Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse
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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.
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The article is 7 years old. Has anything come to fruition since then?
Last update in December
Releases · ARM-software/ebbr
Embedded Base Boot Requirements Specification. Contribute to ARM-software/ebbr development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub (github.com)
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I appreciate that! I’m in the states unfortunately
Can't easily help there. Maybe you can find someone local who could help. Best of luck.
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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.
this time around all it would allow was “disable”.
This has been par for other OEM-flavored Android phones for years, unfortunately.
Disableis alright, not that the phone itself isn't a privacy nightmare in other ways. -
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.
Those apps are installed in the squashfs image. Such images are write once, read many and thus they can't be mutated at runtime.
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The obfuscated nature of compiled code does an incredible amount of heavy lifting on behalf of shareholders. Imagine a world where x-ray specs suddenly revealed source code. The flight to open solutions would be irresistible. Windows is hot garbage but it clings to its market share like a limpet, through the magic of closed source, occupying space like a flabby tumour. It doesn't care if it kills the host because the top priority is growth and an unassailable market share. That's the magic of capitalism.
Honestly I don't think many people would care? Until the security holes became intractable, I guess.
Its proven Android phones are doing awful stuff, even client side, and has that slowed them down?
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Play Store is truly vile to use. It just feels gross and scammy and like a mine field of low quality slop and scam apps.
iOS isn’t great either but it at least feels a whole lot better. The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.
The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.
That's probably to reduce brigading? Android and iOS are infested with all sorts of fraduelnt marketing techniques like fake reviews, and mass fraud reporting for competition sounds like another.
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Play Store is truly vile to use. It just feels gross and scammy and like a mine field of low quality slop and scam apps.
iOS isn’t great either but it at least feels a whole lot better. The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.
My experience with the iOS app store years ago was worse than Android. Searching for apps that were not chock full of spam was useless. I had to research the apps outside of the store then find direct links to them due to clones with the same names.
I have no idea why Apple and Google allow so much hot garbage in their app stores.
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We're all trapped. If you're not using either Android or iOS, you're pretty much screwed.
Technically, you can use one of the alternate phones, but the software support still leaves a lot to be desired. You can get most basic things working, but when it comes to crucial deal breaker apps like anything involving payments or banks, it gets a lot trickier. The world has become increasingly dependent on mobile phones, and if your phone can't handle train tickets, mail deliveries, restaurant reservations or pay your bills, it suddenly becomes very difficult to live in the 2020s.
More and more hardware also depends on specific iOS or Android apps, and those apps may also require GAPPS or some OEM Android. At some point, it just isn't worth the hassle, and it becomes easier to pick either one of the toxic platforms everyone else is already using.
I feel like the standard should be two phones. A disposable 'banking' phone: tiny, no camera, no speakers, small SoC, just the absolute bare minimum to live.
...And then a 'media' phone without all the enshittification.
