Optimal virulence and the Android lockdown

When you get a cold, the virus hijacks your cells and uses them to make copies of itself, destroying the cells in the process. The virus does not care about you. And yet, if you get a cold, your body doesn’t dissolve into a pile of virus-enriched goo as a result of all your cells disregarding survival to focus on virus manufacturing.

Why? Well, you have an immune system. But also, if that did happen, other people would say, “Oh no, Alice has dissolved into a pile of virus-enriched goo; we should stay away lest we also become goo piles.” Better to just hijack some of your cells, so you can walk around and spread the virus to other people. Thus, the theory of optimal virulence says that a more laid-back cold virus will be more successful in the long run, which is why the cold viruses that thrive today are the non-goo-pile-converting kind.

Anyway. Most people reading this have paid Apple $400-$1600 for a phone on which you can’t do anything without Apple’s permission and monitoring. That was a strange decision, but on Android phones you can run whatever you want. For example, I noticed a couple of months ago that all RSS apps were terrible, so I spent 15 long minutes having AI make me a non-terrible one. I copied the file to my phone, installed it, and entered RSS nirvana, no registration, no app store, no nothing. It seems ludicrous that I wouldn’t be able to do that.

And yet, Google plans to change things. Soon, you won’t be able to run any app on an Android phone unless the person who made it bends the knee by paying a fee, giving Google their government ID, listing all apps they’ve ever made, etc. There will be an “escape hatch” for users to install other apps, but it involves secret menus and scary warnings and a 24-hour waiting period. Google says they’re doing this for security reasons, to prevent people from installing malware that does things like steal financial information.

Three things that any credible analysis of this situation must acknowledge

1. The security issue is real, and this change will help. Lots of people are in fact getting tricked into installing malware on their phones, and common sense says that this will accelerate with AI. Common sense also says that during that 24-hour waiting period, some of those people might wonder if it’s really normal for OfficialMicrosoftSupportProfessional021 to contact them on WhatsApp to send totally-safe-virus-scanner.apk. It would be convenient for lockdown opponents if the security issue was fake, but it isn’t.

2. For 95% of people reading this, these restrictions would not be a big deal. You click a few buttons, wait 24 hours once, and then you have the same freedom you have now. That’s still far better than Apple phones where there is no process at all. Oddly, it’s also better than Apple computers, where installing programs from non-verified developers has all sorts of friction that can never be removed. Most people I know use Apple computers anyway and just tolerate the indignity.

3. If Google cared about freedom or privacy, they could have achieved their security goals without as much harm to freedom or privacy. For example, instead instead of making themselves the sole arbiter, they could have allowed for multiple certifying entities, and could have allowed users to add others (perhaps after a 24-hour waiting period). Arguably, that would be more secure: That way, grandma could install my RSS app without leaving herself open to random malware. Or, Google could have used private on-device malware scanning, or lots of other things. Google didn’t do that because they don’t care about freedom and privacy and because they like money.¹

I think that’s a fair summary. This change addresses a real issue, but it does so in a self-serving way that needlessly destroys freedom. Even so, it only destroys a bit of freedom. This change, by itself, isn’t really a huge deal.

Reading between the lines, I think the real concern is what this might portend. Having made this change, maybe Google will gradually add further restrictions, slowly boiling the frog and moving ever-closer to an Apple-style dictatorship.

But will they? Maybe! Still, this whole situation seems under-theorized. There are good reasons to think that a full lockdown would not be in Google’s interest. And if you care about digital freedom, you could argue that a full lockdown would be a good thing.

Some other analogies

Switching insurance sucks, so some insurers offer a low initial rate and then gradually raise it over time. But they don’t want to raise it too much. Maybe they can charge you $50 more per year than a competitor, because it’s not worth your time to switch to save $50. But if they tried to charge you $5000 more per year, you’d be gone.

Or try this: Say it’s 1750 AD and you’re the King of France. You care nothing about your subjects and only want to extract the maximum possible loot for yourself, no offense Louis XV. How high should you set taxes? High, because you want loot. But not too high, because you don’t want your subjects to revolt and kill you. But still pretty high, because revolting is hard, and your subject know that even if they succeed, they might just end up with another ruler that’s just as rapacious as you.

Or: Say you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly heat it up. What do you think actually happens?

Back to phones

Why are there no Linux phones?

OK, technically there are Linux phones. There are various Linux phone operating systems (PureOS, postmarketOS, Mobian, Manjaro Mobile, Fedora Mobility, openSUSE Mobile) as well as sorta-Linux-sorta-Android operating systems (Ubtuntu touch, Droidian, FuriOS, Sailfish OS) and manufacturers who support them (Purism, Pine, Fairphone, Shift, FuriLabs, {J,V}olla). While I love and support these (♡), the general consensus is that they don’t currently offer an experience that’s remotely comparable to stock Android or iOS, especially for the price.

(Even more technically, Android is itself a kind of Linux, but you know what I mean.)

Obviously, the laws of physics do not forbid Linux phones from being just as good and cheap as an Android phone. They currently aren’t because:

1. Making cheap phones requires huge economies of scale.
2. Making a good operating system requires a huge amount of work.
3. For a phone to be useful it needs good apps, which requires a huge amount of work.

Linux phones don’t have those economies of scale because few people buy them. So, there isn’t enough money to pay people to perfect the operating systems, and most companies don’t bother making apps, and so few people buy those phones.

Meanwhile, there are also various Android-except-de-Googled phone operating systems (LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, CalyxOS), and the consensus is that these do come reasonably close to the experience of stock Android or iOS.

Personally, I used Android for a long time while trying to disable as much of Google’s apps and telemetry as I could. A while ago, I got fed up with this and switched to Graphene, one of the most popular Android-except-de-Googled variants. I don’t enjoy tech support bullshit, so I expected some pain, but I was willing to tolerate it for freedom/privacy/whatever. In practice, I found that everything was easy and worked flawlessly and there was no pain at all. Using Graphene made me realize that I had forgotten what it feels like to be “respected” by technology.

So, on a personal level, I recommend that you use Graphene. But this whole situation is full of weird tensions. For one thing, the Graphene project depends on Google for the base of their operating system, and only really survives because of Google’s tolerance. And, at the moment, the only way to use Graphene is to… buy a phone made by Google.

And while I recommend you use Graphene, what I’d prefer you do is switch to a true Linux phone. That would mean that you pay a lot of money for a poor phone experience. But it would help grow the Linux phone ecosystem. If enough people did that, then Linux phones might become become good enough that selfish people like me would switch, further growing the Linux phone ecosystem, et cetera.

That seems unlikely, because digital freedom weirdos face a collective action problem: Linux phones are bad and people are selfish, so we keep buying Android phones and Linux phones stay bad.

There are two ways to solve that collective action problem. Either some entity could invest a ton of money to make Linux phones good, or some entity could do something to make Android worse.

The status quo is good for Google

You may already see the argument I’m making here. Currently Android is just open enough that weirdos like me can run a variant that gives us most of what we want. But doing that is annoying enough that 99.9% of people don’t. This gives Google almost all the benefits of full control, while also sucking up all the oxygen and preventing a real alternative from emerging.

(Apple, incidentally, is laughing. They get to enjoy a full dictatorship while Google does all the hard work.)

Suppose that in six months, Google decides to escalate the lockdown and completely removes the ability to run independent apps. What then?

In the short-run, not much. Tech freedom weirdos would howl, normies wouldn’t notice, and the world would keep turning. But let’s look at some numbers. A rough estimate is that 3-5 million people currently use private de-Googled Android variants like Lineage or Graphene. That’s a crisp 0.1% of the global Android market. Meanwhile, it’s thought that 300-500 million people install Android apps outside the Google store. (That’s excluding China and things like the Samsung and Epic Games Stores.) The biggest reasons are (i) piracy, (ii) modified YouTube/Spotify/WhatsApp clients, (iii) region-locked games, (iv) forbidden gambling or crypto apps, (v) local sharing to save on mobile data, and (vi; least common) open-source app repositories like F-Droid.

In an escalated lockdown, some of this might still be allowed, e.g. local sharing. And many people would simply accept the new restrictions. But I expect that a substantial number would suddenly become interested in de-Googled Android variants that don’t enforce the lockdown. That would be dangerous for Google: If a significant fraction of those 300-500 million people switched, there’s a risk of a vicious/virtuous cycle, where people tell their friends, manufacturers start to cater to those variants, and so on.

If that happened, what would Google do? Might they clamp down on those Android variants, too? Again, maybe! Technically, Android is open-source, but if Google really wanted to kill Lineage or Graphene, there are about 200 different ways they could do that.

So say they did. What would the people currently using those variants do? Again, many would simply submit. That’s good for Google. Others would decide that if they must have an overlord, they’d prefer Apple. That’s not good for Google, but probably not a huge problem given the numbers. But others would decide to look elsewhere, likely to true Linux phones.

Currently, it’s estimated that less than 100 thousand people daily-drive true Linux phones, 30-50 times less than the number of people who use de-Googled Android variants. I’m too lazy and selfish to use a Linux phone now, but Google will take my RSS app from my cold dead hands, so in this scenario, I’d likely switch. If a fraction of people do that—or even get a second Linux phone—it would still represent a huge infusion of money and energy into the Linux phone ecosystem. If this pushed Linux phones from “bad” to “sort of OK”, that could kick off a growth cycle. Eventually, there would be a risk that Europe—eager to decouple from an unreliable US—might embrace them by mandating that government employees use them, or passing a law that popular apps must provide a web-app version that works on Linux phones, or whatever.

Would that actually happen? I don’t know, but neither does Google. My point is that the downside risk of losing their phone duopoly seems vastly larger than the upside, so why risk it? The smart move is to crush alternative app stores and fight malicious apps while making the bare minimum concessions to keep the freedom and privacy people onside. That’s exactly what what Google appears to be doing.

Of course, they might go for a full lockdown anyway. Corporations do dumb things all the time. But I really don’t see how it would be in their self-interest, and I’m not sure it would be a bad thing if they did.