It'll be interesting to see how much of the Chrome OS work Android steals. ChromeOS also has an immensely locked down world, but they have build all kinds of secure/virtualizing proxies to let container OSes feel like they have access to hardware. Immense NIH is both daunting but also kinda cool, see https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/guide...
And as it is, the API restriction that's locking RCS support in is entirely an arbitrary one.
However, someone has created an open source prototype RCS client: https://github.com/Hirohumi
It supports only carrier-provided RCS, though. No one seems to have even attempted to connect it to Google's carrier-bypassing RCS service.
RCS support is actually embedded in android (albeit as a closed source rcsprovider implementation). They just won't actually open up the API (That they expose to other orgs that pay them enough like samsung for their apps).
There is no good technical reason why the RCS API needs to restrict itself to only pre-authorised applications vs making RCS access a permission for the user to approve.
More like Android has hit its ceiling. Time to be replaced by a fundamentally new approach.
Personally, I'm hoping for a "real Linux" based desktop for multiple form factors or even with seamless sync. The Steamdeck has shown that it is possible to do even for smaller companies.
They change every program (sorry app) from the sake of change. And they fix bugs. No, not the ones introduced by those changes.
Just wondering if that is where we've got to or if I was missing something.
Why do they call it archiving, it looks like it's just executing pm uninstall -k to keep the user data?
So this is at least a step into the right direction, how uninstalling was handled since decades: Never ever fiddle with user data on uninstall!
> users will see a UI treatment to highlight that those apps are archived. If a user taps on an archived app, the responsible installer will get a request to unarchive it
What happens if one tries to start an "archived" app which isn't available on the store anymore?
Correection: pm unstall -k also keeps the app cache which could, according to <https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1ayheuf/is_there_a...>, be a problem when reinstalling an app. So I assume pm uninstall uses a new parameter or even a completely new command in Android 15 for archiving.
Hopefully this is sign that Android will support E2EE RCS that is interoperable with iOS.
Android/Google encryption is proprietary as evidenced by the fact that the Content-Type header is "application/vnd.google.rcs.encryption":
* https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf § Messages Encryption
They state:
> In order to store and exchange user public keys like identity keys and prekeys, we need to have a central key server. Unlike the RCS messaging servers, the key server is currently only hosted by Google.
* Ibid § Key Server
For interoperability there would (potentially) need to be a neutral third-party where everyone's public key(s) are present. ("Everyone" potentially being all folks who use RCS, which may be every phone on the planet.)
