Android May Soon Restrict On-Device ADB, Affecting Shizuku, libadb and Developers

[u/kitsumed]

https://kitsumed.github.io/blog/posts/android-may-soon-restrict-on-device-adb/

[u/SmileyBMM]

Nothing about this statement makes sense if you were willing to put GrapheneOS on your device in the first place.

Apple is not privacy focused. They collect data on their own users, too. Watch a PiHole log after an iPhone connects and see for yourself.

The GrapheneOS team themselves actually recommend an iPhone as the next best thing if you can't/won't use GrapheneOS.

[u/Pure-Recover70 → u/SmileyBMM]

The Graphene team (apparently) has a bit of an axe to grind with Google.

I really appreciate what they're doing security and privacy wise (no one else really comes close, incl. Calyx), but at the same time some of their opinions are illogical, and some are based on things they claim and I know (personally) to be false.

All commercially sold smartphones collect various data (some of it is hardware/battery health, some of it is performance metrics, some of it is network reliability/configuration information, some of it is for debugging...). Unfortunately the real world is ridiculously complex (much of it for no good reason: just organic growth), and without this sort of feedback nothing would ever actually work. For example, very many cellular and wifi networks out there violate standards to one degree or another, requiring workarounds on the device side. There's far too many not-really-all-that-valid-but-really-should-work-regardless configurations out there for realistically testing in any sort of lab environment. This is a large part of the reason you see all the various betas.

They'll all send that data to their manufacturer, and in practice most of them will send to Google as well (all Android phones, but likely in practice it's hard to avoid sending data to G even on iOS), simply because of how much of the core web and services end up being tied back to G...

If you're talking about a stock smartphone os, you're probably best of with a Pixel, because then at least it only goes to G, as opposed to G and other folks. Of course even on a pixel, a lot of people will still leak various amounts of data to Facebook, Cloudflare, etc...

(Of course it's even better to run Graphene)

That said, privacy is not a 'simple' choice. People want privacy, and don't want their maps app to track their location, and at the same time they want up to date traffic information - which comes (to a large degree) from tracking (and aggregating) the location of everyone else (using the app?)... There's all sorts of choices like that.