Modal CollectiveNew blog post: Why "digital sovereignty" requires a free software alternative to Android and iOS, and how we're building towards that 🏗️
Tak!@modal ok, but what are you doing about the political and social problems you outline in your post?
there are already a bunch of non-ios/-android mobile operating systems, including at least one built on gnome/gtk, but the actual problem is that many people can't practically use them because they need the proprietary apps for government id, banking, mobile payments, etc. - yet another mobile platform that doesn't solve these problems won't change anything
Val Packett 🧉@Tak there's no "yet another", the work happens directly in existing upstream projects as much as possible.
People have been trying to Just Do Something about these problems ever since the free software movement became a thing. I am now convinced that a BIG reason advocacy and policy work has been slow/stalled/difficult is that we (FOSS devs) have not yet been offering a compelling platform.
With everything that's happened recently, the motivation to seek alternatives is higher than it's ever been, ethics and politics are now a consideration for more people than ever, but they'll never be the ONLY consideration, so we must respond with goal-oriented, vision-driven development to make sure we can actually compete.
Once we reach the state where the platform is:
- all community-driven FOSS from the kernel up, guaranteeing truly "forever" updates like on PCs, AND
- doesn't fall apart on its own / meets a standard of quality at least on select "blessed" devices, AND
- has enough ability to do things, even if some have to be done awkwardly via compat layers at first, AND
- offers something new and exciting, from a non-nerdy perspective
Then it will become a lot easier to go around telling everyone "hey, I want to be able to do your $thing on this cool device, it's important for sovereignty and freedom reasons and also just look at what amazing new capabilities this thing has, and I have 50 friends who want to switch to it but your $thing's absence is making that difficult, I'll be happy to help with bringing your thing to this".
The @modal vision is really exciting to me because it's basically about pushing existing projects like pmOS across that line, plus adding actually-good peer-to-peer communication as the "new and exciting" factor.
@valpackett @modal maemo has been around since 2005
ubuntu touch since 2013
sailfish os since 2011
the problem has never been lack of a technical alternative
Anders Cornelius MadsenYes, the problem is very much a lack of technical alternatives. As long as a technical alternative cannot be used for online banking, storing your tickets and whatever else that requires an unbroken Google Android to work, the technical alternative is irrelevant, regardless of how nice or how open or how technically supreme it may be.
Is the problem with the app developers that relies on Googles services for their app to be secure? - hell yes. But the problem is still that as long as the technical alternative offers nothing truly compelling to the end-user, the end-user will not care enough to make a stink about it (outside of our small group here on Mastodon, that is).
The good thing is that most of the services that requires impeccable security are also heavily regulated, and as such possible to change through political pressure. However, applying political pressure successfully will require the technical alternatives to be at least equal to Android and iOS - otherwise the attempt will be dead on arrival.
I agree that requiring a common hardware platform is probably the first step. If the current alternatives can be installed on a broader selection of hardware, improvements are much more likely to come faster.