There is a term for that. Duopoly.

It is nice if you prefer the original file with all the associated data/metadata instead of the stripped/transcoded copy that many messaging apps send. No need to cloud or message or nothing. Works without Internet. Just bulk-select 20 pics and tap on the person’s phone.

Probably will become more popular with so many leaving the cloud, as well.

It will be once the bubble pops. Small local tuned models for specific tasks that the user powers are much less expensive for the tech companies than tech companies powering and watering datacenters.

Right now the tech bros genuinely think people will be cool paying hundreds of dollars a month to rent a GPU for all their Internet tasks. AI fatigue is already setting in.

The tech bros’ investors will pull funding once they realize how asinine that is long-term. Probably already starting to, with the likes of Zuck trying to use green charity money to fund his LLMs.

So the way compute used to work, is you could install any program you want from anywhere. You could buy a program from a web site or copy a disk and install the program.

Smartphones have been around since the late 1990s in various forms, it used to be, you could just install whatever you want.

Then, in 2008, Apple released the iPhone app store, and it was a closed space, a “walled garden”. You can only install apps on their phone if they approve them.

Google decided to join the phone race and released a phone where one could still install applications from anywhere, not just their store. There are multiple stores like others have mentioned, or you can download an APK file from anywhere and install it on your phone.

Part of their behavior since is slightly open to interpretation, as the technology is now used by everyone, not just tech nerds. People could install “bad” programs, and they could lose money, cell networks could be compromised, etc.

It likely costs a lot of companies a lot of money to deal with dumb users doing stupid shit. So from one perspective, making it extremely hard to install unknown programs from anywhere will curb that expense.

It could be a defensive move, as LLMs now allow anyone to write computer software with very little knowledge of it, and it is just bad timing.

On the other hand, since the beginning of computers, the owner of the machine could run whatever software they wanted.

This move by Google is basically making it so there is NO mobile compute platform that the owner of the device actually owns, and is allowed to do with their hardware what they want. Apple or Google, that is it. Apple had always been closed, which should have been made illegal, but I digress.

It has been a slippery slope with Android for almost 2 decades, and this move is basically the end of the ability for free humans to install free software from anywhere on the hardware they own and paid anywhere up to $3000 for.

Basically a huge dive for personal freedom on a planetary scale, decided by one corporation.

At some point people are going to start realizing they’re not temporarily inconvenienced billionaires

Hahaha, so accurate. The psychological poisoning seems so effective on many levels, like those on welfare voting against their own interests as they know they’re just one lottery ticket or get rich quick scam away from financial freedom. Or the billionaires that think they’re one harebrained scheme away from becoming a god-king.

What did you pivot into, if you don’t mind my asking?

The actual reason is control. VPN on the current Android stack makes it relatively easy for a non-technical user to sign up for a paid service that blocks telemetry-harvesting back to Google. Unlike Apple’s platform, Google’s historically heavily relies on a cloud connection for pseudo-real-time telemetry harvesting. If a person uses a VPN with ad/app/telemetry-blocking, Google gets cut off. That means things like, their Waymo cars not receiving real-time traffic updates, their WiFi geolocation database missing current information, their adtech arm not receiving user metadata.

Google’s software is quite tenacious at attempting to connect to Google too. If you ever want to see how much, install RethinkDNS and start blocking core Google services. Check the logs. You will see the app try Google in your country, then Google in neighboring countries, then other devices in your home running Google software. Any connection they can find to relay telemetry back to the big G-spot.

Google’s moves right now in lieu of any government taking action against them is to solidify their platform control and metadata harvesting pipelines. They’re cutting off alternate ROMs, cutting off open source hardware drivers for newer devices, partnering with Samsung to encourage Samsung to close their devices down, reducing security patch frequency on older devices, partnering more closely with Apple to ensure a stream of healthy metadata from Apple, closing the ability to install third-party apps, and also getting heavier into military contracting.

Google is an information vacuum, always has been. When their leadership was more “altruistic”, the trade-off was a contribution back to society. Now that they are in a late-stage profit phase, they’re just doubling down on that vacuum role hard.

They will likely end up doing something similar to how Apple’s network stack on iPhone works once they can figure out how to make the network stack work that way. Apple’s devices are configured so even when you have a full-tunnel VPN, some local traffic, and connections back to Apple corporate always circumvent the VPN. There is no way to truly full-tunnel on an Apple device.

If that bank does not have an alternate way to 2FA, see if another bank does. They just want you to have an app dependency so they can harvest everything you do, everywhere you go, and sell it.

Banks will have to adapt when they realize people won’t play their games anymore. At the end of the day, they like money, and will follow it.

And using tap or chip on a regular credit card does as well. Every tap rotates through a set of keys in the card. The periodic use of the chip refreshes the tap keys. It isn’t the first gen tap to pay on credit cards anymore, it is much more robust.

But beyond that, the retailer already saw your face when you walked in, already saw it at the point of sale, already tracked you as you traveled the store via WiFi, already saw the BT/WiFi profile of your rotating MAC address device as it only obfuscates, and in some cases, already had your phone join their WiFi network via EAP-SIM through your carrier, already scanned your license plate with Flock in the parking lot, and already saw your club/discount/points card number at the point of sale, so they already associated you with yourself.

Tap-to-pay also sets up so all your transactions, on-phone or not, are captured by the handset manufacturer for further resale of metadata.

There was a recent change in the last month or three that any tap transaction over $100 has to be chip or swipe. Likely what you are seeing. Which again goes back to how pointless phone tapping is when the ability to buy goods and services is already rife with hoop-jumping.

The plastic card can be shut off by the bank web site/phone call/app. Banks also have fraud protection, a quick call will shut off the card and undo any fraudulent transactions. The fear is not realistic. Also why it is good to use a credit card and not carry a bank card. A fiscal firewall.

Who cares? What is the obsession with banking apps? From a privacy perspective, one does not want tap to pay or banking apps on their device. Setting that up gives the bank/a whole pipeline of interim companies access to every transaction you make as well as phone telemetry, whether or not you use the tap to pay service. Carrying a card or paper money is so simple.

It’s a novelty, sure, but who wants tying their ability to purchase, drive, go through airports, and such, to an electronic stalking tether with a limited battery? Much simpler, as others have said, to use tools that do not require battery.

And yet still not as serviceable/durable as older ThinkPads. They don’t even have water spouts in the keyboard/chassis like the older ones. One could dump a beverage on the keyboard on the older models and it would route through the keyboard->chassis->even the docks had water routing ports so it would just keep traveling mostly harmless through to underneath.

Nor batteries externally removable like used to be.

Not a bad step though by any means, and great to see this return to user-serviceability.

Props though, on the removable RAM. Given the need for shorter circuit paths for higher performance RAM these days, that looks a bit of clever engineering.