Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse
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Google’s Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. In its quest for ever-greater profits, the tech giant has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source nature over the last decade.
Originally published on The Lever, but that one asks you to sign up.
Maybe it was better when Android phones didn’t get updates. Eh?
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Unfortunately the Android experience is getting more and more bloated and users' freedom to tinker with their phones or sideload apps is getting more and more difficult. The Play Store is riddled with more ads than useful content. Just try searching for something, and oftentimes more than half of your screen is ads.
I've been with Android since the start and I hate what Google is reducing it to. It pains me that the only viable alternative is Apple and I feel trapped.
Funny enough, having Microsoft making the Windows Phone again would make a 3rd player, and maybe some competition in the market.
I don't know many companies that have the resources to fight in this arena right now...
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Sadly iOS is not much better
You can't sideload on iOS at all.
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F-Droid is a decent replacement for the play store. Lots of FOSS and less-enshittified apps available.
Unfortunately many of the apps needed just to exist as a member of society are only available in the Play Store.
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the OEM has to make and test these updates anyway. In virtually all cases they will then release these worldwide
I wouldn't be so sure. There's a vested interest in NOT shipping them outside the EU. It's called planned obsolescence. Just looks at Macs and OCLP. It's so easy to keep older Macs updated that it's actually able to be done by some random developers in their free time (not to trivialize this effort, just to say that it would be extremely trivial for Apple as the developer of the OS and one of the most profitable companies in the world to do it). And yet Apple does not ship these updates to them. Why? Because they want you to buy new shit and they know not doing so will render them virtually useless in a short time.
I know it seems like I'm being mean in this comment
You are just being mean and extremely rude. It's completely unnecessary and I've done absolutely nothing to deserve such language. You are actively making this community shittier.
Be rude, someone is rude to you back. Boo hoo.
Trying to bait people into absolutely pointless arguments makes the community shittier.
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Be rude, someone is rude to you back. Boo hoo.
Trying to bait people into absolutely pointless arguments makes the community shittier.
I wasn't being rude. That was only you. And since you continue to do so, you can have this argument with yourself. Goodbye.
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Yeah how the hell do you do this?
Waydroid, Anbox, etc
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Waydroid, Anbox, etc
Which do you recommend? How well does it work?
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2 days ago I moved from GrapheneOS back to Stock Pixel in my 8 Pro, just to see what all the hype about the new android 16 in Pixel is about. Jesus, this is way worse than I remember. i tried it for 2 whole days, and that shit just won't allow me to have ANY control over my phone. It's fucking ridiculous. On Android 15 I was able to uninstall Google Drive, Meet, Youtube, and many other Google apps, this time around all it would allow was "disable". What's next, removing the ability to disable (which I don't trust anyway)?
Fast forward to today, I'm back on GOS, and my anxiety levels are down again. This shit is insane, and I honestly can't understand why anyone would put up with this crap.
Most users want those installed, anyway.
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You can't sideload on iOS at all.
In eu you kinda can for some degree
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It's telling how incompetent they've become when their LLM AI is the absolute worst one, including mechahitler before that update.
I like Gemini a lot and use it often, but I did disable it for web search.
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Which do you recommend? How well does it work?
Waydroid, it's the wayland continuation of anbox. From what I've seen and used, it's very good. It's good enough for most mobile apps including gaming. Some linux phone manufacturers even make it a point to integrate waydroid by default to allow you to use android apps just fine
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Both ARM itself and Linux for ARM has been standardizing a fair bit recently. But not to the extent to be fully generic, mostly just enough for portable bootable kernels - and after that you still need all the same custom drivers and configurations to make proper use of a SoC, but it's not nothing.
EBBR spec to bring standardization to embedded Linux boot process
At Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Arm’s Grant Likely explains how an emerging, UEFI-based EBBR spec could standardize embedded Linux firmware bootup behavior using standard bootloaders like U-Boot.
LinuxGizmos.com (linuxgizmos.com)
The article is 7 years old. Has anything come to fruition since then?
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The stupid attempt to have everyone leave bluetooth always on pisses me off. They've made the BT quick tile 2 more presses to toggle on or off is ridiculous. It's not a quick tile.
I've just put a BT on/off widget on my home screen.
There is an Xposed module to replace the tiles back to a simple on/off toggle, for both BT tile and WiFi tile.
You need to grab your control back lol
Also if you don't have root on your personal Android devices these days... lol may Google have mercy on you lmao (hint: they won't lol)
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Mobile GNU/Linux is getting better, but I think it is 5-10 years out from what's needed. I suppose people need to adopt Desktop first. The nice thing is you can install Android apps including Google Play on it natively, and they appear in your app drawer like a regular app
Unless they get NFC payments working on it and banking apps. It literally will never matter.
The single most common thing phones are used for at this point outside of entertainment is payments and banking.
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Unless they get NFC payments working on it and banking apps. It literally will never matter.
The single most common thing phones are used for at this point outside of entertainment is payments and banking.
What’s wrong with tapless payment with cards?
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Unfortunately the Android experience is getting more and more bloated and users' freedom to tinker with their phones or sideload apps is getting more and more difficult. The Play Store is riddled with more ads than useful content. Just try searching for something, and oftentimes more than half of your screen is ads.
I've been with Android since the start and I hate what Google is reducing it to. It pains me that the only viable alternative is Apple and I feel trapped.
Is there no Linux for mobile options currently available?
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Garmin would work and isn't iOS or Android based
Garmin makes shock collars. They're more evil than Google or apple.
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I bought a Garmin to accompany my Graphene Pixel, only to discover that my bank doesn't support Garmin Pay.
So, MagSafe wallet attached my phone it is then.
Does the PayPal the wallet work?
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Does the PayPal the wallet work?
On the phone itself? I don't think it does. The Wallet app doesn't work at all for NFC payments in GrapheneOS, because Google are shit heads.
