I honestly wish for the responsible people to die. A natural, painless death, but let it be quick. All of silicon valley is so evil it would be deemed unrealistic for a movie villain. They are selling out our freedoms and planet for what? They are already stinking rich.
Most moderate lemmy user when talking about digital freedom:
Moderates is what got us into this dystopia. We should have never tolerated greed and selfishness to begin with.
They are sexually aroused when they torture both individuals and society at large.
I wish I could accuse you of exaggerating. But I am not sure it is an exaggeration.
Everything is about sex. Sex is about power.
Only for toxic people.
I agree. One should strive to evolve beyond the tyranny of our amygdalas.
Google getting rid of all the things that made people want an android phone over an iPhone.
Yep, if this happens there is no benefit to android.
Linux phones are moving fast but it feels like Android is moving faster on the other direction 😥
(Yes I know Android is built over Linux, I mean more traditional and open distros like postmarketos)
Yup my first thought was “Where is your God now?”
Google ditched “Don’t be evil” a long time ago.
Unfortunately, that is 0.1% of their global market that is affected. So, they don’t really have much to lose.
The Android ecosystem has been feeling more like an invasive chaotic advertisement machine the past few years. The play store is a cesspool, the weather app switch was poorly executed, Google Podcasts went to the graveyard, and Google pay getting shut down meant I had to switch back to vomits Venmo.
I still have Android gaming handhelds, but why wouldn’t I just get an iPhone the next time I go to replace my phone? I can’t believe I’m even saying that after being so die hard Android so for years.
why wouldn’t I just get an iPhone
Jumping from the frying pan straight into the fire.
Exactly this. Just left iOS and got a pixel8a and flashed grapheneos on it. Apple is doing the same shit. GOS might be a pain in the ass sometimes but I feel much better knowing that Tim Apple isn’t reading my texts and monitoring my bank apps so they can target me with ads.
I can’t do Graphene because of work. I am an IT manager, and one of our guys did graphene and had a host of issues with the work apps. I really can’t risk any issues.
This is the unfortunate hell I am in too. I’m debating an iPhone and I fucking hate Apple with a passion.
It is a tough choice, both companies are gigantic and kind of scumbags. Funny story though, I was also in the market for a new computer recently as my 10 year old Windows 10 tower was really starting to show its age. My frustrations with Windows had also peaked.
I have been doing a more photo and video editing for fun, and I ended up taking a leap. I got an M4 Pro Mac mini. Mac OS is definitively better (IMO) for home use than Windows, and the M series processors are like wizardry. I liked it so much that shortly after I bought a used M2 Max MacBook Pro off of a coworker.
Coincidentally, a few months after I got my Macs LTT also switched over first to Snapdragon-based Windows laptops and later to Macs for a 30-day challenge and they ended up staying on the Macs.
I am an IT manager and I don’t think I would ever want to deploy Macs at scale in my workplace, though it is the only computer I look forward to using now.
Personally I’ll never purchase a Mac.
It sucks that at this point both systems suck. Apple is not great but at least it’s been pretty stable. If Apple allowed side loading that would be the dream.
Yeah, Apple is also a very proprietary ecosystem in a walled-garden style presentation. I don’t want an appliance. I want a computer.
I’m sure we all have a different perception, but my current view is that Google sells you a phone that they need to push ads and harvest vast amounts of data from you in order to make money on the phone, and Apple somehow needs to do this less.
Which company do you feel takes privacy more seriously? From what I understand, Google primarily makes their money from advertising.
I’ve never owned an iPhone, but I 100% agree with you. The reason I choose android is because of the freedom to use my phone how i want (for the most part).
Apple is a walled garden, but their security is good, they’re not an advertising company in the same way google is and don’t have as much of an incentive to harvest and sell your data. If android is going to be a walled garden like iOS, I trust apple more than i do google and If in the future I can’t find a phone that has all the features i want anyway, then i may as well just get an iPhone.
Agreed across all points. Android’s main advantages after the changes go through with side loading will be:
- choice of manufacturer and
- the still-deeply-flawed-but-far-superior implementation of a work profile in Android.
I love being able to press one button and have all of my containerized work apps shut off. It is also quite nice that a remote wipe from M365 could be limited to the work app container rather than the entire phone.
They also managed to remove a feature from the fucking clock app. It’s not much, but seriously, it’s like a headless chicken running toward a cliff from the business end.
Last I checked, unverified software didn’t run the risk of making my phone fly itself into, and bring down, a skyscraper.
You haven’t seen the way I write code.
Remember that brief period in the US where, for a fleeting moment, Lina Khan went after a few companies for monopolistic practices?
Yeah man, those were the days.
Great i guess it is time to root my phone, and run a custom rom. I haven’t had to do that in years because android finally got good.
I guess it’s time to buy a linux phone
Two things especially worth noting from the article.
If you have a non-Google build of Android on your phone, none of this applies.
This means that at least GrapheneOS will be unaffected for now. Other ROMs without gapps will be unaffected only as long as you don’t install gapps. Since Graphene has a sandbox for them, I’m assuming it’ll be fine. That is, unless Google decides to lock the bootloader entirely.
In September 2026, Google plans to launch this feature in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The next step is still hazy, but Google is targeting 2027 to expand the verification requirements globally.
So most users worldwide still have at least 1.5 years until it’s implemented. Plenty of time to get a Pixel and install Graphene on it. Or to figure out some other plan.
Don’t get me wrong - this is insane, unreasonable and horrible news for everyone. We should push back as hard as physically possible against it. However, at the very least we still have some time to figure things out before the policy rolls out.
Fuck Google
EU: How often do I have to teach you, old man?
EU is moving full steam ahead toward the end of “private” computers and mandatory state surveillance on your devices. They’ll be delighted with that. The funky “hey, we’re consumer friendly” times are over.
I need an OS for phone which is completely controlled by community.
GrapheneOS for Pixel
Well. They will try anyway.
Wasn’t Apple sued for not allowing sideloading?
I will pay hard cash money for some devs to bring postmarketos to quality hardware vendors.
I’m all for buying a pinephone, but man are we missing out on the full potential from some genuinely good OEM hardware stuff like razr flip.
Aside from google doing google things, android has been a bloated java pos toy OS for nearly a decade now. It completely wastes the full potential of superior hardware by running everything on a shitty JVM known as the ART that was designed for when devices had <512mb of RAM. A Nintendo 3DS can do better multi process tasking than modern android which regularly kills app threads for no reason other than to screw with you because you dared to switch to a different app for 5 seconds.
Android was supposed to be the big apple killer because of its closeness to a desktop OS with heavy emphasis on widespread features and functionality. Even technically speaking, rooting got you there if you wanted to run whatever straight on the linux environment or swap kernels.
Its nothing but a ripoff iOS clone now. Android 7/8 was probably the peak of development and usability, and even back then people were complaining it didn’t have groundbreaking improvements like 6 or lollipop.
I don’t think that it’s the lack of quality hardware what is stopping adoption of Linux on phones. There are many resons why I don’t consider someting like PostmarketOS viable as a daily driver for most.
First of all some apps are just not available on Linux. Banking apps are a prime example. Most banks are now requiring some form of app where I live and they don’t even consider Linux. But that’s also another problem in it self.
Secondly: driver support. Drivers aren’t something one thinks about when talking about phones. But they are needed and mobile phones being what they are, most manufacturers aren’t really open to do anything in that regard.
As an Android developer I’m also annoyed by the restrictive power management of Android. But it’s there for a reason. On PostmarketOS my phone would be dead after sitting around all day doing noting. On Android I can maybe squeeze two to three days of use out of the same phone. And that’s not even with the OEM rom.
That being said, I hope for a future were all of the current issues can be solved and we finally have a viable alternative to Apple and Google.
To be clear, I’m in no way trying to defend what Google is doing.
Please let this be a nightmare…
