This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I wonder how much of this is about cracking down on Newpipe, ReVanced and other unauthorized clients.
My suspicion is that it's because the playstore has become so awful that google is seeing the effect in their earnings. If customers get burned one too many times on a crappy app with fake reviews, then they're not going to spend any money on anything else in the store anymore. So now Google tries to sabotage the possible alternatives, rather than try to fix their product.
Playstore got so unbelievably bad now, and it happened so quickly, I feel like I'm going insane. Who's decision was to do it like that and was there even a person to make decisions!
I have actually bought an app on the play store once, because I had a gift card. Turns out, they didn't use the gift card and used my cc on file for Google drive. Had to spend hours sorting that out with automated customer service, never gonna use that again. Their product actually does suck, and a lot of the reason that f-droid doesn't is that they aren't charging you to use it.
Ordered a Jolla phone with their SailfishOs (linux based). Time to leave android
SailfishOS is heavily closed source and Jolla used to be linked to Russia with Rostelecom owning 60%+ of it.
Some of the OS is proprietary especially the android layer, the rest is open source which is based on linux Meego owned by Nokia. I believe quite a few of the Nokia guys went further into developing Sailfish Os. I find the Russian link ( also Votron) also a bit crap. But i dont like the heavy dependence of Google either...
Someone needs to bring back Symbian OS
I miss my old Nokia sometimes
Isn't SailfishOS proprietary?
Would these work outside of Europe, say in the U.S. or Canada?
They will work outside of Europe according to their website. Also it says on the website:
The initial sales markets are EU, UK, Switzerland and Norway. Entering other markets, such as the U.S. and Canada are to be decided due course based on potential interest from the areas.
We will design the cellular band configuration to enable potential future markets, including major U.S. carrier networks.
Ironically, this may be a catalyst for better Linux Phones
Just in time for them to be practically outlawed, if my gut can be trusted. I hope not.
Dark times ahead...
I can't see this move by Google as anything but a power grab to reduce competition. If someone wants to bear the "risk" of installing software that hasn't been vetted by Google, why does Google insist on being a nanny that makes it more difficult? Money, that's why. Google is acting to try to enforce its monopoly over android apps. GrapheneOS, which is more secure than android, doesn't make a fuss over this issue. No, this is only an issue with the company that hoovers up all your data in breach of your privacy.
I can’t see this move by Google as anything but a power grab to reduce competition
It locks down phones. Without sideloading the elite controls which messenger services can be used. They most likely can also secretly update apps and replace them with versions that leak the encryption keys.
With Google not being threatened by a competitor this essentially tells us that the elite is serious about moving to fascism.
It's frightening to me that the comment has 85 upvotes but no reply that points this out.
So get a phone that can run AOSP and its many child roms and dont give a damn. Literally whole point of Android.
Now that US market has long since abandoned locking you into a contract for 2 years in exchange for a free flagship, and locking bootloaders on US models on top of that - just export whatever you want and magisk/aosp it.
This new limit is literally made for the savvy public who uses external apks and such and not the vast majority of room temperature IQs anyway.
I'm curious, how does this affect EU users? Isn't this against our rules?
It's trying to squeeze through a legal loophole. They have to allow apps from outside their appstore. But law does not explicitly say they can't require them to be verified by google first.
Thank god I run /e/OS. I just hope this won't hurt the popularity of sideloaded apps too much, as this might mean FOSS apps becoming stagnant because they don't receive as much attention anymore
Hard agree. If I'm forces to only run barely used FOSS apps, then I might as well buy a linux phone.
This is my #1 concern with this bullshit.
For /e/os have adblocker? How’s the learning curve?
They have a tool called advanced privacy that tries to block in-app trackers. Adblocking is more a browser thing but the preinstalled browser does have it (although I use uBlock on Fennec, a Firefox fork). Theres really not that much to learn most things just work. The only thing you need to know is that some apps that rely heavily on Google Play Services might not work properly. For example Google Maps does not work (but the Webapp does or you can just use CoMaps or Osmand, something OpenStreetMap based). Generally I found the switch to be pretty easy. My banking apps all worked fine but I've heard some people have trouble with theirs. The App Launcher is kind of iOS inspired but I didn't like it that much so I just swapped it out with Kvaerisito.
I only hope that manufacturers respond to this kind of behavior. Motorola deserves full credit for adopting grapheneos. I think some of the Chinese manufacturers have their own forks too?
How? The TOS for selling phones with Google services is that they can't sell phones with an Android fork outside China. Even the ODM is affected, meaning nobody will ever think this.
I saw in Italy that selling phones without Google services is a death sentence, Huawei crashed from 25% marketshare to 0% basically overnight even if they already had a "plan B" where they made "new" phones using the same specs and codename but in a different shape to buy time and when they launched their fork they had a 1:1 replacement for GMS called HMS so devs could still embed Google Maps and it will be replaced automatically by petal maps. Devs could upload their apps with a single click and users could install Google services unofficially installing an "unofficial 😉" APK with all the right signatures. Nobody did that. One click = too much work = nobody touches the default
At least they can leave the bootloader unlockable for us, but fucking Xiaomi really needs to make 200 new fucking models a year with lots of proprietary bits and abandons them after 6 months so it's impossibile for the community to make a well supported custom ROM. They copy everything from apple except the part where they should only make 4 fucking models a year. Basic, standard, pro and pro max. Don't need a "Xiaomi Redmi note 29T pro 5G wideband edition"
To be clear, GrapheneOS or any other fork of Android is not a long term viable solution as it is still dependent on Google. We need to break the Google/Apple duopoly. And of course, Linux phones are an option but people need top get behind it.
