It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.
I switched to graphene OS just a month ago when I first heard about it.
I’m happy to report it was easy, everything works perfectly and the user experience is better. Full control, no bloat. Should have switched way sooner but I was intimidated by never having done any installs on a phone.
So I already have apps downloaded from f-droid including encrypted folder. What happens to this from September. Do i get to keep them?
If i do get to keep them are there any apps I should download while I still can?
Also if f droid is going to stop working but I already have it what does that mean? Are google going to outright takeover my phone like some IT department in a big company and delete and install everything they want on there?
Once this rolls out, the apps stop working. Google have said there’ll be a process you can go through to allow other apps on your phone, but it doesn’t seem to be available yet. Presumably you’ll need to go through this if you want to use f-droid after the change too.
Welcome to Apple Inc
Can’t stay on Android because Google is anti-privacy. Can’t get a GrapheneOS phone because they’re only compatible with non-repairable devices. Can’t get a FairPhone or Jolla because I live in America. Can’t get an HMD because the bootloader is locked.
Even e/os and LineageOS have security problems.
There is no good phone on the market, to my knowledge. You can’t have privacy, repairability, and security all at the same time.
I really feel like I should have bought a phone 2 years ago… Mine is now 6 years old and I hate everything that is happening to android sine version 11(i’m on 10)
Can’t get a GrapheneOS phone because they’re only compatible with non-repairable devices
Replaced the battery in my Pixel 7 in like 30 min with an iFixit kit, nowhere near as imposing as I’d thought. They have screens too, the rest is mainboard, but that’s nearly all phones.
The Pixel 7 requires a heat gun to get to the battery because it’s glued down, and step 31 in the process goes over what to do if your battery is stuck even after applying heat. It’s impressive that you were able to replace the battery without many problems, but companies shouldn’t be adding unnecessary complications like gluing down the battery in the first place.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Google+Pixel+7+Battery+Replacement/154680
Sure, glue sucks, but I didn’t need a heat gun (or hair dryer), just the microwave heated tube thingy and the slicer tab. Admittedly the old battery was a bit spicy pillow which may have helped, dunno. If it’s too imposing, just get a pro to do it.
Afterwards I got a ‘chargie’ which connects between the wall charger and the phone and lets you choose how much to charge it to, e.g. 80%. More importantly it lets you cut off charging when the device is over a certain temperature, e.g. 33C. Pretty sure the old battery cooked itself during summer, it was happily charging at 50+C, which is definitely not good. 2 years later and it still reports 99% health (although it mostly stays in it’s wireless charging dock, so YMMV). Like that you may not need to replace the battery more than once during the 7 years of security updates the more modern Pixels have.
I’m looking forward to the Motorola and Graphene partnership. I may finally upgrade the S10 in still using.
I’m cautiously optimistic for that but need to see the specs and disassembly. Either way, it’s an important step forward for the phone industry.
The new Pixel 10a is very much repairable. It also doesn’t have this fucking horrible camera bulge that other Pixels have.
Why cant you repair the google phones? Most of the common repairs are not that hard to do. I recently did a battery swap on a “non repairable phone” cost $30 and was pretty easy. Going to replace the usb c port next.
Which model do you have? A lot of them have low scores of ifixit.
tbh, I’m tempted to get a feature phone :/
Letting my phone bill lapse just to see if I miss it.
Well yes. But gotta say, my last three phones lasted me 13 years and counting without requiring any repair. Unless you drop your phone regularly or sometging like that, I am not sure how important repairability really is.
Personally, every modern phone I’ve owned post-Blackberry has battery problems within the first year. I’d like to be able to swap out the battery when that instead of getting a new phone or dealing with bad battery life.
Understandable, though I don’t share your issue. Or rather, it has usually been a software problem (app wasting battery) rather than HW one.
What in the Apple products are you trying to do Google? Guess we will just dump you like we did Windows when they put 11 out and the Linux draw became too great.
They are following what Apple is doing because its whats legal. Apple made their system closed and Google made theirs open. Both got sued multiple times in court and Apple kept winning because they were closed and Google kept losing because they were open. It doesnt take much to see what to do next. They will just copy the Apple model in Europe because its the the one most approved by world courts and governments.
There’s a thing called precedent.
Also, Apple has been.contested in Europe precisely because it’s closed. They’ve been forced to open up their app store more… which makes Google’s stance all the more strange.
So I’ll keep using F-Droid then?
Google continues to stress that sideloading isn’t going away. Power users will still be able to install apps from any source they choose. The difference is that unregistered apps will require extra steps, while apps from verified developers should continue to install normally.
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-sideloading-changes-timeline-3679204/
Still scummy as fuck.
This is just the first of many, slow changes to close off Android and milk the userbase.
I don’t believe a word Google says.
This will be used to punish and block developers for political reasons, whomever party or oligarchs don’t like this month.The frog is boiled slowly
Give them an inch, they’ll take a mile!
I don’t know why people downvoting your for saying what’s actually happening.
Still a dumb decision that they’re changing it though.
I paid off my old phone early and got a grapheneOS phone ASAP just because of these motherfuckers.
Hell, I was firmly in the Android camp specifically because of the open source nature of their software. I never made the apps I wanted to make, but I like having the option to do so.
So you can go fuck yourself, google. Yes my phone is a Googlepixel 10 because they work best with grapheneOS. In a few years if I can I will get a Linux phone.
I’m really hoping we get a hard fork of AOSP that gets really popular.
it’s called GrapheneOS.
it gets popular by you installing it and telling your friends
Im already doing that but we don’t have big players selling it in stores.
yeah, the problem with a pre-installed OS is that you don’t know what’s in it, the carrier could have installed a fork or spyware that defeats the purpose of GrapheneOS.
it’s much more secure to download, verify, and install the OS to your phone yourself.
hopefully people wake up to all the bad-faith surveillance happening and become willing to take that step, which is much easier than it sound
Why graphene? Lineage os much more popular and supports many more devices.
U can’t trust Google hardware
Don’t let the grapheme crowd hear you. Maybe Motorola will work it out.
Would a hard fork not splinter the software support, killing the ecosystem? E.g. some devs only support that hard fork, others only the android compatible version.
I would be fine with that split. That would be an almost ideal situation even, and a thin compatibility layer like proton or even just an invisible container system similar to docker or flatpak could handle getting more of android onto the fork when it all stops being completely compatible. More effort but hopefully only needed short term.
Hardware compatibility is the major problem with alternative android. Basically I have to buy a 10 year old used phone as is. Would this only make this worse?
Anyway, maybe AI code generation could actually help with things like hardware compatibility. Things like an AI agent could iterate on reading about a smartphone model and testing various configurations and patch drivers to make it compatible for many more devices. Not sure if AI is suitable for that, but you should be able to define stringent test cases for this.
AI can’t code around missing security chips and features in hardware.
They do make a small profit off those phones, while you could’ve simply hit them where it counts with ad-blocking and tracker protection.
Buy used.
Which helps contribute to resale value which contributes to initial sale value.
it’s a nice incentive to double down on my degoogle efforts
Where u gonna go?
You also get AI features you never wanted. Now shut up and be happy
Convenience usually wins until it doesn’t.
Looking at the bigger picture, that convenience was manufactured from the start.
Fair point. People rarely ask what they traded away.
Isn’t all convenience manufactured?
Sure, but not all convenience comes with surveillance attached.
Well literally speaking everything is manufactured.
Yes, dear.
Apple did that from begining and nobody care
I cared. That’s why I didn’t get an iPhone.
Yea but that was known from the start. Android is an open platform right now. This is changing a fundamental feature of a device I already paid for.
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Introduce cutting edge tech to the masses, claiming it will usher in a new era of connection, convenience and utility.
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Firmly entrench that tech into every corner of modern society so that most day-to-day activities SUPPOSEDLY cannot be done without it.
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Slowly tighten the screws by removing user agency and freedom while raising prices.
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Become obscenely wealthy from an entire generation of locked-in consumers who think they have no choice but to submit to your control over their lives.
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Wash, rinse and repeat.
E³ing society.
And yet none of my friends and family can see this blatantly right in front of them. Have people gotten stupider ? Its as obvious as the sun being hot.
Yes. Yes they have. All it takes is one charismatic idiot to make your otherwise thoughtful and mindful friends to debase themselves. It sucks, but welcome to the world.
Edit: Debate to debate. Fucking autocorrect.
I don’t know if they’re stupid or have just given up or what. I always feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I talk to people about technology. Usually they can’t even acknowledge there’s a problem while I’m so pissed off about it that I’m not sure I could restrain myself from doing physical harm if I found myself in the presence of some of the people responsible for this shit. It’s incredibly frustrating.
I am 10000% in the same boat. I can’t even talk to them about tech because like you, I’ll go insane trying to make them understand these issues and they just laugh it off, or I’m a crazy tinfoil hat person. Even though its documented 100% proven what big tech does.
A lot of them have given up as well. I mean, say you have a kid, then you forgo thinking about anything else in the world except that, who cares if zucc and thiel are destroying the world and surveiling you constantly to bring in a new era of authoritarianism that will result in mass suffering? Your kid needs food. Parents by and large do not care what is actually going on, theyre too busy (from what ive seen.) And I can’t really blame them.
So I prefer to have intelligent conversation online, and when around IRL folks I just act as dumb as them.
They never had a problem with it.
See Windows and Mac.
Or IOS.
Or the people who cheered when Epic Games lost their lawsuits.
It’s that whole frog analogy, where you can slowly boil a frog alive by gradually increasing the temperature by small increments.
I’m pretty sure that’s a myth, but the analogy is still useful to get the concept across. It simultaneously amuses me and disappoints me that so many humans can be aware of this effect and still not recognise it happening to them, whilst the frogs aren’t actually that stupid and jump out of the water.
*after you lobotomised the frog first.
Hopefully not coming off as too much of an ass, but normies largely won’t care, as it doesn’t immediately affect them. Knowing it’s a bad thing requires a bit of understanding about an operating system that most people just don’t know or care to learn about.
And this is the issue. People are lazy and dumb. No desire to learn.
It does immediately affect them though
Right, it’s of no consequence to people who just browse Facebook and do online banking and candy crush and watch TikTok reels. They’re already perfectly happy giving up everything about themselves.
‘Bad’ is just an immediate feeling of aversion to most ‘people’.
They’re just pzombies. Herd animals.bundles of reaction and reflex without consciousness.
We all start out that way. Not everyone is fortunate enough to grow in an environment that grants them access to education and insights into how tech works.
If you start thinking of others as lesser just because they’re less/uneducated about something then know that someone could be thinking the same of you.
As someone who has been offering those insights for longer than many people have been alive: they call you a nerd hate you for trying to make their lives harder and tell you to fuck off, because mastodon takes five seconds and one decision more to register for than Twitter.
Then ten/fifteen/twenty years later when they panic because you were right about everything, they blame you for Facebook being evil because you knew about it. Despite being the one person they know without a Facebook account.
You’re making up someone to be mad at, who yells at people for using a GUI and shouts “nooooob!” Without irony. That person sounds unpleasant, and I would like an apology for the assumption that I’m them.
Just gotta put this into context:
They’re just pzombies. Herd animals.bundles of reaction and reflex without consciousness.
Sounds like condescending narcissist POC speak to me. No apologies.
Yeah I guess I should just switch to windows. Continue this conversation on discord?
Joke’s on you bud. I use NixOS.
Curiously enough, home-manager supports Discord.
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I don’t want to laugh about this. I am seriously freaking out at the idea of using the built-in apps instead of the open source equivalents. Calculator with Internet access? Camera app with ads before I click? Browser that spies on me no matter what searches I perform? No thank you.
The issue is that the masses will use the out of the box functionality and not think much of it. Most normal users don’t mind that they can only pull from official app stores, and like the idea that this system is more secure. If everyone who didn’t like this change stopped using the platform entirely, they would still have enough customers to maintain profitability.
and like the idea that this system is more secure.
*The false claim
https://www.bitdefender.com/en-gb/blog/labs/malicious-google-play-apps-bypassed-android-securityI understand what you’re saying, but is it not comparatively harder to pass malicious programs into a walled garden (Play store restrictions) compared to being able to be downloaded without any checks?
Yes and no, your average end user trust the Play Store and the promised security which is why an app once it’s inside can get millions of downloads.
Compare this to trying to get your average user to
a) trust your selfhosted app and
b) succeed in installing it.Also, I can’t find a single malware that has used f-droid as it’s primary vector.
I understand what you’re saying, but the barrier to entry for non technical people to jump into an alt app store is too high. Most are complacent.
too high
Literally me and my pal the other day
Pal: “hey sup, what app do ya use for music? Ya never have ads”
Me: “Metrolist”
Pal: “can’t find dat on the playstore”
Me: “you gotta install it from Droid-ify, just search it, click the first result, then download and scroll until you see app-relase apk and click on that”
Pal: “oh okay, now?”
Me: “just click the search bar and type Metrolist duh”
Literally the simplest shit ever, i agree that it isn’t intuitive for everyone and that’s an issue that should be addressed, Google should be forced to allow F-Droid and other appstores on the play store
I agree that it can be easy but this is kinda relevant: https://xkcd.com/2501/
So an iPhone
No, stop using vanilla corpo software. They will fuck you again. Just put an aftermarket ROM on your android phone. I run LineageOS on an old OnePlus model. You can build it yourself if you’re techy and paranoid, otherwise the tutorials to flash an official prebuilt image are not that hard for a tech-literate person, almost every supported device has a guide page on their wiki.
F-Droid for foss app repo
Aurora Store for anonymous Google Play login and installsF-Droid for foss app repo
Aurora Store for anonymous Google Play login and installsThe whole point of this change is that you won’t be able to use these anymore.
LineageOS will not be enforcing Google’s new developer verification. Sideloading (Which really just means not using the Play store) will still be possible on such ROMs. Even for unverified APKs.
Tell me a phone with all the e features i want, and support for stuff like lineage and graphene And I’ll happily switch But i havent found any
I don’t know what features you want, but GrapheneOS only runs on Pixels due to that team’s specific concerns over hardware-based security, and LineageOS officially supports hundreds of phones.
Honestly, iPhone is already there in shittyland. You need to jailbreak to do it, which you can host install GraphineOS or root your android easier for the same effect.
We need a 3rd primer mobile OS option, but won’t get one since the money always enshittifies these things.
PostmarketOS Ubuntu Touch LineageOS (AOSP) GrapheneOS (AOSP)
Jolla looks somewhat interesting, it’s a shame they produce so few devices.
The most annoying part is the number of good mobile OSs we have already lost over the years to these two; Symbian, BB10, Windows Phone, and WebOS come to mind just off the top of my head. Not to mention the projects that have struggled for traction like Mozilla OS and Ubuntu Touch.
Edit: I misremembered, it was called Firefox OS, not Mozilla OS.
Maemo/meego was better than all those IMO. It still half lives on in sailfish but had Nokia not been burned it could’ve been a true Goliath that could compete.
WebOS was nice
I still have my palm pre and boot it up now and then even though it will only connect to wifi, it was a wonderful phone and OS. I’m just so fucking mad at how that all went down and every time I turn on my LG TV and see WebOS it legit hurts
Synergy was magical!
I thought they allowed app installs outside of the app store now? I haven’t had an iOS device for about 10 years but the few things I hear it feels like iOS is moving more towards openness while Android is quickly moving towards a closed environment and what iOS used to be in that meaning. I also think Google has been real bad with tracking and shit than Apple has ever been. Obviously both Google (or Alphabet or whatever) and Apple are absolutely not good in any way about any of this, just saying to make it clear I’m not siding with either.
Apple “lets” you make a dev account to install an app (side load) from something like iloader and sidestore/altstore, but you are limited to installing a handful of apps and each app only works for 7 days after which you have to redo the whole process. Side loading on apple is a PITA. I recently tried helping do this and hate the entire process, it should be more like android. Not that android is perfect, because I personally believe you should be able to install any app or OS on any device.
should be more like arch.
