Wait, what the hell?
I can’t believe this, who the hell are they to decide what I should install?
They are welcome to curate their own store, but sideloading concerns only the user.
Hopefully, the EU and other jurisdictions block this.
Fucking corrupt American oligarchs.
Google says it’s no different than checking IDs at the airport
What, and Google is now the TSA? Fuck that shit. I’ve paid for my device, I get to do whatever the hell I want with it!
Okay, let’s check ids wherever you leave the house, since that’s the sane as checking them at the airport.
Papers please, right?
I’d argue those aren’t the same. ID is checked at the airport for legal entry into another country and the security is on both sides. A lot of countries don’t require people to carry or present ID while walking around in their own country short of a crime having been committed.
For your security we’re going to block your access to FOSS and apps that let you avoid our ads. This is totally not a business decision. Pinky swear.
for the greater good
This good is gonna be so great after we lose everything to the worst of us.
Google says it’s no different than checking IDs at the airport.
You’re not a fucking airport, Google!
Its 2050, you are waiting outside of the HR Office waiting for them to talk to you. You’re certain that your job has just been replaced by a robot.
Fuck this shit, you thought, 90% of the people are unemployed anyways, fuck this 16 hour shift.
You pull out your hand terminal (yes a “hand terminal”, as “smartphones” no longer have local storage now, almost all computing is done on cloud) and start typing in your journal app: “Down with the regime, Down with tyranny!”. You tap “save”.
“Action not authorized. This incident has been reported”
2 seconds later, you can hear sirens in the distance growing louder and louder.
This gas no basis in reality. No way that society makes it to 2050.
God I wish not everything was American
And that’s the biggest issue. Every hoddam thing in tech is American.
We really need some global competition in tech. It’s the main reason why I’m rooting for China when I read that they’re developing new consumer tech. Bring some damn competition and hopefully these American tech companies will learn to stop enshitifying their products.
The current trends and direction of tech is making me want to become Amish…
I’m getting so fucking sick of everything turning into shit, what’s even the point of fucking point anymore? This is borderline kernel level enshitification
Go outside and touch grass.
How can that be legal?
Because Apple does it
Fuck.
Google has been been cracking down on installing .apk’s on your phone for years and they’re getting more and more aggressive about it. It’s not a question of if they’ll disallow it completely, but when.
It’s already extremely tedious. Back in the Android 2.3 days (oh, good old Gingerbread) you could just get an APK and install it, but those times are long gone.
Years ago they threatened the developer of Total Commander to remove his app from the PlayStore unless he patched out an APK install feature, so he was forced to do that.
Now another example: Try to install eBay on a phone that is not passing device integrity. It is not listed on the PlayStore because your device doesn’t pass safety checks. You can grab an APK and install it, but the OS will check if the app has been installed through the PlayStore and if it hasn’t, it will complain and close itself.
GrapheneOS has patched that bullshit out, btw.
And this behaviour happens with all apps where the developer has enabled the “App Integrity” option, which is heavily pushed as a super-great security feature. So developers might just enable that feature, not being fully aware of the implications.
As you can see, it’s one method at a time, slowly but surely, until Google fully controls the ecosystem. The intention behind that is pretty clear: They don’t want people to have AdAway and Revanced, they want money and user data. And they also want you to login to the PlayStore, get hooked on their stupid daily points challenges and spend your hard-earned money on virtual crap.
This is textbook enshittification, it will only get worse from here on.
AdAway can be easily emulated using a DNS server…
only malware i have read about on android have came from google’s oh so safe store.
I’m probably going to spam this around a bit, since most people don’t seem to know about it, but a reminder that FuriLabs has a (GNU+)Linux phone with decent spec.s and the ability to run Android app.s (from what I’ve heard) pretty decently: https://furilabs.com/
Biggest drawback is it’s based on Halium. Usual growing pains of a new product/company apply but apparently the company is pretty responsive and their dev.s have worked with customers to get things like calling working with the carrier and bands of their country where it hasn’t worked before so improvements move pretty quickly.
Collection of different experiences I’ve variously seen online over the last year or so:
- https://clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2025/07-20-flx1-actually-usable-linux-phone.gmi
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41839326
- https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1fa1ljn/furilabs_flx1/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1j46f2w/flx1_linux_phone_display_out/
- https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/furiphone_flx1/
I don’t own one, myself, so I can’t give any personal experience but I’ve seen it around for a few years now but most people don’t seem to even know about it. Maybe there’s a reason for that? But none I’ve ever seen anyone say.
Google can get fucked. I feel like there will be a nontrivial market for de-googled or older and unlocked Android phones after this. If they manage to kill off custom roms with their previous AOSP rug pull I’ll go back to using a (subpar) Linux phone or maybe even one of those cheap flip phones.
Don’t worry we can just install Graphene OS on Pixel phones, there is no problem with my plan !
feels funny that you have to buy a phone from google to get around google’s actions…
I’m sure it’s just a fortuitous coincidence and nothing to be worried about
fuck google!
Who can I donate to that is working on making alternative OS accessible on android or iphones?
I know there are alternative OS already out there but they aren’t as universally accessible compared to how Linux can run on any PC.
Problem is we need vendor like pinephone maybe fairphone,which will able to run give us freedom what to run on device hunting and seeking for vendor which allowing to unlock bootloader and then install custom os it sleepery slope because it’s not know how longer they will let to do it
If they lock bootloaders, whats the best way to force it work even the vendors don’t want it to?
The only way to bypass a forced bootloader lock is to find a bootrom exploit. It’s basically like jailbreaking an iPhone or a console at that point.
Note, the iPhone hasn’t had a working jailbreak in years. Samsung phones in the US also haven’t been able to be unlocked in years.
Android would be even harder because of how fragmented the market is. There are many different phones from many different manufacturers.
None,we fucked up.that why I don’t wanna non arm non RISC currently see on desktop
I was wondering this awhile ago too. There are ways but it’s pretty hardcore stuff from what I can tell. It’s basically a lost cause at that point. Some solutions involve using $30,000+ laser machines to manipulate the hardware physically and cause glitches in the locking. But even then the devices have self-destruct mechanisms to detect tampering. Not like the phone explodes, but they self-destruct the cryptographic keys needed to unlock the bootloader, and then you’re stuck trying to brute force in by guessing keys, which most likely will take literally a million years.
FUTO has some good initiatives to follow.
How about we abandon proprietary locked-down launcher sandboxes on our phones and just run regular old Linux on them like we do on the desktop?
Isn’t that what PostmarketOS is? Is there some bullshit firmware issue in the way of that? What exactly is stopping us?
The difference is that mobile phone hardware is commonly more locked down by default than x86 hardware. Whatever phone you have now likely has some weird shit on it that makes it really difficult to do anything but what the manufacturer wants you to do. What Microsoft is trying to do with Win11 and TPM 2.0, has basically already been done with many brands of smartphone. I’ve been trying to research affordable smartphones to daily drive that are also de-googled, and hours of research has resulted in me struggling to use a pinephone. The hardware, the software, they’re just not there, either. It’s not like desktop Linux where really it’s better than Windows if you give it a chance. Mobile FOSS OSes might be daily drivable if you try really hard.
What OS did you put on it and what issues have you run into? I’ve been considering the Pinephone Pro because it seemed both more flexible and cheaper than a Librem.
