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
Isn't SailfishOS proprietary?
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
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.
Possibly at a base level, but not well. Most US carriers have a white list of devices certified to use their networks.
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
This is my #1 concern with this bullshit.
Hard agree. If I'm forces to only run barely used FOSS apps, then I might as well buy a linux phone.
I also use /e/OS. I'm not too versed in these things, but if I understand correctly from your comment, this decision by Google won't directly affect us right? Only in the sense that it discourages developers to not support FOSS apps?
Yeah, it won't affect you really. /e/OS is based off of AOSP and Lineage and the devs can just choose to keep it like it currently is. I haven't really found a source for it but since theres like no official play store, and the lineage community would just patch out whatever google introduces (If this even reaches AOSP) I don't think this will ever bother neither of us. The real threat comes from FOSS projects dying bc most Android users still use proprietary android
Alright, thanks for the confirmation! Yeah, hopefully this won't affect FOSS projects too much...
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.
The way google is behaving is making a hard fork more likely.
Its not a solution, but it buys time - Linux phones will take some time.
I'm guessing that features like relockable bootloaders & open source drivers help both.
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.
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.
