I am greatly displeased at the smartphone industry. I think it’s time for a heavy handed crackdown about all the spying they’re doing. The smartphone industry and in particular the company qualcomm I find an intolerable company in their practice, I believe they should be smashed, their equiment liquidated and their intellectual property destroyed.
The smartphone industry is a festering cancer on general computing, a persistent and pernicious assault on human rights. An invasion of our private spaces. A colonization of our lives.
I think it is past the point of reform, not that there are any regulator with to intelligence figure out what is wrong let alone the wherewithal to do anything about.
For those reasons, I think global thermonuclear war is our only realistic option for setting back the clock on this travesty.
I am willing to hear your alternative, I don’t believe anything short of that has a snowball’s chance in hell to change anything about this.
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There’s a reason pixels are preferred, it’s not some kind of malicious conspiracy. The most common sense reason being that there’s a lot of overlap and cross-pollination of devs in the android world. between Google and graphene os in particular.
Pixels are also targeted because it’s a mass-produced flagship with decent specs that is the closest thing to being already rooted off the shelf. It’s the path of least resistance. Plus the used market is robust. A used carrier unlocked pixel 1 or 2 models behind the latest one can be obtained for several hundred dollars cheaper than it originally retailed for.
It takes effort to support additional brands/models.
Most brands lock their bootloaders and make “owning” the device difficult.
That answer is at best only partially right.
The real answer is that Pixels were, until very recently, Google’s officially supported reference hardware in AOSP while everything else is a community port of some GPL compliance source code dump.
Community ROMs are Pixel first because Pixels just work.
It’ll change now that Google decided to no longer release Pixel adaptions directly as AOSP and the community will have to port that the same way as for any other vendor, especially if a vendor decides to maintain their adaptions in LineageOS.
Hey, that makes total sense. And thanks for filling in what I missed! Really too bad about those changes, too. Google set out to create an open mobile ecosystem in opposition to Apple (and, at the time, and to a lesser extent, M$oft). It was such an incredible success at the start. Lately though, it seems they want to run in the opposite direction by tightening their grip - not the best thing for the community of Android users at all.
Of course, the minority group of nerdy, early adopting users who are a dedicated bunch will bear the brunt of it (as always). It’s no surprise they’ll be facing backlash from those groups, which in part explains the surges in demand for better (yet somewhat adjacent) alternatives. I was all in when Google said “don’t be evil”. Now they seem to have abandoned that ethos. I’m still stuck in their ecosystem, have started looking for the exits and I’m definitely not alone in feeling that way.
Question: what happens when, inevitably, every manufacturer locks down locks out etc. everything so not a single smartphone made can be modified in the slightest? Because I figure we’re only a few years away from that at best :-(
Better yet, what happens when the oligarchs make it a felony to modify your spy-device smartphone? Because we aren’t far from that either.
There will probably always be a manufacturer that looks at that niche.
I sincerely hope that that is true. Then again my second concern that I mentioned is how long before it becomes a felony?
This answer isn’t even right, it’s due to hardware security requirements. Other phones are supported when their hardware is secure enough.
And Graphene OS is looking for manufacturers to makes phones which respect their hardware security requirements, there should be one in 2026 IIRC.
To add to this, the phones are consistent. With many other brands, it is common for two phones with the same advertised name (like “Galaxy Note 7”) to be actually different depending on where you bought them. This makes supporting each model challenging. Also it is closest to AOSP.
I have a bunch of old Samsung tablets that are all the same model, but they’re all running slightly different hardware. As a result a couple are running Lineage while a couple are stuck on the stock Samsung/Android because I just can’t root them.
I mean, sure but, the absurdity of buying a google device to degoogle, to escape google ?
I just can’t !
So OP doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Yes, I see…
Im out of the loop, did something happen with GrapheneOS?
I think it’s related to this
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-not-killing-aosp-3566882/
- Google has made it harder to build custom Android ROMs for Pixel phones by omitting their device trees and driver binaries from the latest AOSP release.
- The company says this is because it’s shifting its AOSP reference target from Pixel hardware to a virtual device called “Cuttlefish” to be more neutral.
- While Google insists AOSP isn’t going away, developers must now reverse-engineer changes, making the process for supporting Pixel devices more difficult.
GrapheneOS says it won’t be a big deal:
Fairphone also recently released Fairphone 6, and so people are talking about having to pick between privacy (GrapheneOS) and ethical manufacturing (Fairphone)
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There’s a bunch of boneheads around here that equate the janky behaviour of the (now departed) founder of GOS with Graphene=Bad
A crackdown by whom?
The people who have the power to change it are the people who want it the way that it is.
Protests don’t matter. Boycotts don’t matter. For one simple reason.
You’re not their customer. The people buying the data they collect from you are. There will never be enough people willing to do away with their precious smartphones and tablets to make a dent in ithat.
If there is no one willing to step up and protect the interest and wellbeing of common people, it means democracy is dead and it can’t be denied anymore. If there’s going to be no effort made to force the hand of device manufacturer and carriers to provide a privacy respecting full featured smartphone at the regular price of any other phone while also constructing a society that demands everyone to have one. Then it must mean that society intends to spy on everyone in a way that would make Big Brother blush.
I don’t see any solution other than “a vigorous nuclear exchange” as the last hope we have for a reset button before our feat is sealed as human cattle of the oligarchy. And yes, this is far from the only sign that this is happening, it’s just the one undeniable smartphone aspect of this upcoming horror.
I feel your frustration… though a decent phone w/o locked Android shouldn’t require global thermonuclear war I hope!
I stress about what phone, if any, I’ll be able to install a non-bloatware, rooted, vanila OS on once the models my wife & I have become too ‘obsolete’. (OnePlus 5T with LineageOS).
Here’s the alternative: only use a device that allows a custom rom that is stripped down. If those are also not secure or private then stop using a smartphone.
