Love that some megacorp can just make decisions like this that affects billions of people.
Really just feeling the fucking freedom. I hate everything.
The megacorps can do anything they want with their product. The chef can change the menu anytime and he can refuse you service - it’s his restaurant. Our problem is that it’s a duopoly and there’s nowhere else to go.
The only way out is open standards and platforms, enabling true competition.
Real quick.
Just imagine you order a plate of pasta. You’re only two bites in, and it’s DELICIOUS.
Then here comes chef. While making full eye contact, he tips your plate and dumps all of that pasta in the trash.
Chef proceeds to take a giant wet shit onto the plate. He brings a new set of silverware and a fresh napkin right before your server comes back with the check.
You insist that you didn’t order a giant wet shit, but they won’t take it off the bill.
Let’s stop pretending this is an inevitable oopsie. This shit is egregious.
Daddy Googs won’t be happy until it’s a walled garden just like iOS
“Fascist oligarchy of capitalist dictators continue to implement totalitarian surveillance apparatus. Majority of talking chimps sleepwalking into dystopia.”
Don’t overstretch my analogy like that. How about this:
Google has standardized The Restaurant. The kitchens all have the same tools and ingredients and are open to anyone. Seating and billing is standardized, and you can easily order and pay at your table, and the food is delivered straight to you via pneumatic tubes and nicely packaged. The food might be expensive or cheap, tasty or revolting, but the experience is always the same.
There are a lot of hobby cooks that like to cook in the Google restaurants. If you want to eat their food, you might have to pick it up straight at the kitchen, or nicely ask the hobby waiters. The cooks have been there for years and whipping up nice creations - mostly for free, beacause the ingredients and tools were free, and they really like to cook. Because the food is so good, some people tip the cooks or waiters directly.
Now Google introduced a new rule: everyone has to use their billing and pneumatic delivery system, citing improved food safety. The hobby cooks and waiters are infuriated, and even some of their customers, and they demand that everyone can still come to the kitchen or the waiters. But Google just says: look, my restaurant, my rules. If you don’t like it go make your own.
Except that google’s "standardized, “packaged” food is just as unsafe or even less safe than the hobby cooks’, and they’re only using “food safety” as a pretense to capture the market and hold clientele hostage.
And this change has also been preceded by buying out every other restaurant chain in town, except for the “Apple Restaurants,” which are already a walled garden, which Google is now trying to emulate even though most of its user base came to it specifically to avoid Apple’s business model.
And there are a few other smaller chains based on Google’s standards, but they’re considered niche and don’t all support every feature (“sorry, no ATMS”). Also, since most of their equipment comes from Google, Google likely has a killswitch and can cut off their stoves and refrigerators at any time.
It’s clearly an anti-trust issue, but since Apple has already set the precedent and the US is pro-corporation and anti-consumer, everyone is kinda just screwed.
The point is that Google’s head chef can come out and shit on your plate, and if you don’t like it then it sucks to suck because there aren’t really any viable alternatives.
Please consider donating to PostmarketOS to build up a pure mobile Linux alternative that is completely free of Google’s influence. It’s the best option we have.
Just signed up to donate 5 euros a month. Took me about 45 seconds.
Legend! :D
What about fairphone? Don’t they run a Ubuntu option?
The issue with Ubuntu Touch is that unfortunately it uses an outdated Android kernel (which is also usually not receiving security updates) and a Halium abstraction layer to access the closed source binary blob Android drivers for the phone’s hardware. It also requires that it be installed on top of an existing Android install, so in all it’s more of Linuxified layer on top of Android, which means it’s not truly escaping the control of the Android/Google ecosystem.
UBPorts also appears to inherit the use of CLA’s from Canonical:
I’m very much not a fan of CLA’s., which SailfishOS also employs.
The advantage of PostmarketOS (even though it is not ready as a daily driver for the average person), is that it uses the upstream Linux kernel with open-source GPU/hardware drivers, not an Android kernel to access the outdated proprietary GPU/Hardware blobs.
Hijacking as I’ve done on other posts. In my country all 3 major tellcos needed to verify phones can call emergency on VoLTE.
FP5 does this. For whatever reason the telcos cant “conform” that (its not sold here but important and DOES work) so the device is blocked at a network level.
Not blocked just for calls but even data.
Phone is now a brick. Double brick once the Android changes roll through.
I got grapheneOS on my phone right now. Go fuck yourself, google.
I will also do my damn best to make sure my older Samsung S23 doesn’t fall into that version. I have uses for that phone.
Concerning that this thread is overrun with bots telling me to download some super duper safe LLM
Hopefully this pushes Linux on Mobile devices to be a more daily drivable platform at least. Otherwise, guess we’re fucked since there’s no way Google will give in to the backlash since if memory serves me correctly they NEVER have. It’s almost like they’re basically a monopoly and can be as anti-consumer as they want or something…
People thinking this isn’t a monopoly enforcement action in disguise are the same people who think banning Huawei was justified.
Google’s one mistake was that they sold Motorolla to Lenovo, who ran it as low cost shovelware to make the mobile phone market in the US not look like a complete oligopoly. They kept their cost low by using complete stock Google ROMs while every other OEM exited the market.
Until recently when Lenovo properly built up their hardware lineup and started jumping ship to GrapheneOS the moment Google started clamping down.
That and thinking that they won’t be sued to oblivion for this. People are looking for ways to do lawsuits and this is a big one
Of course the US won’t do jack shit. Google always wins in reality even when they lose in US antitrust courts. But other countries can maybe win. Please do!
We need go start talking about the year of the GNU/Linux phone
Or the year of free (as in freedom) pocket computers, since the global telephony system goes against the freedoms.
PostmarketOS isn’t GNU
Anyways it’d be interesting to see more niche OSes on phones (there’s a mobile port of Genode/Sculpt OS for example)
We gotta rush the EU to pass legislation to prevent monopolies like this.
I recently switched from Apple to a De-Googled Fairphone 6 (Murena e/OS), because I do not fully understand Graphine OS and I thought the Fairphone would be the easiest way to detach myself from Apple and Google.
At the end of the day, all you can really do is to start treating your phone more like a phone and stop carrying it everywhere and using it for everything.
The convenience of it has made it way too easy for people to spy on you.
My wife would hate it, if I were no longer reachable.
No. I haven’t used Google apps on my phone for years already. That includes Google Play Services and the Play Store. Most apps are open source and I’m self hosting my media.
We gotta claw this shit back.
Do you have custom ROM + no gapps? Gets harder and harder if you want a new phone once in a while.
Bought the Fairphone with e/OS.
Problem is many see Android equivalent with Samsung and Samsung is the worst when it comes to customize your HW because they really lock down their shit.
For my phone I just bought a new battery after many years of use and it’s back to working as if it’s new. Before that I had a Shift phone (with Google, I think) which allowed me to replace the camera module once the autofocus in the camera broke.
Not sure if I’m old fashioned, but I like to own my devices and modify them if I please.
Yep. My disdain for the combination of fascist government where everything is surveillance, and sociopathic corporations and billionaires where everything is a cynical cash grab, overcame me excitement for tech “products” a long time ago. I’m in the US so it’s especially bad.
I still have a smart phone that’s 4-5 years old, and I do of course use it every day, but I consciously avoid using it every hour. I love when I misplace it in my own house, to then not look for it for hours. The only person who is going to message me anything urgent is my wife and she knows where to find me.
Constant phone addiction is one of those situations where when you remove yourself from it you can more easily see it in others. It’s like there’s a new form of body language where when you see that slight forward tilt of the head you know they are in the Phone Zone without even seeing the rest of their body.
I still have a smart phone that’s 4-5 years old,
Mine is an older model too, thankfully. I never needed the bells and whistles other people are into, which probably helps me stay more secure.
But I also just love that I’m not reaching for my pocket every 30 seconds for another dopamine hit too.
No. You can do a lot more. You can develop alternatives and enforce anti monopoly legislation.
brb enforcing anti monopoly legislation
As a person who uses a few sideloaded apps, this is sad news.
Well, as far as I know the current idea is that you’ll have to toggle a setting in developer options and wait 24 hours (once). After that you can sideload unverified stuff as much as you like. So it’s not horribly sad, I´d say.
I actually kind of think that’s a reasonable change. It improves safety for the clueless majority, but it still gives those that know what they are doing a free reign with a minor initial inconvenience. And I kind of feel like articles still claiming how horrible this all is are mostly just outrage farming. Unless the plans have changed to something more fucked up, that is.
No, it’s not reasonable. Fuck the clueless majority. Stupid people should be prevented from hurting others, but they should not be prevented from hurting themselves. If you manage to download malware that’s on you, no big brother should ever be controlling what you can and can’t install on your personal fuckin devices. I’m a fucking adult and I do not need or want some bullshit fucking kid mode imposed on my personal shit because Google went full fucking nazi. Companies have no business dictating how you use your own purchases property. Imagine your fucking car saying nah you’ve already driven twenty miles today it’s not safe for you to drive more and just shutting the fuck down. Every motherfucker making these decisions in every industry need to be publicly gruesomely executed. The owner class needs to remember who they’re accountable to.
boooooo
Publicly traded companies are soulless entities that are legally bound to 1 and only 1 goal, short term profits. Any time you see a company do something stupid, ineffectual, completely pointless, ect., then what you are seeing is step one in a plan. It is costing them money and future profits to make these changes that they know will be wildly unpopular just to maybe, sort of, possibly could, but won’t really, protect a very small number of the dumbest people on the planet? No, companies ruin, poison, make homeless, and kill people constantly while being completely aware of what they are doing. They do it and continue to come up with new ways to do it because they have just the 1 goal, profit. So, if this is not altruism then what is it? That’s what people are upset about. Because there are a lot of reasons for them not to do this, but the only reasons for them to do it are all bad in addition to violating their 1 goal. And they are still doing it anyway.
“Android fans”
Android Hostages lol, what am I supposed to do use an Iphone?
Yes
Yes, the much more open iPhone.
Not for much longer.
Android will still be more open than iPhone.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
