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Your phone is about to stop being yours

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Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#101

Post by nine_k »

rcxdude wrote: post #24
nine_k wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see zero trouble as long as it requires no additional identification, no additional payment, and no mandatory time limit for the sideloaded apps. That is, fine by me. I can wait for 24 hours once in a few years when I acquire a new mobile phone.

You are thinking about it from the point of view of an enthusiast/hacker who wants to put their homebrew stuff on it. But this is also tightening around developers who may want to distribute their applications to lay users.

Lay users use Play Store.

Users who use F-Droid are already not as lay. If you distribute stuff that Play Store would ban, your users are likely not as lay, too.

Yes, it's inconvenient, but I see it as a good-faith attempt to limit exposure of lay users to scams, not some power grab.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#102

Post by at-fates-hands »

dethos wrote: post #75

To be sincere, they were never truly ours. A proof of that is they were able to come up with this, and you don't have a way to reject it. What we actually need are (open) alternatives, not to double down on Google's ecosystem and Google-controlled OS. We need to control the device we bought and be able to run whatever we wish on it. Just like we do on PCs.

Is it time to bring back the Windows phone?

I keed I keed!

But unfortunately there really isn't a great alternative. I painfully attempted to use Ubuntu Touch and its always the same thing. The lack of available apps, the lack of app development in general for the platform was pretty eye opening. Add in having it only run on really old devices isn't much help either. Its promising, but a long ways off even from some of the non-standard roms I've used like Evolution X which is a Lineage fork.

If this really does cripple a lot of the known custom roms out there without any solid alternatives other than Graphene? It could really be a huge turning point.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#103

Post by gowld »

NDlurker wrote: post #30

>Android's openness was never just a feature. It was the promise that distinguished it from iPhone. Millions chose Android for exactly that reason. Google is now revoking that promise unilaterally, on devices already in people's pockets, because they've decided they have enough market dominance and regulatory capture to get away with it. This is why I've stuck with Android for the past 15 years.

> Millions chose Android for exactly that reason.

Millions? Are you sure?

Even so, Android has billions of users who want secure app management by default.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#104

Post by cogman10 »

ge96 wrote: post #73
buzzwords wrote: post #57

I imagine most of us here will look elsewhere when we next upgrade. But are those numbers large enough to form a viable alternative?

I'm doubtful, I for a bit bought a lot of the Pine64 devices thinking about this eg. not just Android/iOS... but the lack of feature parity eg. missing drivers, lack of apps, old hardware. Unless people are paid to do it vs. volunteer

That's the depressing part. I keep looking for something I could potential run the likes of kde mobile and maybe waydroid on, but there's really just nobody doing this. You are basically locked into a vendor kernel if it's even available.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#106

Post by selectively »

johntash wrote: post #100
selectively wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't want millions of people to have every cent of their money stolen. This measure is about making it harder to pull off a specific type of scam that is plaguing South East Asia. No conspiracy. For actual information on the purpose of this change rather than conspiracies, I refer you to https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-de... Since the victims of these scams do not typically own a t…

I sorta get that reasoning, but is a 24 hour cooldown really going to stop scammers? They're already used to multi-day scams, so wouldn't they just say they'll call back in a day to finish the process?

Yup. The specific scam here is built upon preventing the victim from talking to trusted individuals. A cooldown breaks the spell.

Complex, multi-day pig butchering stuff is not what Google is going after here or would have any hope to defeat. But they can deal with banking malware.

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#109

Post by brodock »

bee_rider wrote: post #78
ninininino wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great attitude until slowly but surely 90% of apps used in day to day life won't function for you: banking, dating, social media, e-commerce, communication/messaging etc slowly freeze you out.

Are banks and e-commerce going to get rid of their websites? I imagine some will, but I can’t imagine using one that did. Dating… well, the goal for most people is to exit the dating pool anyway. Social media is bad.

In many countries it's already impossible to use just the web for banking. They either make you install rootkits on your computer or move you to their mobile apps

Re: Your phone is about to stop being yours

#110

Post by tossit444 »

pngwen wrote: post #68

This change has served me well! I have been a Mac OS X users for years who used an android phone. As soon as google announced their impending walled garden status, I went out and bought into the ios eco system. I have really been enjoying my iphone, ipad, and apple watch. You see, the only value that Android really offered me was the ability to run my own code on my own device. Since they are taking that away that ju…

So you moved into a walled garden in an attempt to escape what's essentially a 3 foot picket fenced garden.
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