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TD;DR
(FOR EVERYONE)
Here is the petition that we all need to sign:
https://www.change.org/p/stop-google-from-limiting-apk-file-usage
(FOR DEVELOPERS or “DEVELOPERS” 😉 )
Here is the form that we need to fill:
(Please UPVOTE this so others can see!)
The tech companies are doing a great job at making me uninterested in the hottest new phones. I used to follow the news about them and know the tech specs and stuff, because I’m a nerd and gadgets are fun and smart phones in particular are the intersection of SO much technology and engineering. Moore’s law was alive and well during all my formative years, so I am even conditioned to expect the excitement.
But lately, not only have I been ignoring what the big players are offering, I have been ignoring the phone I already have! Instead I have a PC at the end of the couch with a monitor on an arm that s swings right over my lap.
I use my phone pretty much just for music, web browser, Voyager (Lemmy on the go), and occasional texting. When I am at home I will sometimes misplace my phone for hours and just not worry about it.
I have already pushed the megacorp phone + social media experience so far out of my daily life, that if future options for open linux phones are rough around the edges and don’t have tap to pay then oh well I don’t think I care.
It’s much easier to live without the shiny new thing once you see how well your brain does when separated from it. (and you have some loved ones who are still hopelessly addicted to the scroll)
Sometimes I use my phone so little that I only need to charge it every 2-3 days. Nearly everything that it does my PC can do better and not try to lock me in to a dozen different
monthlyweekly subscriptions.I just got a Pixel 9a and put GrapheneOS on it straight away . my battery with my current usage says 4 days hahah. my old phone was 1 day maybe. I loose my phone around the house , my friends know I don’t text back for awhile.
Twinsies 👭
PCs are the best, especially the keyboard (I don’t like using a mouse), the shortcuts, and the terminal.
Dear terrorists, I don’t like your actions, but if you still exist and want to cause destruction and deaths, please, do it by attacking main offices of big corporations. That will be a tragedy for whole world. Thank you!
Terrorists tend to act across borders and so they are interested mostly in global corporations. If only there was one single building that housed all of them at the same time. Some buildings where they all engaged in trade around the world, centralized.
Then that would make your scheme easy.
you mean this place?
Decentralize the world!
deleted by creator
I’ll be frank with you. As long as my customers are captive on either Apple or Google platforms I can’t do shit.
Call your representativesHire a lobbyist to donate millions of dollars to election campaigns for your representatives
Doesn’t even take that much. Most can be bought with a couple thousand.
This move doesn’t look like a co-incidence,first google acquires android ,then you now have to use your ‘‘google account’’ as user detail to signup for most services, Now they’re tip toeing towards This techno Lockdown kwowing full well how many pesrsons use Adroid phones…Who owns google Satan?
Remember to contribute to postmarketOS!
Fucking love postmarketOS. First OS to improve on Maemo on an N900
We need alternatives to big tech. They’re reigning in and locking everything they can down, and the states are loving them for it as it solidifies their ability to control us.
They’re kind of already is. It’s the free and open source community.
The problem is phones are actually incredibly impressive pieces of hardware and the fact that we can Mass produce them has diluted that opinion. I’m actually to look into building my own phone and I wanted to have at least some near-flagship specs. I know how to design my own circuit boards and get someone to print them. But acquiring CPUs that perform at least 1/4 as well as Pixels or iPhones is objectively not possible, these companies have deals with manufacturers for exclusive products. And even if you could these chips are so precise you will never be able to figure out the signaling yourself.
Maybe things have gotten better now that we have ai and you don’t need to be any sort of expert in anything you just need to be good enough at decision making problem solving and communicating to acquire the skills and knowledge to work on these chips. And by the time you’ve done all the work and acquired all the hardware you might have spent close to 3 to 5K on a device you could have just bought for $800. All for what, to circumvent privacy breaches that should be illegal in the first place?
And that’s the root problem we’re trying to solve. Another symptom of these companies being able to engage in the bad behavior that they do is that they gain the ability to overvalue themselves. There should be no safety or privacy concern when engaging in the purchase of any device for the same reason that people should not fear food poisoning every time they go to the grocery store.
That’s what the regulators are for. This is a legal issue not a technical one.
But the only underlying cause for why we’re not regulating tech companies is because fear of privacy violations is not reducing market activity. Apparently people are still going to use their phones even if their phones are listening to them having private conversations. Apparently people will still buy shit off of their phones even if their phones are going to use that data to show them ads.
Apparently the harm of your privacy being breached does not hurt enough to prevent you from doing good things.
Now if Android takes away my F-Droid, Tasker and Termux I’m gonna throw a fit. That’s not privacy that’s self-determination, I bought an Android because I can customize it to be as low friction for me as I need, if my phone starts giving me friction then we’re going to have problems.
Europe is slowly working on that. Ironically, Trump’s policies were kind of a blessing to Europe, because it forced politicians to finally start working towards strengthening the independence of the region.
What we need is a good linux phone that is affordable, has hardware that isn’t slow, and isn’t over sold to an annual pre-order.
Sadly, if the first two are true, the third one becomes an issue.
What we need is a large company to see that is a sign of huge pent-up demand. Apparently, HP and Dell are both talking about switching to Linux as their default OS for desktops. Once all the desktop manufacturers find themselves in the business of selling hardware with Linux on it, either mobile manufacturers will copy, like Samsung, or the desktop folks decide to make their product smaller.
What everyone has wanted from the beginning was a desktop in their pocket. The amount of time that no one has produced that despite major demand, and the amount of development that has gone into building any other stack, just feels like willful suppression at this point.
Is there some government somewhere telling large-scale manufacturers that they can’t build something as free and open as a desktop that isn’t at least the size of a laptop? Because it actually takes less technology to make something that’s open than something that is closed. And there is just as much appeal for the consumer to not restrict them.
What we need is a good linux phone that is affordable, has hardware that isn’t slow, and isn’t over sold to an annual pre-order.
That’s not enough, sadly. That phone must support, at the very least, all the national ID and banking software. And that bit might be tricky.
This always gets brought up, and is the chicken-and-egg problem, but only sort of.
Supporting software designed for different platforms is not the phone’s responsibility. It should be the government and bank developers’ responsibility to build software for platforms their citizens and customers use.
Android and Apple do not jump through hoops to run Windows desktop software, for example, and the notion is kind of absurd to begin with. Yet this argument is used for Linux smartphones all the time.
Some of this also applies to people without phone / with dumbphone.
It’s a kind of “yes, but actually no” situation.
Way back when, smartphones were a relatively new thing. Nobody gave a crap, so building a new OS that had similar capabilities to the competition was easy. We had a bunch of those over the years.
However, every new OS means new architecture, every architecture means developers having to take it into account when building apps.
Eventually, the smartphone market essentially defaulted to Android and iOS - long gone are Windows Phone, Blackberry OS, and a dozen others.
They didn’t die off because they somehow had to - they died off because they couldn’t keep up with feature parity with Android and iOS.
Nowadays, everything is being made for these two OSes. And by “everything” I mean things that are actually crucial to people - banking apps, ID apps, train ticket apps, parking lot apps - things that they either cannot replace with “not in a smartphone” solution, or can, but it would force them to juggle cards and papers.
Any new OS coming in must take that into account. If Linux comes to mobile phones but can’t run national ID apps or banking apps, it will have a market share of maybe 1% - the hardcore fans, and the “technological preppers” who are always anonymous, always off-grid - and that’s that. No users further users will switch, and because no users switch, no developers will take it seriously enough to make their apps work on it.
Windows Phone is a great example of this. At its height it had around 20% of the European market share. And what happened? Snapchat (massive at the time) and Google actively worked to undermine and destroy it, because they knew that - in the long run - it’ll be cheaper than having to hire a third group of developers. With 3rd party alternative apps being constantly blocked, the OS eventually went down to sub 5% in its biggest market, and sub 1% in the US, and Microsoft finally pulled the plug.
An OS coming in without critical app support won’t ever get to even 1% of market share in any region larger than “local Linux fanclub”.
Android apps do solve a lot of UI problems a that are unique to the phone interface. If only Linux could run APKs. Oh wait, it can. Linux can run anything.
Those who have the expertise should start contributing and working more on Linux for mobile. Postmarket has made great progress it just needs more manpower
What kind of roles do they have for people who don’t know how to code? I’ve considered helping translate things before, but my languages are among the most popular, so it’s almost always already translated.
You should checkout their contibuting guide. There are many ways to contribute as non programmer.
Everyone is talking about getting a fairphone and whatnot but I’m concerned about the open source apk communities shutting down since the market share and interest is killed by this.
My main issue is losing YouTube ReVanced. I refuse to pay for Premium! Especially to one of the wealthiest companies in the world!
Time to popularize Linux phones. I read that the security model is lacking, but especially given that Android is Linux too, it shouldn’t be too difficult to catch up. The EU is also interested in tech independence, so that could be one of the sources of funding. And there are a few viable early projects, like Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish.
There need to be enforced of competition law here. Companies aren’t going to voluntarily support a platform with few users. Users aren’t going to move to a platform without critical apps.
We live in a dystopia were you have to have the banks app to do online banking even on your desktop. You can’t charge your car without an app. You can’t navigate your car without a map app that has traffic information. Etc etc. I want FOSS alternatives to all these, but there isn’t and Google could take even having a FOSS platform at all.
This something we need regulators to fix. It is a politically problem, not a technical one.
America screwing up trust should wake up Europe to dealing with American tech monopolies. Now it’s not something just nerds and economists complain about, it is a geopolitical problem.
Corporations are getting WAY too much fucking power over our personal lives, it’s at critical mass where their power is superseding that of our basic democratic rights.
We all knew it would happen, and here we are. We need to fight the fuck back with everything we’ve got, and coordination and planning is the first step.
There has to be something already happening, where do we sign up, who do we get in contact with? Where’s the team?
Does anyone know or have any leads on that? I have the possibility to devote my life full time to it and I’m feeling like me and many others are not being utilized the way we could and are capable of.
The fight was always going against these monopolies.
In the UK with have OpenRightGroup to some extent the Greens. In the US EFF, FSF, SFC. In the EU ESFe, Pirate Party, Greens.
There are many groups fighting the political cause. They have had victories over the years, but winning the odd battle doesn’t win a war. They all need support.
Until now, a lot of open source has tried to be nonpolitical, but that may be changing:
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SFKNTZ-welcome_to_fosdem_2026/
you have to have the banks app to do online banking even on your desktop
I have never heard of that. Can you give an example?
HSBC business. There is no fob. You have to get a code from their app to login online. That app refused to run on LineageOS with MicroG, regardless of the boxing and lying to it I tried. It does work under GrapheneOS with boxed Google services.
That sounds obnoxious they don’t support the usual MFA platforms
And at the same time there’s Fidelity (and others) using voice authentication as the sole verification of account ownership when calling in (I think they finally fixed this a couple years ago)
It’s pretty rubbish. I was under pressure from a few angles to compromise more with Google. GrapheneOS is were I am. But I want to be on a prober Linux. But it’s just not possible without competition law being enforced. It’s political problem not technical.
Fully agree, there should be regulations, temporary at least, that require/incentivize critical companies to make a mobile Linux version of their apps, as well as strategic funding and incentives to make the platforms viable. We as citizens should contribute too, increasing pressure for this to happen, spreading the message, becoming early adopters where possible, submitting feedback, contributing to development, etc.
We need to support political groups fighting for us, not just think in terms of technology. In the UK it is OpenRightsGroup, maybe the Greens party, in Europe there is the Pirate Party, Greens, Free Software Foundation Europe, and more. We should be trying to get politicians into this.
IDK, I’d think the best path forward would be to just fork Android and move on from there. That’s what Graphene OS already does. Just standardize on Graphene OS for everything and get them more devs / resources.
GrapheneOS has strict standards for what phones they support, which is why you can currently only install it on Pixels.
Android is not Linux (the OS), it just uses the Linux kernel. That means almost nothing is transferable from one OS to the other unfortunately.
That’s all Linux is though, arguably
not even arguable, you’re right
You can run Android apps on Sailfish via AppSupport
yeah I will start deeply researching this because I refuse to use a closed down operating system for my phone my whole life. Fuck android fuck google and fuck apple
Sailfish is not very alive. Ubuntu Touch too.
But honestly yes. I think the problems are mostly in hardware support.
The political problems driving the push for independence are fairly recent, so the current state is unlikely to be extrapolable.
There are devices using these operating systems that are also gaining popularity, like Jolla, Volla and Fair phone.
How about phone as terminal for home pc.
If this happens, I guess it’s Linux Phone time for me… I’m pretty certain GrapheneOS will be able to get around this abuse of power for a while, but it wouldn’t take much effort from Google to kill them too ; they almost already have…
Or maybe dumb phone time ? But I like browsing Wikipedia and playing chess and RetroArch on my phone, I don’t want to lose that just because big G$ said so…
The new requirements will “only” apply for “certified” Android devices. I’m pretty sure, devices running a custom ROM aren’t certified, especially if you don’t even have Google Services installed. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to a bright future for Linux phones.
Fwiw, just because a dumb phone doesn’t give you access to “smart” features doesn’t mean the capabilities aren’t present on the phone. It’s just a matter of what could be hidden on the circuit board (lots can be hidden in chips), and what can be hidden in usual expected traffic (if bandwidth requirements are low, even timing of packets could be used to encode hidden data that would never show up in any logs).
Plus the simple tracking of cellphones is necessary for them to function at all.
I wonder if there is a dumb phone with tethering currently. Cause if you don’t mind carrying 2 devices, that may be viable for your use case
If you just need a mobile data connection there’s alot of sim based wifi routers
Good point!
/e/os
Do you really think that will survive ? It’s next on the chopping block with GrapheneOS if they keep going this way.
The new Jolla phone can’t come soon enough. I truly believe the future of tech independence lies with linux, for us, europeans. Anyone welcome ofc.
I do hope it’ll be a good enough device, even if there will be no NFC phone payments possible.
You can still use a dump phone. You can play and browse Wikipedia on a Steam Deck which has WiFi. If you are outsid, you can use a Mifi device of a USB LTE/5G dongle for the SteamDeck.
Steam decks are expensive and relatively bulky when compared to a phone. I don’t think it’s really a practical solution for most of us.
Is GraphenOS tenable to use as a daily driver?
Yes.
Is grapheneos available on anything but Google pixel phones?
No, just buy one used on ebay.
I heard that they’re working on that, but currently only Pixel.
Sadly, no. Your best bet is Lineage without gapps. Aurora and F-Droid covers pretty much everything I use, so that’s likely my move in the near future.
so much yes. I just got mine a few days ago and I love it so much.
Absolutely.
I have found it good
Are you pretty much able to do everything you need? I don’t even love using my phone but when I use it its kind of critical. Things like maps while driving. Does that work alright?
I am. You can install Google Play services in a sandbox. One of my banking apps works the other does not, but I prefer to do that over web on a desktop anyway. Otherwise I get pretty much everything off of f-droid.
Absolutely. You won’t be able to use tap to pay, and the Google Wallet app doesn’t open for me. Certain banking and finance apps might require some additional compatibility settings to be enabled. Otherwise it’s been an extremely smooth experience for me.
Cool. Currently I try to use Mobile Pay for everything, but the privacy is more important for me. I’m on IOS right but I’m tired of Apple and hate Google’s privacy policies. So I’ll def get a refurbished Pixel and try out Graphene. Thanks!
I probably just need to buy a fair phone at this point.
Fuck you Google. I won’t do further updates on my Pixel and the moment I run into an issue I’ll move operating systems or phones if required. Half my apps don’t come from Google Play and I don’t want the developers to have to register with Google for anything.
put grapheneOS on it …
That will be the go to. I’m just procrastinating the migration.
is there a way to ACTUALLY disable them? I’ve attempted to change every option I can find (pixel 7 pro) and it just downloads them anyway. I’d love to try graphene but I am a fucking moron and I will 100% end up bricking my phone if I attempt to install it.
no you won’t … its so easy to install.
Grapheneos has a wonderful how to install procedure. I did it with a Linux Debian machine. It took several tries to get the bootloader right, part of that was I didn’t know what I was looking for. Once your phone has the red triangle in the bootloader of the phone, the installer should recognize it, and the installer was awesome from there.
still hard to commit to it when it’s the only phone I have to use. maybe I can grab a cheap older pixel to test drive it on or something, I think pixel is up to 10? now but 7pro should hopefully last me 3-4 more years if I treat it right, as long as I don’t fuck it up
I’ve found some cheaper pixels on e-bay, bought mine there.
Not that I know of. I was just going to not install them.
Actually I hear Graphene installation on a Pixel is nearly unbrickable and has a nice user friendly website.
I watched a video of it and was reminded of the old Limera1n/Blackrain/etc IOS jailbreak days. There was one where you just went to a website and swiped to jailbreak then your idevice rebooted and you were jailbroken.
The comments keep mentioning Linux phones, have they managed to get Linux running on mobile hardware that I won’t have to go on an archaeological dig for?
There’s this… https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder
It specifies the European market, not sure how well it’ll play with Canadian service providers. I’ll have to wait and see before dropping $1000 (before shipping) on it. VoLTE is pretty much required here and last I heard that was tricky for Linux phones
For now I have GrapheneOS on a Pixel 8 Pro, but I’ll keep an eye on this one to see if it’ll be compatible in Canada
I have GrapheneOS on Pixel 8a and given all the recent news I’m genuinely anxious about what’s coming next :(
Also waiting for this! Would love to get TOH, but doesn’t look too promising currently.
I mean, there are Purism phones. Super expensive, but they keep selling out so I guess they are reasonable.
I have one, and while the actual hardware features are nice, the constant overheating and incredibly slow responses on the phone are reminiscent of a brick laptop from the early '00s. I am instead just running e/OS on an old pixel 4a (since it still has a headphone jack)
Well that’s disappointing to hear. Although it makes me glad that I am too cheap to buy one. 😅
