Maddy - ADHD-powered mess Mar 4
GrapheneOS: Talks shit about Fairphone and their 'ancient' hardware on socials, not considering them as an option at all.

Also GrapheneOS: Partners with Motorola/Lenovo despite more devices in their lineup having relatively mediocre chipsets than not.
Show threadnytpuMar 4
@maddy Oh yeah, GrapheneOS, the OS that's fine officially shipping sandboxed proprietary Google Play Services but will not ship a screen reader because it's GPLv3!
Show threadSenilMar 4
@nytpu @maddy wait, the fuck? they don't ship a screen reader? they're OK with being inaccessible???
Show threadMaddy - ADHD-powered mess Mar 4
@senil @nytpu I mean, they don't shut the fuck up about privacy and security, but I never see them spotlight accessibility.
Show threadnytpuMar 4

@senil Yep, their social media account has told actual blind people to "just manually download a TTS engine" which is really useful advice when it is literally impossible for someone to interact with the device to get past the initial OOBE.

(They actually do ship TalkBack since that's part of AOSP, but they're missing a TTS engine. Which is like a Linux distro including a desktop environment but no graphics drivers and saying they "have graphics")

@maddy

Show threadSenilMar 4

@nytpu @maddy Ohhhh my godddd that's. Annoying as hell. "We ship the thing that would let you use a TTS system, but we don't actually provide one for you to get started with, if you need one you're on your own."

Surely there's like, some basic TTS engine that could be used for at least the initial OOBE and then post-setup assist the user in installing a more appropriate one if they REALLY don't want to ship a properly featured system.

Show threadnytpuMar 4

@senil I mean, unfortunately there's really not. Apparently GrapheneOS said "we can't use eSpeak-NG because they don't support launching early in the boot" and then eSpeak-NG promptly implemented that (and no other Android TTS engine supports to this day) within a few months so GrapheneOS had to reveal their real reason for not including it is "it uses the GPL".

eSpeak-NG does kinda suck but AFAICT it's the only FOSS TTS engine that works on Android and is actually usable by blind people rather than being a toy project. And it'd at least let people get the OS installed and navigate enough to install a proprietary one like Google's TTS engine if they wanted

@maddy

Show threadSenil

@nytpu @maddy Why... do they not want to ship anything with GPL? Like I'm sure they have their (presumably silly) reasons but "not shipping a decent enough TTS engine to get started with" does not feel like something they should be accepting.

And yeah, that's literally just my thought. A basic enough TTS engine that gets things off the ground to enable users to install a better, likely-proprietary engine post-OOBE. It'd just have to be good enough for that purpose.

Mar 4 at 6:16pmWeb
Show threadnytpuMar 4

@senil Since Android AOSP is Apache licensed and apparently "we want to be a drop-in replacement for AOSP". As if they couldn't just do what Debian does/did and have separate "minimal Apache" and "complete" versions or something?

Apparently LineageOS has the same issue for the same reasons after a search…

@maddy

Show threadBeurtMar 5
@nytpu
But... Linux IS GPL, and not Apache licensed!
@senil @maddy
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 7
@senil @nytpu @maddy We ship plenty of GPLv2 software and have our own GPLv2 projects. We don't include GPLv3 software in GrapheneOS because it would add restrictions we don't want applying to the OS as a whole. We want GrapheneOS to be a drop-in replacement for the Android Open Source Project without having more restrictive licensing. Sketchy companies don't care one bit about the licensing and will fork it without complying with it while lots of ones we want to work with want to avoid GPLv3.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 7
@senil @nytpu @maddy GrapheneOS is a privacy and security focused project. Including an app which handles sensitive user data as untrusted input from other apps is something which needs to be handled very seriously. It's a high priority for us to avoid doing harm to privacy and security which is very difficult when including a bunch of attack surface. We don't want to add a bunch of memory unsafe code. We also don't simply want to have something barely usable but rather a competitive TTS app.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 7
@senil @nytpu @maddy Our approach to GrapheneOS is not hacking things together to get it working as quickly as possible. Our approach ahs always been putting in the effort to build high quality implementations where privacy, security, usability and other goals are all satisfied. It takes time to get things implemented to meet our standards. That's just how we do things in this project. It works out very well in the long term and is largely why people want GrapheneOS in the first place.