ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Oliver Grawert <ogra@xxxxxxxxxx>]

hi,
Am Montag, den 28.07.2014, 20:00 +0200 schrieb David Planella:
> Hi all,
> 
> 
> I noticed that Developer Mode had just landed on devel-proposed, and
> while I've been following some threads on the list and on IRC, I don't
> recall having seen the final conclusions.
> 
> 
> From the POV of an app developer:
> 
> 
> - Is Developer Mode reversible? I.e. I remember in the past, once I'd
> turn a device to RW mode, I'd have to reflash it to get it back to RO
> mode and this be able to use OTA updates.
> 
> - What does Developer Mode exactly do? I.e. does it simply set the
> device into RW mode, does it do anything else?

developer mode is far from being complete yet and it has nothing to do
with making the image writable at all ... :)

the UI you see will become more restricted once the password handling is
completely in place (hopefully soon after TRAINCON-0 is done).

once completed the UI will only allow you to enable it if you have any
kind of security mechanism enabled (the password/pin used there is for
example also your sudo password).

what the UI option en/disables is the access via adb/phablet-shell when
you plug in the device to a PC (making the image writable is not planned
to have a UI option, we expect developers that actually want to develop
the underlying system to go on using the touching of the file as we
always did).

further changes down the road are:

- completely disabling root, adb shell will only let you in as phablet
user (you can indeed use sudo as usual in ubuntu)

- either a fingerprint exchange with the machine you connect to or
complete dependency of adb on the state of the screen (it will only let
you in when unlocked, we defined the former over a yyear ago, the latter
came up in very recent discussions, there is still a meeting outstanding
about teh actual final implementation)

- defaulting to developer mode disabled on freshly flashed devices
(something you will be able to override with an ubuntu-device-flash
option to set the password (and to enable the mode)

i hope that sheds some light.
today all the UI option does s to flick adb on or off for the USB gadget
driver of the device ... 

i will send a complete announcement once everything is in place and
fully functional as desired...

ciao
	oli

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