[chiglug] Thoughts on Android variants? (In particular, Copperhead OS?)

[Dan Krol]

Hello all,

I'm not sure how many of you use Cyanogenmod these days or how you feel
about it. Personally I'm disappointed that it's been 6 or 12 months (and
however many CVEs) since the latest Release build on my HTC One M8, and I
don't care to deal with the hassles that comes with running Nightlies.

I randomly heard about Copperhead OS on Hacker News:

https://copperhead.co/android/

Sounds better to me; they put the important stuff upfront. FOSS, security,
fast updates. Cyanogenmod has all that in theory but in reality I'm not
even sure how prompt they are since the ecosystem is opaque. (As Jim knows,
I found that Cyanogenmod's "https download links" for ROMs actually
redirect to http mirrors. I even reported that as a vulnerability to
Firefox and Chromium but they considered it the fault of the site. Perhaps
I should have hassled Cyanogenmod directly.) Copperhead OS actually gpg
signs their ROMs; imagine that.

Copperhead OS seems much more limited in scope, but the Pixel is on their
list of planned devices to support. So, I don't need to run older hardware
like Cyanogenmod.

The bad side: it sounds like they will support things as long as AOSP, and
Google only guarantees support for a device for 2 years (according to a
random HN comment; perhaps they may do longer than they guarantee) Is there
no way to keep my phone safe? Literally every Android device more than a
couple years old should be recycled? I wish it were like normal computers.
I did hear something about Resurrection Remix doing security updates for
older devices, but their downloads page links to a forum post, which has
links to some third party file hosting thing. Nothing about ROM
verification. Feels a bit shady to me, though maybe I shouldn't judge it
that way.
Thoughts?

-Dan
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