Keep Android Open

I find this to actually be a great litmus test for the overall problem. Bank account balance is a basic piece of information that's about me, and that I need to keep track of to effectively live in our modern times. I should be able to access that information non-interactively at any time. But I can't.

Ask many banks, you'll get as many reasons for why they can't just allow me to cURL this number off an endpoint with some pre-shared credentials. Most of those reasons are bogus[0]. Now, it's not hard to identify several points where I could observe that information in-flight. There's an API that powers the app. The app itself has UI that could be queried or scrapped; some apps will even communicate this data to other apps when requested.

But good luck getting access to any of that non-interactively.

This is what all those technologies add up to. The bank says I can't have this information unless my eyeballs are physically looking at the screen displaying it - and the whole tech stack conspires to make sure I can't get it otherwise.

It's a trivial and non-critical need, but it's also exemplifying the basic user freedoms being denied to us: the ability to freely process information on my own device.

EDIT: Accessibility tools are often the only remaining workaround here, because those are uniquely hard for services to close. And as expected, accessibility became its special privilege category on modern devices, and is increasingly heavily scrutinized and limited by device vendors.

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[0] - They're usually some kind of security or stability point, that's just a fig leaf to cover the actual reason: this is the way they can force you to interact with their app or website daily, creating an extremely valuable marketing channel for their financial products.

Google was found to have a monopoly on android with the play store (even though you can side load other stores), Apple was found to not have a monopoly with the app store.

OK. But that is not the really bad part, the really bad part came from the appellate court this past July. Google pointed out that the Apple app store was ruled not a monopoly, but somehow Google's more open system was..

The judge, I am not shitting you, said that because Apple doesn't allow competitors on their phones, they cannot be anti-competitive. Google lost the appeal.

So now, clear as day, Google needs to kick out competition to be competitive. Good job legal system.

I suppose your mean't you "can't".

I know, m'y life is full of compromises because of my various political opinions.

> https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

I agree and I intend to keep my current phone at least ten years (and I hope it will be able to run Linux at some point, it's very close!), but the Librem was released with outdated specs and that was 5 years ago. It was released with outdated specs because then current hardware was not free software friendly. However, producing outdated hardware today is a huge environmental concern for me.

That current hardware is non-free software friendly is a huge concern as well, and both concerns go by hand: we are absolutely building huge piles of e-waste just because of proprietary / closed hardware.

Anyway; the Librem 5 has been a fantastic thing for the development of Linux mobile. We also won't go anywhere with phones such as the Librem 5 to make Linux mobile a reality for the general public.

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/docs/community-wiki/-/wikis/F...