Australia checking in.

Everyone can send and receive SMS. It’s always the primary /default contact method.

Close friends can be contacted via whatever third party app but there’s no single platform everyone uses other than SMS.

Is that the definition of CSAM?

Good lord. What a tedious and pointless discussion.

Same with all of these other frontends like invidious, teddit, rimgo, bibliogram,

This you?

Besides which… it’s well understood that all of these apps are brittle as in they stop working every other day when youtube changes whatever thing so they stop working.

In the case of newpipe for example, if you install from the app store or even f-droid the version there will be a few weeks old and just won’t work. The best approach is to install the apk and allow it to update itself when a new version is released. I’ve been using newpipe for several years in this manner and it’s very reliable.

Er go, if it doesn’t work for you, you’re doing it wrong.

Nome of the frontends you mentioned have apps.

Doing it wrong.

I don’t think that’s true at all.

I haven’t used only office but it looks pretty great.

Open source alternatives are always around, even if they’re a few steps behind corporate offerings.

Not really. If you really wanted to help your time would be better spent volunteering for an organisation that teaches tech literacy to people.

Also I don’t really believe OPs claims. Sure OK occasionally you might get a scammer to talk for more than a few minutes but not often.

If you’re not getting calls it’s just coincidence. Scammers don’t have a unified do not call register.

You’re just wasting your time.

That’s… not how that works.

Diallers just dial random numbers. They don’t need a list of numbers to call.

They DGAF if you’re on a do not call register.

When a ROM is compiled, the compiler follows the build file, which means it’ll build in dependencies related to the files bing compiled. So simply remove/replace has a high risk of not working, since dependencies are unique to each file/component.

There’s not really anything special here. This is how any software is built. Components have published APIs with which they interact with other components. The whole point of microG is that it emulates the same api as com.google.android.gms. I’m not expecting a 100% flawless implementation.

This is a bit messy - rooting is done to a running OS, and unrelated to flashing a stock ROM. Stock Roms, as far as I’ve seen typically have Google Services baked in. Just clarifying.

This just isn’t true, at least not in my case. I obtained a stock android ROM from samsung’s update server using bifrost. I then patched that ROM using Magisk and only then flashed it. So it’s patch then flash.

Running without Google Services makes a fast phone and a battery that lasts noticeably longer. You could try simply freezing the Google Services files with something like 3C Toolbox (once rooted, of course). I think 3C can actually uninstall the files, but that’s a good path to boot loop (ask me how I know 😁 ).

Even just freezing the files will often cause repetitive error notifications.

This doesn’t really seem sensible? Of course just freezing google services will cause errors. MicroG is designed to emulate google services and mitigate those errors.

Sure, look I don’t know enough about this to contradict you but I’m not sure “GS are part of the ROM” is the whole story. The components in question like com.google.android.gms are just components, it’s just that a lot of other components rely on them. If you remove them it’s going to cause problems, but as I understand it the purpose of the microG suite is to mitigate those problems?

I’m not sure I really have a specific goal. It’s a second / unused device so I’m just playing around with it really. I’ve always wanted to try Lineage but it’s not directly supported and I think there’s problems with the Camera amongst other things. I was reading on xda-forums someone said they rooted, installed stock android, then lsposed, and microG, and found the end result to be very pleasing, so I was just kinda following along with that to see where I end up.

I think in summary I’m interested to see what sort of experience is possible without any (minimal?) google services or apps.

I’ve updated the post since your first comment, I found a guide that I’m going to work through. I’ll let you know.

LineageOS support seemed pretty terrible for my device, an s20+.

I’ll have a look at NikGapps, thanks!

Well, it was a carrier branded ROM. I’ve flashed rooted stock A13, so not really “factory” but I take your point in that it still has google services.

I’ve seen commenters in xda forums taking about this approach like it’s no big thing.

A court wouldn’t look favourably on that.

Rights couldn’t have been very b important if you just let it run.

Nonsense. If this is copyright the payout will be many billions. They’ve had a year to think about it.

Generally if someone is clearly in breach of copyright the rights holder will apply to a court to issue an injunction to order that company to cease their activities until a case can be resolved.

Given that has not happened, it seems that from a court’s perspective, it’s not a clear breach of copyright.

It’s not at all clear that the current model does breach the law.

If it was a court would have issued an injunction or whatever.

Sure, it’s been the “winner” if you were expecting reddit to topple from top spot as best aggregator - but it was never really reasonable to expect that.

Even now, the perspective that Lemmy should strive to be some kind of new reddit is really daft.

What we actually want, is for Lemmy to grow in a sustainable and manageable way with real actual content enjoyed by real contributing users.

The quality of Lemmy has improved dramatically in the last 6 months. Way more users, servers, content, and third party apps. The quality of reddit has decreased dramatically in the last 6 months. User counts may not have suffered, but the content and the experience most certainly has.

It lacks diversity.

I think what you really mean is that you don’t feel like you fit in here.