This article is a thinly veiled ad paired with fearmongering to get gullible users to buy the shit phones they sell (or not, some people have been on “waitlists” for 5+ years after providing a full payment).
Granted, their phones are fully open, but have next to no apps.
Personally I’ll stick with Android 12, rooted, and see what the future brings.
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This is an ad
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Degoogled ROMs are gonna be the bomb in the future.
Maybe you should curb your enthusiasm a bit. have you seen what it take to unlock the bootloader from most manufacturers? you might even need your grandma’s birth certificate before you’re allowed to do so in the future
Certainly depends on where you live.
Unlocking a Samsung phone is trivial here.
I am aware, but what choices do we have? I for one stopped using banking apps in my Android phone, not a big deal, we didn’t have banking apps there pre 2007 right?
I know not everyone can do it, but we can fight back in our own ways.
And voting with your wallet should be an obvious statement at this point.
CalyxOS works with most banking apps, and is don’t degoogled.
The restrictions on apk access over the past 10 years have already been an annoying pita. Many of the best power user apks have had to gut themselves over their original functionality, all while obtaining root access over your owned devices has become harder or next to impossible.
Let them keep those. I hereby declare that if I don’t own the thing, I ain’t buying it. So no root, no $$$.
Yeah, but I still really like my micro SD card slot and pen on my note 20 ultra. Dunno what I’ll do when I have to replace it.
The pen is the only reason I have stuck with Samsung. If they made a Pixel with a smart pen that I could put GrapheneOS on I’d buy it in a second.
Yeah. Id pick up a redmi 10+ pro if it had a pen and sacrifice away the SD card slot. Id at least have a huge battery and awesome cooling.
There is exactly one app I use that is available only on play store - my bank.
I don’t really need the app.
They have a website.
I have a few phones, just got one that now has grapheneOS.
I’ve been using it for a few weeks to see how it works before I switch over anything to use it as my main. it has a lot of very interesting privacy/security features to test out.
Either way, I don’t get anything from the play store anymore.
It’s F(L)OSS or a website.
As god intended.
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Are they talking about the changes that were made that allow a dev to prevent their app from launching if it fails a Play integrity check?
If so I don’t see that as a big deal since it is up to the dev to use it. OSS devs that want to distribute their app via apk download won’t enable it, and anyone distributing cracked apks will just disable that along with whatever other changes they are making.
Some apps only require ‘basic’ play integrity verification, but now check to see if they’re installed via the Play Store. They refuse to run if they’re installed via an alternative source.
This has been a problem for GrapheneOS, since some apps filter themselves out of the Play Store search if you don’t pass strong play integrity, despite the fact that they don’t require it. Luckily Graphene now had a bypass for this.
From what I can tell, all of this shit is on Google versions of Android. If you are on AOSP such as lineage or graphene, from what I understand this has no effect whatsoever.
But this is not the only aspect of Google’s autocratization; Apps who’s developers have enabled the Google Play Integrity APIs will not run on custom roms.
I’m sorry, but in that case, it wasn’t worth running the app to begin with. You can either find a third-party app that lets you access the same content, such as Newpipe and YouTube, or you can use it from a web browser, such as your bank, and if you can’t do either of those, then just don’t fucking use that service.
I was willing to totally switch banks because my previous bank required me to use a mobile app and I did not want to do so. If I must go through some annoyance to use something that works properly, I will.
For me at least, running as much open source as I can possibly do is worth more than the inconvenience caused by not being able to use these shit services.
I use open source whenever I can, but sometimes that just isn’t an option in the real world. I work in IT at a hospital that REQUIRES Duo. I use GrapheneOS. I was able to get it to work, but it was a horrible experience.
I’d be telling them to provide a work phone.
I did honestly think about this, but its honestly more trouble than it’s worth. Carrying around two phones is just kind of am eh experience, plus I’m new, and I don’t wanna be that guy. If I kept having issues with it, that is probably the route I would have ended up taking, but it’s working as expected now. I’m not a FOSS purest or anything either way. I have a librebooted thinkpad, but I also have several proprietary apps on my phone. Its all about usability for me.
cool, any dev who requires that is acting in bad faith against my privacy and doesn’t deserve my support.
The problem comes when it’s not an app you’re using for the app’s sake, but because it’s the app of some company you have a real-world relationship with. Your bank’s app being the most important one that comes to my mind, considering I’ve already heard about some banks trying to restrict users to only Google’s flavour of Android before this.
Honestly other than a fingerprint lock, I’ve found the apps suck compared to just a browser on a PC anyhow. Half the apps could just be webpages, and a bunch of those are just wrappers to a web rendering layer anyhow
and that’s important why? pick a different bank, or don’t use the app at all.
I get that some folks think using the app is a requirement. that may be true for some but not all.
don’t support shitty services and these companies won’t continue to abuse us.
One of the reasons why I got a Android over ios :(
In parallel, Google has rolled out its Play Integrity API, which allows developers to limit app functionality when sideloaded, effectively pushing users to install apps only through the Google Play Store.
All of this while EU forbids Apple to do the same, what is the idea here? Measuring how EU reacts?
Is it the same though? Google is allowing the developers to choose to prevent sideloading. I thought Apple’s issue was that they prevented side loading completely.
In Singapore, lots of boomers are downloading scam apps from facebook lured by promises of discounts and free gifts, handing out accessibility privileges, and they’ll even argue vehemently against loved ones and bank staff when confronted. When it all inevitably blows up, they blame absolutely everyone except themselves, including praising Apple for some reason.
Being the largest voting block, they managed to get banks responsible for reimbursing their losses and there was even an idea floated of getting everyone to contribute to a shitty scam insurance fund. Many major banking apps are paranoid af and block usage from simple things like usb debugging turned on.
Absolutely stupidity. And there’s nothing we can do about it when the politicians love them so much.
Usb debugging is sketchy as shit. You should almost never turn that on, and immediately turn it off once you’re finished with whatever it is you’re doing with that on.
agree completely. But I recently broke my phone screen, the usual Samsung green screen of death, and I wish I had that turned on to copy the data over lol.
If you can copy data over, then someone else can too. It’s important to have backups. Maybe syncthing or some other home server will do nicely.
Purism is sketchy btw:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKegmu0V75s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IjUryQOlgk
(Louis Rossman videos explaining how a customer was denied a refund for a “pre-order” and then they tried to coerce Louis to take down the video.)
Edit: typo
As a person who experienced the customer support regrading preorders I can confirm this firm is extremly sketchy.
Never had an issue with them. Writing from my Librem 5
That sounds illegal.
Depends. Are you from the EU or not?
I am, that’s why it sounds illegal. :D
Eh, if you are still on a Gservices Version of Android you are lost anyway
So I just urge y’all to step back and watch at this clownshow.
effectively pushing users to install apps only through the Google Play Store
I wonder what this will mean for Aurora and Fdroid etc.
This is my immediate first thought seeing this. This fucking sucks. Part of the whole benefit of something like LineageOS or e (OS?) was being able to use Fdroid to stay away from Google as much as possible. Now this is going to potentially make things weird.
doesn’t do anything to f-droid, but probably kills aurora a bit. the developer can prevent their app from being sideloaded. why would one prevent that if they are distributing via f-droid too?
I hope f-droid has nothing to do with Google play store, thought they are their own store without connection to Google.
Well, both will be unable to install certain types of apps.
Aaaaand now I’m carrying around a laptop again, at least mini pcs are tiny now, maybe a small handheld would do…
if any of this shit hinders me, I’ll get a dumb phone and the cheapest iphone available for manditory work-based things and say so-long to being a mobile OS user.
Just FYI, no, F-Droid will not be impacted.
Links in this comment explain, they are incorrect about how F-Droid works.
I recently started carrying a GPD microPC because of this bullshit.
It’s like a very bulky phone. Pocketable but kinda chonk. Thumb typing kinda thing.
But it runs Fedora + gnome with no problems.
My phone is now just for quick stuff and a way to make a WiFi hotspot.
That doesnt appear to be true, the restriction seems to be on apps being installed from file managers, web browsers, messaging, etc.
F-droid and the like are not part of that list.
This still isn’t good, but it doesnt stop you from having F-droid manage your messaging apps it would seem.
Edit: If you’re down voting because you think its using the same method as a file manager as the user that replied to me, this is incorrect. This is also an issue going back several versions.
F-Droid uses a session installer method for 3rd party app stores, it does not use the same method as a file manager.
For an article about a similar issue brought up by similar restrictions in previous updates, you can refer to this article:
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-15-restricted-settings-sideloading-3481098/
You can also refer to this thread in the F-Droid forums which covers this as well, from 2 1/2 years ago:
Which also includes a merged discussion from the last time this came up 9 months ago.
F-Droid has been using the session installer method for quite some time.
But how do you install F-Droid after, say, a factory reset because you had to troubleshoot something?
No idea. Play Store then update itself via its at store rev? Preinstalled on a ROM? Via adb?
That said, all the link refers to is a few sample permissions (which would not include F-Droid from that list) and only via certain methods being downloaded. Or they have it wrong and its “opened from”.
Its still shitty, but as of now I’m not sure if there is any impact to installing F-Droid, but I can say the method of installation has complied with previous versions of googles “protections” (as in forced limitations) and that appears to continue to be true.
For what it’s worth I use aurora store and have already noticed some apps refusing to open/work unless I reinstall them from the play store.
How did you install aurora store?
I’m curious because ive seen no issues with F-Droid (just had a few updates actually), and the F-Droid team have commented on this sort of approach before, including the method being used for installation.
I don’t use aurora, so I’m not overly familiar.
Apk from their gitlab page
I wonder if it is because you added that way, rather than from f-Droid or something.
No idea. If I had a spare still running android (trying out postmarketos on a few devices) I’d like to give it a try. Maybe I’ll spin up a VM.
What apps?
I don’t think so, I actually updated it via f-droid before but resorted to sideloading the apk myself for faster updates.
I’ve noticed it so far for my apps: Tilla (subscription manager), ChatGPT, Poe
F-Droid uses the same way to install packages as the file manager does.
F-Droid uses Session Installer, which is an “app store” method.
This is not a new issue:
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-15-restricted-settings-sideloading-3481098/
