fabrice, 4 months ago

@simevidas Unfortunately running on the 2.5 release of KaiOS, which is insanely old (gecko 48 / android 6 base) and should not be seen in new products.

simevidas, 4 months ago

@fabrice How old a browser engine is does not matter. What matters is how many people are using it. If enough people are using it, then websites should try to work well on it.

fabrice, 4 months ago

@simevidas Do you think that all these people using a device with many unfixed security issues is fine?

simevidas, 4 months ago

@fabrice The real question is, is it acceptable for KaiOS to sell devices with security issues?

As a user, if I could not afford an Android device, I would get such a KaiOS device despite the security risk. No question.

fabrice, 4 months ago

@simevidas No it's not acceptable. Users should rather get more recent second hand devices.

schizanon, 4 months ago

@fabrice @simevidas why are these device manufacturers stuck on KaiOS 2? Does KaiOS 3 only support some newer chipset that costs more?

#kaiOS #kaios3 #firefoxOS #firefox #phone #phones #mobile

simevidas, 4 months ago

@fabrice That’s a good idea. There are probably millions of still functioning, older Android devices collecting dust in drawers in the developed world. Donating these devices should be a more common practice.

schizanon, 4 months ago

@simevidas @fabrice I think chip makers should be required to update their devices for a certain number of years. This throwaway silicon has to stop.

fabrice, 4 months ago

@schizanon @simevidas Ideally yes, but it's not very compatible with capitalism, especially for razor-thin margin products. The devices makers don't want to hear anymore about them once they are produced, because even updates are seen as a cost center (validation of new versions, support cost for failure cases etc.).

schizanon, 4 months ago

@fabrice @simevidas I don't really understand why SoCs are so different than say x86. Why is it I can install Ubuntu on a computer I bought in the 2010s, but I can't install Android 13 on a phone that's made today? Something about drivers, but my laptop has those too.

fabrice, 4 months ago

@schizanon @simevidas because many drivers needed for these chipsets are proprietary. Also you need to know which drivers is used for each device because autodiscovery is not really a thing in ARM land.

Even projects like postmarketOS that are pushing hard for mainline support of these chipsets have to build one image per device.

schizanon, 4 months ago

@fabrice @simevidas then let's require them to open source drivers.

It's the auto-discovery part that I don't get; why did ARM forego that? Sells more chips without it I suppose.

fabrice, 4 months ago

@schizanon @simevidas How do you require that?

About the auto-discovery, it's (I think) partly because of legacy. That let ship only the required bits, hence saving precious resources in embedded devices. That makes less sense now of course.

schizanon, 4 months ago

@fabrice I asked ChatGPT about it and it seems that drivers for PC devices are more commonly built to open standards because of the competition that's inherent when you can just, say, pop out your network card and install a new one. There's no incentive for them to write drivers that are simple for FOSS to reverse engineer because nobody is going to replace Qualcom's modems with a better one.

I still think we should regulate that they open source them after some time.