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I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to stop using Android. I don’t need my phone. Sure, it’s convenient and often helpful, but it’s not something I can’t live without. Fuck these assholes.
Are you sure you can’t? Because when my phone was stolen last month, I came to terms with how much the modern world needs one to have one.
You mean how others need you to have one.
I put a clause in my contracts, and I also do it for social interactions: if anyone needs me to have a Google Party-approved phone, or a Google Surveillance-approved application, it’s their responsibility to provide it to me.
I guess we’ll find out. If a viable option that isn’t Android or iOS comes along, I’ll use that. Until then, I refuse to play the game anymore.
Yeah, I have almost no apps on my phone now. Breezy Weather, Firefox Focus, Comaps, Stratum for MFA, Signal, and a few other things. I rarely use any of it, except I check Breezy Weather once a day (better than anything I’ve found on the web). Signal seems to finally be removing the phone requirement, and I could move MFA to my password manager. I rarely turn on mobile data, and I get 6-8 days battery on my Pixel 9a running Graphene.
But, it’s really nice to have if I get lost when I’m in town. I can go from ruining my day, which being autistic, tends to snowball into a week or so, to pulling out my phone and getting everything back on track.
That said, I used to constantly have my face in a reddit app, have YNAB and all my banking apps, and rely on it for just about everything. I don’t need all that. I take my receipts home, I bank from my laptop, I bought a DAP for my music, Pocketbook for reading, etc.
That said, I’d like to move music back to it once I get a phone with an SD card that will run an OS I’m happy with. I’m optimistic for the Motorola phone with Graphene support. And I’d like to use it to control MPD or Navidrome at home, start getting some Home Assistant stuff running with it for control, and spin up an open source alternative to YNAB that I can run an app for.
It took me years to get to this point where I feel like I can start using it for actually useful stuff, and not be tempted to have it take over my life. Of course, now RAM and disk are too expensive for me to build the little hyperconverged cluster I want to run those services.
introducing ubuntutouch and sailfishos. (never used one myself, but bought a jolla phone which arives this summer/fall this year)
Almost time for me to switch to UbuntuTouch. It’s well supported on my phone.
Cool. So what happens if I run a version of Android that doesn’t inherit Google security theater cruft? That is to say…what if the user simply…does not…upgrade the Android version to be affected by this (eg: uses an old phone or blocks OS version update?).
My phone is going on 7yrs old. Perfectly happy with it. When it breaks, I will get a phone of the same era (2nd hand or new-old stock) or investigate other options.
So, it seems to me, the winning move is not to play the game (in any one of 100 diff ways).
Or am I missing something here? Is there something that will prevent older tech from working? Because if so, I am happy to YOLO my phone and switch to a dumbphone if I have to.
As I understood, they will roll this out through “Google Play Services” and not the Android OS. So, any device with Google Play Services will be affected.
You can read more here: https://github.com/keepandroidopen/keepandroidopen.github.io/blob/main/src/content/pages/en/index.md
Thanks for that. I’ve been meaning to (re) disable Google Play services. I have a few older phones too that never had it to begin with. I wonder how/if Aurora Store will be impacted. Presumably, if you don’t have Google Play Services functioning, you don’t get the poison pill. But…given that Big Evil likes to just … do shit (cf the recent 4GB forced ingestion of their LLM with Chrome) I dunno.
In any case, step 1 is probably nuking that.
I think microG will work; it connects to the core Play Services API
