Give any employees inside google that agree with you the materials they need to show management it’s unpopular even with developers, (even if you aren’t actually one) and give Google’s shareholders concern that this isn’t just media speculation, it’s real people with real concerns.
I’m so upset that this isn’t all that matters. Carriers usually setup really nice contracts with manufacturers for things like exclusivity and marketing.
They don’t care. Their job is solely to provide you with access to their cellular network. As long as you keep that tied to one device (and don’t phone clone, meaning share that access with multiple devices), they don’t care.
If you’re leasing your phone from them, then I guess they’d care but really only when they get the phone back. It would be best to put everything back to stock when that time comes. Of course this means you’ll want to take care to install only what you’re comfortable with and what you know works and won’t permanently damage the phone.
I’ve successfully debloated two googled ROMs before, once in stock and the other on a custom ROM with GApps prebuilt, and while you can debloat major parts like Google play and Google services, minor parts cause annoying crashes and functionality loss if you debloated it to get a full degoogled ROM, at that point , using a Vanilla ROM is better
It is the only thing that can be done because we don’t make up a significant amount of the population of phone users unfortunately.
But, I’ll be moving rest of my family members to Apple while I find alternatives for myself just out of spite. Benefits of being the tech person of the family.
Well when it comes to the two big corporations I do tend to see Apple in a better light than Google that is more heavily involved in the data collection and advertising business. Not that Apple isn’t collecting data and not completely private, but they seem less evil in those areas than Google.
And for regular people there is less benefit to being on Android compared to Apple, since they don’t tend to care or know about sideloading or custom ROMs. So if it’s giving data to Google or to Apple I guess it’s a matter of opinion on who it’s better for them to give it to.
difficulty: 99% of mobile phone owners either won’t care or will consider it a good thing that their apps are all signed. As though a professional cybercriminal doesn’t have a dozen ways of getting a fake ID.
Honestly, given the ID requirements this feels like more efforts to track everything everyone does. It means any app with sufficient user base is trackable back to a real person. A real person they can arrest, bully or otherwise deal with if they don’t like what they’ve built.
Since DAY ONE phone hardware should have been as standardized and open as normal PC hardware - able to run any operating system that you want.
But every time it got brought up for DECADES, techbro corporate apologists were ready to line up and talk about all the reasons that wouldn’t work and how companies would NEVER do that, as if that was some kind of sensible counterpoint.
Now the noose is closing and all it’s going to take is the combined forces of the richest companies in the world to crush what little competition remains. Undercut or sue Fairphone into oblivion, for example. The lawsuits don’t even have to have merit - they can eat the costs for a few quarters to ensure no viable alternative to the walled garden ever gets a foothold.
The thing to be done now is minimize your mobile usage altogether and try to make it to the tech dystopian endgame with a few local files of your own left.
The answer is likely a de-googled phone. We have some aftermarket variants of Android available. Though installing a new operating system on a phone isn’t very mainstream. And skipping the Play services comes with consequences. Push notifications sometimes won’t work, some apps outright refuse to work, and things like contactless payment are impossible. I’ve lived without Play services for a few years. Now I have them sandboxed in GrapheneOS. I wonder what they’re going to do to address this.
Even with Play Services enabled on GrapheneOS through Sandboxed Google Play, this wouldn’t affect it, as this would be a system-level change that only affects stock Android and OEM-modified variants of Android that are “Certified Android”
GrapheneOS would not have to put much, if any effort into blocking this.
I’m pretty sure Google locks us out and Google Pay is impossible, despite the operating system being more secure, having hardware attestation and not even being rooted.
I think the problem is that this is one part of the puzzle. Samsung are doing the other half. Locked bootloader. I fully expect the bigger manufacturers to go with both for a “fully trusted platform”. That’s how they will sell it at least.
The only question is, who will be making the unlocked phones and how much will they cost us?
The only question is, who will be making the unlocked phones and how much will they cost us?
Fairphone probably. To my knowledge Fairphone 6 can be unlocked and for the less technical, who want to degoogle, they also sell Fairphone 6 with /e/os installed. You won’t get a competitive price for the hardware but rather a fair price for the hardware and under capitalism fair isn’t competitive because the competition regularly resorts to exploitation of third world resources and cheap labor.
My man I hate to say this but pretty sure lineage kicked the bucket last year, at least that what was happening when I had to change phones last year and Got the community notification
Because there was a heartfelt goodbye and everything in the matrix server for it, last I was aware, yeah, they were saying it was dead. Good thing it’s back though
Matrix exists to contain people whose schizo power level was too high for discord and it has no other function. You can safely ignore 100% of all activity on matrix servers and that percentage is not an exaggeration.
If you are an EU citizen then you need report this to the consumer protection services.
Here are some links I have found. There might be better ways to contact them but this is what I got for now. Feel free to correct me or add more ways to make our voices heard.
For years Android people were yapping about how it’s open source, open platform and the competitors are not. So why not just fork it and keep on? Isn’t that the strongest point of being open source?
There’s already a bunch of forks, GrapheneOS and LineageOS being two of the most popular.
Trouble is, this affects the app ecosystem. The overwhelming majority of applications are only available through the Play Store. Sure, there are alternatives like F-Droid, but your bank isn’t offering its app through F-Droid.
Theres a high likelyhood your bank still allows access through a web browser. I think a lot of people forget that browser shortcuts that you can add to your home are a thing that makes a lot of apps partially if not fully redundant.
We need reboot of N900. Although it lost support long time ago as it was launched in 2009, you can still install latest PostmarketOS onto it: https://postmarketos.org/install/
A commercial Linux phone with backing from some larger company could succeed.
I picked one of these up around 2015 and used it as my main phone for ~2 years. It’s a cool phone and I had a great time messing around with it.
Unfortunately the hardware is just into up to modern requirements - old modem means bad signal, old WiFi standard, really low RAM, very slow processor. The browser was barely usable even with an adblocker.
It all sounds very anticompetitive / anti trust to me.
Local laws may vary. In Australia I imagine the ACCC would the place to contact (TIO and ACMA don’t sound right)
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Side note. We need to do something, now. Only problem is, I don’t know what
Go to the Android developer verification site and fill out the Google Form in the bottom of the page on the right under Share your feedback.
Give any employees inside google that agree with you the materials they need to show management it’s unpopular even with developers, (even if you aren’t actually one) and give Google’s shareholders concern that this isn’t just media speculation, it’s real people with real concerns.
Thank you for this
It’s the year of the linux phone
wonder if my phone carrier would be ok if i show up with a phone with a new OS they haven’t heard about
For what one data point is worth, I do it to my phone carrier all the time.
They should not care as long as it has a compatible SIM/modem combo.
I’m so upset that this isn’t all that matters. Carriers usually setup really nice contracts with manufacturers for things like exclusivity and marketing.
Yet…. Just wait until they require an approved OS for “safety” to activate a SIM. Just think BF6 and Secure Boot.
They don’t care. Their job is solely to provide you with access to their cellular network. As long as you keep that tied to one device (and don’t phone clone, meaning share that access with multiple devices), they don’t care.
If you’re leasing your phone from them, then I guess they’d care but really only when they get the phone back. It would be best to put everything back to stock when that time comes. Of course this means you’ll want to take care to install only what you’re comfortable with and what you know works and won’t permanently damage the phone.
Some carriers also lease your phone. This could be what OP is asking.
Oh that’s a good point, I see the concern there. Thanks for the clarification, I’m going to edit my comment with that part.
And Vanilla ROMs users
Gservices you can simply remove via Adb, and MicroG has a magisk module
I’ve successfully debloated two googled ROMs before, once in stock and the other on a custom ROM with GApps prebuilt, and while you can debloat major parts like Google play and Google services, minor parts cause annoying crashes and functionality loss if you debloated it to get a full degoogled ROM, at that point , using a Vanilla ROM is better
Jumping ship isn’t really “doing something”
It is the only thing that can be done because we don’t make up a significant amount of the population of phone users unfortunately.
But, I’ll be moving rest of my family members to Apple while I find alternatives for myself just out of spite. Benefits of being the tech person of the family.
So this spite move is to the ecosystem that originally invented this same shitty closed ecosystem as a strategy. Genius.
Well when it comes to the two big corporations I do tend to see Apple in a better light than Google that is more heavily involved in the data collection and advertising business. Not that Apple isn’t collecting data and not completely private, but they seem less evil in those areas than Google.
And for regular people there is less benefit to being on Android compared to Apple, since they don’t tend to care or know about sideloading or custom ROMs. So if it’s giving data to Google or to Apple I guess it’s a matter of opinion on who it’s better for them to give it to.
difficulty: 99% of mobile phone owners either won’t care or will consider it a good thing that their apps are all signed. As though a professional cybercriminal doesn’t have a dozen ways of getting a fake ID.
Honestly, given the ID requirements this feels like more efforts to track everything everyone does. It means any app with sufficient user base is trackable back to a real person. A real person they can arrest, bully or otherwise deal with if they don’t like what they’ve built.
The solution is what it has always been.
Since DAY ONE phone hardware should have been as standardized and open as normal PC hardware - able to run any operating system that you want.
But every time it got brought up for DECADES, techbro corporate apologists were ready to line up and talk about all the reasons that wouldn’t work and how companies would NEVER do that, as if that was some kind of sensible counterpoint.
Now the noose is closing and all it’s going to take is the combined forces of the richest companies in the world to crush what little competition remains. Undercut or sue Fairphone into oblivion, for example. The lawsuits don’t even have to have merit - they can eat the costs for a few quarters to ensure no viable alternative to the walled garden ever gets a foothold.
The thing to be done now is minimize your mobile usage altogether and try to make it to the tech dystopian endgame with a few local files of your own left.
The answer is likely a de-googled phone. We have some aftermarket variants of Android available. Though installing a new operating system on a phone isn’t very mainstream. And skipping the Play services comes with consequences. Push notifications sometimes won’t work, some apps outright refuse to work, and things like contactless payment are impossible. I’ve lived without Play services for a few years. Now I have them sandboxed in GrapheneOS. I wonder what they’re going to do to address this.
Even with Play Services enabled on GrapheneOS through Sandboxed Google Play, this wouldn’t affect it, as this would be a system-level change that only affects stock Android and OEM-modified variants of Android that are “Certified Android”
GrapheneOS would not have to put much, if any effort into blocking this.
It can still affect other OSs, though not directly but by killing off open source projects
With any luck, this will just clarify the divide between OSS and the garbage on the Play store.
Does contactless pay work in the sandbox? What about ticket apps like mlb ballpark?
I’m pretty sure Google locks us out and Google Pay is impossible, despite the operating system being more secure, having hardware attestation and not even being rooted.
Ticket and banking apps sometimes work, sometimes they don’t. They’re doing their best and a lot of things are fine. There’s a community maintained list for banking apps here: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/
LineageOS? Aosp is still under Google control, so maybe not.
I think the problem is that this is one part of the puzzle. Samsung are doing the other half. Locked bootloader. I fully expect the bigger manufacturers to go with both for a “fully trusted platform”. That’s how they will sell it at least.
The only question is, who will be making the unlocked phones and how much will they cost us?
Fairphone probably. To my knowledge Fairphone 6 can be unlocked and for the less technical, who want to degoogle, they also sell Fairphone 6 with /e/os installed. You won’t get a competitive price for the hardware but rather a fair price for the hardware and under capitalism fair isn’t competitive because the competition regularly resorts to exploitation of third world resources and cheap labor.
My man I hate to say this but pretty sure lineage kicked the bucket last year, at least that what was happening when I had to change phones last year and Got the community notification
Latest Github commits are within the past hour… Why do you think that it’s dead?
https://github.com/LineageOS
Because there was a heartfelt goodbye and everything in the matrix server for it, last I was aware, yeah, they were saying it was dead. Good thing it’s back though
Matrix exists to contain people whose schizo power level was too high for discord and it has no other function. You can safely ignore 100% of all activity on matrix servers and that percentage is not an exaggeration.
Sounds like you would know something about schizophrenia
Suck my Frances E Dec
Oh, shut up LiniageOS will be stone dead any moment now.
Last blog post is from December 31 2024.
I hope there’s still someone working at it.
If you are an EU citizen then you need report this to the consumer protection services.
Here are some links I have found. There might be better ways to contact them but this is what I got for now. Feel free to correct me or add more ways to make our voices heard.
https://commission.europa.eu/
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/selling-in-eu/competition-between-businesses/anti-competitive-behaviour/
Fork Android?
For years Android people were yapping about how it’s open source, open platform and the competitors are not. So why not just fork it and keep on? Isn’t that the strongest point of being open source?
There’s already a bunch of forks, GrapheneOS and LineageOS being two of the most popular.
Trouble is, this affects the app ecosystem. The overwhelming majority of applications are only available through the Play Store. Sure, there are alternatives like F-Droid, but your bank isn’t offering its app through F-Droid.
Theres a high likelyhood your bank still allows access through a web browser. I think a lot of people forget that browser shortcuts that you can add to your home are a thing that makes a lot of apps partially if not fully redundant.
This is why I use user agent spoofer extensions in firefox, I don’t have to deal with “you’re on a phone so here’s half the functionality” bullshit
Or actual bank locations and ATMs.
We need reboot of N900. Although it lost support long time ago as it was launched in 2009, you can still install latest PostmarketOS onto it: https://postmarketos.org/install/
A commercial Linux phone with backing from some larger company could succeed.
I picked one of these up around 2015 and used it as my main phone for ~2 years. It’s a cool phone and I had a great time messing around with it.
Unfortunately the hardware is just into up to modern requirements - old modem means bad signal, old WiFi standard, really low RAM, very slow processor. The browser was barely usable even with an adblocker.
Sadly the Neo900 never got off the ground.
It all sounds very anticompetitive / anti trust to me.
Local laws may vary. In Australia I imagine the ACCC would the place to contact (TIO and ACMA don’t sound right)