosp thing on f-droid
I like Heliboard a lot, but its autocorrect gets stuck in the mud all the time.
It completely falls apart and starts injecting nonsense phrases made up of nonsense misspelled words moment you miss a space ('v' or 'b') or type a really long word it doesn't know.
It also stubbornly incorrects other things like 'a' into "and" if it thinks it knows a phrase fragment. It's always wrong. It just happened to me now twice. Above, "or type a" became "or type and". Also, "it's" became "IRS".
Heliboard would be perfect if it stuck to word-only spellcheck and never split words. Just now again, it tried correcting "heliboard" into "hellenized" and "he lib oars".
This is not a matter of just lowering how aggressive the spellcheck is. It will still generate slop every time. The only real option is to completely turn it off. Futo can have similar problems, but there are a lot more options to tweak and the defaults aren't so bad.
Unsure what you mean by link against it. GPLv3 requires making the entire project it is bundled with GPLv3 as well. GrapheneOS would need to relicense the entire OS and bundled apps as GPLv3 to allow them to use any app with that license.
Go read the GPLv3 license and/or ask yourself how Linux distributions are able to ship a mix of GPLv3, v2, MIT, BSD, etc licensed software all in the same image.
GrapheneOS may or may not have a policy against shipping GPLv3 software (I don't know), but if they do, it's a political or business decision, not a restriction imposed by GPLv3.
They mean linking as in [1] against a GPLv3 work to create a derived work. Simply including a GPLv3 application in a aggregation of different works (e.g. an OS image) does not require everything else to be GPLv3.
The GPLv3 only applies to a work and works derived from it, so either if you take an existing GPLv3 project and modify it or if you link against a GPLv3 project. In these cases, the other code needs to be under licenses that are compatible with the GPLv3.
This is clearly described in the GPLv3:
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent
works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work,
and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program,
in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an
"aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not
used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users
beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work
in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other
parts of the aggregate.
I use Gboard with the network permission disabled. It works well but I hope they have a better stock keyboard, I haven't found any others that don't annoy me in one way or another.
Google can shuttle network requests to any of their other apps (or play services, if that's running) via IPC, even with the network permission disabled in Gboard.
So if you're using Graphene for privacy from Google specifically, it's not safe to install things like Gboard even with the network permission disabled. Even if they don't use IPC in this way today, there's no telling what the Google-of-tomorrow will do.
there's no telling what the Google-of-tomorrow will do.
This is true and even vastly understated. Google is like the Walter White of companies. Starts out innocent, turned into a monster, everyone around him astonished at the dark, depraved change.
So if one thinks "nah, Google wouldn't do that", I have a bridge to sell you...
The latest FUTO works just as well as Gboard for me. Their somewhat recent update to their swiping library really changed the game, and their voice recognition is also pretty decent.
It seems like work on voice recognition has halted entirely though. On https://keyboard.futo.tech/voice-input-models , community models and other models have been "coming soon" forever, and in the end the only model they offer is whisper-small, a very basic model from 2022. Which in AI is like prehistory.
fyi disabling network permission doesn't protect against deliberate and coordinated data exfiltration. Apps can still communicate with other apps, for example with Google Play Services or any other app.
I wish Futo had the ability to use a typing heat map for more accurate predictions like SwiftKey. It constantly suggests "AMD" when I am trying to type "and". I have fat thumbs OK! I don't even have the caps on and I RARELY talk about AMD. It's just the one thing I miss. I do find the predictions generally less accurate as well, but perfectly usable.
As someone who uses and loves Unexpected Keyboard: the higher learning curve compared to other keyboards would be the main reason I can think of. The reliance on swipes in particular is something that's likely alien to a lot of smartphone users.
Probably never happening in the next millennium. GrapheneOS has a gripe against FUTO because it is tied to Louis Rossmann, which dared to challenge GrapheneOS's social skills in the past.
I've yet to organically run into anyone who regularly uses Grok for coding. I'm sure they're out there, but what I hear with my own ears tells me that Grok is a relatively small slice of the market.
In my sphere of colleagues, it seems like at least 90% are using Claude exclusively and the remaining 10% are using some amount of Codex. Granted, my work only pays for Claude, but even so, nobody is talking favorably about Grok or begging our work to pay for it.
In my private life, the only people I know using Grok for non-work items are, frankly, conservatives who took the Elon pill. They see it as more truthful than ChatGPT. But they're pretty much using it for answers and not to produce anything.
That’s mostly because Grok only became good enough to be worth using about a couple of months ago when Grok 4.5 was released.
I feel confident enough that I can plan with fable or GPT5.6 and then hand it off to Grok to implement for certain complex tasks. If it’s a simple task, I can go straight to Grok.
I like mixing and matching to take advantage of these LLM subsidies and also trying to figure out each of its strengths.
GrapheneOS (the project) might recommend for or against certain things in relation to their specific objectives, but that doesn't mean all GrapheneOS users have the same objectives or need to comply with the opinions of GrapheneOS.
For instance, I use GrapheneOS because it provides better security and privacy out of the box than LineageOS, but I'm also not so paranoid that I'm going to just blindly listen to advice against using F-Droid. What I want out of my Android instance is good security defaults with no bloatware, not to stop the NSA from looking at my travel photos and what HN articles I once looked at. It's okay if my OS is great but not perfect.
So yes, I am a GrapheneOS user who is [modestly] hurt by this. Signing in with a dummy account is just another one of those things that will end up being futile in years to come when Google requires iris scans, DNA samples, and anal probes in order to get a new account. Personally, I'd prefer installing whatever software I want on whatever devices I [pretend like] I own, without telemetry or jumping through hoops.
Yes, F-Droid and its apps are great <3 They add so much security by simply not having a lot of tracking code that can be exploited and tries to hook all over your system. And they have reproducible builds which is something the commercial stores don't even bother with. This is really important for security. I don't understand that GrapheneOS advises against them.
And yeah the iris scans sound like a scare but only 2 years ago there was a constant line of zombies here in the shopping mall giving their eye scans to altman.
The masses really don't care about privacy if you give them a worthless trinket.
I've honestly never understood why F-Droid even still exists. Every time I've tried to use it (as recently as half a year ago) it's still a shitshow and never displays or updates apps correctly. Half the time an app showed up on the website that didn't show up on the phone app. The other half of the time even when I did get something installed, it would just never understand that an update existed and needed to download and update a given app. It's one of the worst pieces of software I've used in a while, and I can tolerate a good bit of jank from FOSS apps.
> never displays or updates apps correctly. Half the time an app showed up on the website that didn't show up on the phone app. The other half of the time even when I did get something installed, it would just never understand that an update existed and needed to download and update a given app
You probably "just" need to pull down while on the "Latest" or "Updates" tab, to update your repository (it will show a small banner at the top while it's doing that). It's incremental, so it may take a while if it has been some time since you last did it (and auto-updates are disabled).
The way F-Droid works is that it downloads the whole index and then the catalog, version checks, etc, all runs locally, quite similarly to some package repositories actually.
I am not claiming its intuitive, but I think that part works fine once you understand how it works.
The last time it wouldn't update an app, I could see in the app store and on the website that my app had a new version, but no matter what I did, I could not make it update the app. I don't know what I was doing "wrong", but I think if I couldn't figure it out or make it happen, there's something very wrong with either the app or how it's "supposed" to work. Neither of which is an acceptable user experience for me.
Doesn't match my experience (or anyone I know that uses F-Droid), FWIW.
We search for stuff, install it, it updates in the background. We install some of our own repos, but the bulk of our apps come from F-Droid's default repos.
Hard to reconcile your account with my experience without specifics.
My understanding is that F-Droid is hosted out of some home servers (instead of some universities like other similar package managers) so the bandwidth leaves much to be desired. But the UX is definitely a big part of the problem. I don't understand why it tends to abort downloads when I background it, and I don't understand why it doesn't show a toast that it aborted the download.
I very much prefer Obtainium these days despite the setup steps. I don't think it's a coincidence that Obtainium, Aurora, Zapstore, etc. are gaining mindshare over F-Droid, just like how Brave has explosive growth over FF.
> Every time I've tried to use it (as recently as half a year ago) it's still a shitshow and never displays or updates apps correctly. Half the time an app showed up on the website that didn't show up on the phone app.
Sounds like an accurate recreation of the Play Store experience to me.
This is not me simping for Google, I would honestly prefer literally anyone else with an acceptable app store experience, but I can honestly say I've never had that experience with the Play Store. If there's an update, it updates. If there's an app, it appears in search. On the rare occasion an app doesn't appear and I go to the Play Store website looking for it, the reason the app didn't show up is because it's listed as incompatible with my device (usually Android version too low or too high).
Yeah, the experience isn't great and there are better alternatives but F-Droid was there before anything else existed. It's also great to just have it as an option.
Software is one of the most derivative types of works ever invented. It's arguably based on copying what other people have already created. The modern world would look a lot more primitive if this wasn't the case.
Corporations like Coca-Cola long ago figured out that begging people not to steal your ideas is a waste of time. If you don't want people using your ideas, then don't share them.
Dunno why so many programmers don't get this and seem perpetually butthurt that other programmers figured out the ultimate way for programmers to rip off each other's code.
Coca-Cola literally shares their idea in every bottle they sell. The recipe being locked up in some super secure vault is a marketing gimmick and and has not relevance on anyone else being able to create clones of their drinks.
If they fix(ed) their messaging app and their keyboard, then they've really eliminated a lot of potential complaints if a less tech-savvy crowd ends up buying future Motorolas.