I got an offer from a dealer three weeks ago and was going to order the car, then the API for the community integration got turned off. I decided to hold back and see what comes from it. Now this, which ultimately - since I am a GrapheneOS user - makes me completely cancel my plans.
I really do not understand VWs thinking here. It would cost them little to nothing to continue not blocking the the inofficial API and not block GrapheneOS (or other non Play Protect androids) users. It would have no adverse effects on the average Joe, but it would gain a lot of support and enthusiasm from heavy users, differentiating from other brands. Not to mention the fact that it is the USERS data in the first place
Obviously, the chances of that are virtually zero. But they'd rather make their product worse than assume with any kind of risk, even if it is virtually zero. That is simply the way in which German enterprises operate.
Vendor lock-in to Play services is ridiculous.
A car is a big purchase, and ideally not something I discard after a few years. I'd like it to not treat me like a renter and second-class citizen.
You should definitely reevaluate how you constructed your list. VW has a history of being scummy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal) and their ICE cars are notorious for being unreliable compared to the Japanese car-makers. To be fair, EVs do change the equation a bit, but given their scandal plagued past, there's no way I would put them at the top of any list.
The "app" they provide is 60% advertisement, 30% features, and I unironically preferred using a Home Assistant connection instead of of it for everything. Even for automations like "when to preheat the car", since that was easier and more intuitive outside of their native function.
This also means, that charge control from the cars side is not possible to automate anymore.
Sure, one could take the position "but it was never officially promised", but for some people, including me, having the api (which is paid btw) was a selling point.
Yes, I registered specifically for this comment.
There's enough of users to start making a difference. Really, even a low effort action raising valid concerns (security theater, a lie, google's monopolistic position, anti-competitive, etc), keywords that will make their response more careful and potential complaint to the regulator more impactful.
In a similar vein, I once met a woman who told me how she would enter every single one of those stupid contests that you'd see printed on cereal boxes and ice cream containers because literally five people enter into those things, so you're odds of winning are surprisingly high. Apparently she won a bunch of them, but her favorite was when got a week long vacation that included going on a fishing trip with Ben and Jerry of "Ben and Jerry's".
I've slowly but surely been moving away from any service provider of any type who does not allow me to use their service without their often Play Services-dependent app. Changing vehicles would be a lot harder though.
- Buy Pixel, Get Graphene
- Use FDroid, don't sign up for Google Play, download Tor browser
- Censorship resistant access to the internet without handing over your ID.
The squeeze on the free internet happened so quick by the UK (well it took years of indifference and a failure to enshrine protections - but once they started moving the did so super fast)
Realistically we're speed running ID being tied to internet usage - create your escape hatch while you can!
It's scary how quickly the banning is moving. The problem is what happens next. When they realise that banning things doesn't really work. The next logical step is severely limiting internet traffic.
One dual-boots to a reputable Linux vendor’s signed/sealed OS image with secure boot enabled in BIOS, so that the attestations are valid; financially supports said vendor; contacts them quarterly with check-ins on the status of their lockdown+attestation roadmap and uses professional journalism approaches to highlight their (in/)action; and, contacts one’s relevant governing body to petition for the addition of that vendor’s signed/sealed product line to be added to the authorized signatures list by both government-sponsored apps and to the verification platforms of the competing vendors (in order to balance the necessities of attestations with an appropriate degree of anti-monopolistic protections for consumers).
> It's scary how quickly the banning is moving. The problem is what happens next. When they realise that banning things doesn't really work
This confidence that ‘attestation doesn’t really work’ is the same sort of confidence that lead the Linux user community to largely scoff at, and ignore, attestation’s threat from when it was ballistically launched three decades ago towards the future. Options are now very limited for stopping it, and largely reduced to ‘getting some Linux into the approval list’. Severe compromises in user freedom will be required for the signed+sealed distro images to receive government approvals.
Imagine if Linux were an app on a video game console and you start to see the outcome: it’s a perfectly great working environment into which all of /usr/local and /opt and /home are writable, but the lockdown prevents you from modifying the OS in any way that could defeat the attestation protections. Apps you install into /opt can only access their own /opt/prefix, apps you install into /usr/local can access $HOME. The apps you install can choose to write session data (such as digital age verification certificates) to a system-protected /data store keyed first by the kernel’s signature, and second by the vendor signature the kernel reads from the app; with the understanding that an attestation latch-forward after an exploit patch will wipe that store, and that dual-booting to a different vendor will suspend access to sessions stored by that vendor.
This is, to climb on my hobby horse for a moment, why I continue to believe that Valve will be the first Linux vendor to receive government attestation approval alongside Apple / Google / Microsoft have previously across the desktop and mobile spaces. I’d really prefer that to be Graphene, Ubuntu, and Valve — but Graphene’s customer base is hostile to this, Ubuntu doesn’t have any incentive to care, and of the Linux vendors out there, Valve has a decade-long head start on the need for a locked-down and attested platform for business reasons. All of the above falls out naturally from considering how to defend one app from another on Android, iOS, Steam Deck, and Xbox. So far as I can tell today, though, Linux intends to be left out in the cold on all this. Oh well.
“Every time we see a Google Pixel, we suspect it might belong to a drug dealer,” said a police official leading the anti-drug operation in Catalonia.."
Seems like some countries/areas are already targeting the Pixel (really its because of GrapheneOS)
Genuine question. That's news to me and I'm here.
[0]: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-vpn-...
It mostly happened already and it's in motion.
I don’t think that will stop them trying though
Happy voting with your wallet folks. See ya.
It's possible that we get to a place where everyone cooks their own meal (vibe coded app), and only goes out to eat sometimes (official app store). Spreadsheets are the same, you can get a lot of milage, and most still buy and use closed source software.
Reminds me of this: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
This is the WEF future your conspiracy uncle was telling you about during family gatherings. Well.
Increasingly my vision of retirement is a life of luxury surrounded by hardware from before the internet era, things that do what I tell them, rather than telling me what I am and am not allowed to do.
> Please note that the use of the Volkswagen app is only supported on iOS devices and Android devices with supported operating system versions.
Is it time to mandate app developers support all operating systems for a device?
If 97% of your users are on mainstream OSes, and the rest also account for disproportionately high numbers of bug reports, why should they bother supporting alternatives?
My take is that they were trying to block rooted phones and/or custom ROMs of questionable origin and GrapheneOS just became collateral damage because all these companies do go the minimal route of using Play Integrity. GrapheneOS supports remote attestation through AOSP APIs, in fact, they have a page about it.
I think it's worth letting this be heard. GrapheneOS has > 400,000 users and is rapidly growing. Breaking things is not going to affect 5 people anymore, but thousands, ten thousands or hundreds of thousands, depending on what the app is.
"Support" is such an overloaded and vague word in the software industry. What does it mean for a company to "support" an app/os configuration?
1. They deliberately target that app/os configuration, QA tests it, and answer customer support requests about it.
2. They target the configuration, QA tests it, but it's offered without customer support.
3. They target the configuration, but only release an untested build, use at your own risk.
4. They don't target the configuration at all, but the builds they do release happen to work on the configuration, totally unacknowledged by the company.
5. They don't target the configuration, and deliberately sabotage their application such that un-targeted configurations are actively blocked. Only adversarial users who hack the software are able to use it.
Too many companies say: "We can't do 1 because we don't 'support' it, therefore we must do 5!"
Because of those bug reports, very few may be specific to the non-mainstream OS? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978086
If you choose to use something like GrapheneOS, you are signing up for the fact that almost no one will test on your platform and plenty of things will be broken.
Hypothetically, if GrapheneOS wanted to become a certified Android, it would probably not be blocked on technical reasons, only that becoming certified (last time a contract was leaked) requires running privileged Google Play Services (which is less secure) and pre-installing a bunch of Google apps that should not be uninstallable.
How is that not anti-competitive?
This site talks at length about running businesses, identifying your target market and focusing hard on them. The same thing applies to other aspects of software.
If I ran a cross-platform app (built on Electron or whatever) and a certain platform made up 0.1% of my users but 20% of my customer support team's time, I'd stop supporting that platform. It's literally not worth the effort. And I wouldn't just let it rot (that would keep the customer support issues going), I'd block it.
Maybe then app developers should be mandated to open fully their server-side protocols, so people can create apps for platforms that are not supported by default. No more undocumented APIs, anybody can get an API key, no API serving limits!
There are already massive problems with people miswiring head units to play videos while driving and updating their ECU to spew pollution into the air. You're not going to convince any significant number of people that it's a good idea to allow arbitrary code to run and control most of the other systems too.
Then that's a poor design that should go the way of the dodo. Someone hacking the entertainment system should not be able to take over control of the engine. The entertainment system on planes do not allow one to hack into the autopilot. There should be no need for a firewall, they should have no shared wires between them.
People are growingly concerned with both the car manu and Apple/Google control over their car and related extra software goodies.
Laws are really needed when businesses don’t play nicely. I don’t know the legal specifics, but I’m sure glad I don’t need to buy $1000’s of specialty tools to maintain my vehicle, and sure glad that replacement parts are readily available (and will be for decades).
Just image how much worse society would be if car manus did the same thing as Apple and had ID-paired parts. Sorry! Your AC doesn’t work anymore, please install a genuine Honda oil filter at your nearest Authorized Honda Shop, available for a minimum of $500.
(Yes, repairability and standardization are encouraged where feasible.)
