What non Chinese manufacture are you looking at? I liked Xperia I for being made in Japan but it’s still Chinese components underneath and as you say there’s no control of all the code.
There’s always Bunnie’s Precursor phone if anyone is interested in commercially developing something reasonably secure and auditable.
[–] glenstein 2 days ago
I also think it's easy to underestimate your footprint when it comes to ecosystems that involve money in any capacity. No Amazon, Steam, no card information on a Netflix app, no signing in to Google to read a NYT article.
I think either you care about these things categorically or you don't, and I don't think anybody is going to be in the middle space you seem to be envisioning, which is concerned enough about the risks to avoid all banking but still a casual enough attitude about a compromised phone that you're fine with it for uses you consider non-secure.
[–] iamnothere 2 days ago
The major problem is banking, although some banks still work with Waydroid, and a few banks have full featured websites that work. But you do have to be more selective.
[–] glenstein 2 days ago
Is a browser on compromised hardware supposed to be more secure than an app? Amazon, steam etc still risk exposing accounts authorized to make payments using your money. It's easy to think "I just won't use banks" and underestimate the risks of doing anything on compromised hardware, and the answer isn't to play the "what could possibly go wrong" game, it's to not use compromised hardware.
[–] iamnothere 2 days ago
I’m not really worried about mainstream Chinese manufacturers stealing my bank credentials. Fly-by-night budget phones full of crapware, yeah sure.
[–] Dylan16807 2 days ago
Also when I use my phone to watch something in a focused way, that's a high quality HD screen filling my field of view even better than a theater. The audio isn't quite as good, but the overall experience beats most TV setups. So unless you dismiss Netflix as a whole, I think your notion of the phone experience is overly narrow.
At the same time, the state has its flaws and I'm questioning whether a top down system can ever really work, not out of some kind of "fuck the man" point of view, but more of an engineering and systems design perspective. If the system is perfectly factored, there are no cross-cutting concerns. But in such a system there is no need to communicate or coordinate laterally, only up and down. This sounds very lonely.
And if this system has a flaw, not a specific flaw, but rather a flaw in the assumption that tree structures with abstraction are a good way to organize systems, it might be impossible to change from let's say a tree with a single root to multiple interacting trees, with multiple roots of authority. Or maybe this is possible if people can learn to exist in multiple seemingly incompatible realities simultaneously?