Pay the $25 ransom little devs or else!
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Linux phone time
I really want Linux phones to catch on, but even watching demos, while they are making progress, it seems like they are still very far behind.
A phone for me (and many others) is more a lifestyle utility than a tech gadget, so reliability and compatibility is paramount. Things need to just work the first time every time for me to trust relying on it for important things.
I still follow the development of some projects and contribute when I can, but it doesn’t look like it’ll be a realistic option (for my use case at least) any time soon.
Friend had a fairphone (no google version) worked well, with like a quirk or so. Sounds quite close to a really good phone.
Fairphone uses stock Android, or /e/os, which is degoogled Android.
Fairphone 5 and 4 have support for SailfishOS, which is Linux. Some closed parts, but nothing from Google.
I have FP6, will try Sailfish when available.
Speaking of, the first waves of the new Jolla phone (with sailfish os) are apparently coming out now. I haven"t seen any posts about it on Lemmy yet, just an unboxing vid on YouTube
Literally the only one I like but I live in Hell and they don’t seem to do too well with the carriers over here. Some of them are crazy, lwanting like nearly 2k, ain’t happenin’ chief.
Sailfish has been around since 2013. Hopefully the hardware is good 🤞
1st version hardware was decent enough and I had really high hopes for the company. And then they went and messed up royally with the tablet-kickstarter. I hope they really can push to the market this time, but I’m not the first to buy their device again.
Darn even the fin is critical of them.
I don’t know how many, if any at all, are still on board from the original company but I really had high hopes for them. I used N810, N900 and N9 from Nokia. That OS (maemo/meego) then eventually matured to Sailfish some time after Nokia was already either down or going that way. I really liked the first Jolla phone, it had something in it which none of the android slabs I’ve then had doesn’t. They had at least some kind of market share, promising applications coming up and, at least in my opinion, at that time, very real chance to challenge Android/iOS on the market.
And then they blew it all with a massively oversized kickstarter for their size. I haven’t followed too closely what actually happened, or could that been avoided, but that blunder meant that I haven’t really followed Sailfish or Jolla since. I really hope they succeed, the market needs desperately at least one more player to challenge walled gardens we currently have, but previous experience says that I’m not going to throw my own hard earned money on them until they show they can actually stay on track.
I don’t like jolla after that one time when they sold their brand and product to russian company affiliated with current corrupt government that you know, killing people in Ukraine.
I really don’t mean to start any more in-fighting on “this side”, but is it really worth it to wait for something “better” to appear? I admit I don’t know much about that russia thing, but this latest Jolla phone is selling out all the pre-orders, there is lots of momentum going on, it seems that we might finally have a viable option that isn’t american big tech. So is it worth it to let this thing go, while letting the cancer cells grow even bigger?
If you want to swap cancer to aids - you do you.
It’s worth noting that the current Jolla is whatever the original founders could get back through the Finnish courts after their investors from Russia stopped communicating.
I got a new phone recently and I was so close to getting a Linux phone, but I chickened out. It seems damn close to being there, but just not reliable enough for me yet. I need a phone that works essentially all the time without question for everything I need. I can accept worse UX, as long as it works.
For those who have the means, please consider donating to PostmarketOS, which has been slowly but surely pushing forward pure linux support for phones, and is the best longterm solution we have to completely circumvent Google and reclaim our hardware permenantly.
F-Droid is way more trustworthy than google pay.
Or Google Play, for that matter!
(I don’t really care because I find the idea of hooking your credit cards to a third party to pay with your phone creepy to begin with, but are there any non-Google-Pay alternatives for GrapheneOS or Linux phones?)
I think it was a play on words
…or pay for that matter.
I understand wordp(l)ay, I swear! 😅
Unfortunately, theirs had a namespace collision with a separate actual product, so I decided to riff on that instead.
gnu taler but barely anyone uses it and its still wip
Google claims the google playstore is safe and the only way to avoid malware. Ironically it was like 65-70% of all malware on android came from the playstore.
The dumb part is that this won’t even solve the problem. It will be trivially easy to get dev certificates through a shell company. Anyone who is making money off scamware will have no trouble standing up LLCs faster than Google can ban them.
You still think it’s about security while it always has been about control.
What does Google care? They’re making money off of it now.
I didnt care really about switching OS’s, but i do start to care when a fucking company gets abusive. Not only that. I get spiteful and petty. And that generally supplies enough fuel to get me through the pains of moving to a new system quite well.
When Windows 7 was discontinued, i used linux. Now im still using linux, outside of some work i did a couple of years back, none of my devices run windows.
Btw, i baught (with money!) Windows since 3.11 (Windows 3.11 - Win 98 - Win 2000 - WinXP - Win 7)
I mean - how many of us are here because we got spiteful and petty over reddit API shit?
Removed by mod
Sounds like a boon for other projects like Graphene, Postmarket, Lineage, Ubuntu Touch, etc
Make sure to donate and I hope the devs switch gears and leave Google behind.
It’s why there’s already talk that recaptcha only works with approved phones to lock out alternatives.
please drink verification can
Yeah, this shit has me moving to Graphene soon.
As far a I know you need a Google Pixel for graphene. So you would still be helping google.
I already have one but even if I didn’t buying used FTW!
Also, Motorola is reportedly releasing a Graphene friendly phone (not that they’re all that great either).
I’ve had 4 pixels and even the og Google Nexus. A graphine Motorola might be the last thing I need to fully ditch Google phones. I wish I could put graphine on my old pixel 4a 4g. It’s got e/os now. The battery life is crazy good, but it still kind of just feels like an android phone anyway.
*Graphene
There’s other mobile options too like Sailfish and Ubuntu Touch.
Assuming they buy it new. If you buy it used, no helping Google.
Wouldn’t it create an incentive for the other person (the seller) to buy another phone from google?
Like if someone had to keep all my past phones, would they buy as many new phone?
I don’t know a lot of people who wait to sell an old phone before they get a new one. Usually, they decide to sell after they already have the new phone set up.
Usually people calculate/justify the cost. Like if a new phone costs 1000 and the old phone can be sold for 750 (selling it before the new purchase or after doesn’t matter) then the actual cost of the new phone will be 250.
But if we stop buying old phones from them, then they will have to bear the full cost (1000) and they won’t be justifying their purchase like this.
You know what i mean right?
If someone is selling the phone, I think in 90% of cases they’ve already bought a new one and migrated their data to it.
True, however the justification to buy a new phone while already using a ‘perfectly good but older model’, is that they know they will be able to sell the ‘perfectly good but older model’ for a good enough price.
Thus, this idea that buying a second hand pixel mean money does not go google is flawed.
Eh, I see what you’re saying, but I think there’s always going to be a market for second hand hardware. And what new phone they decide to get, which might not necessarily be Google, isn’t going to be influenced by the purchaser, I don’t think.
Unless you do like people with iPhones do and you still pay premium prices for used phones… that I could see incentivizing Google specifically as holding value becomes a reason to buy them, as is true with Apple. But I don’t think eliminating the incentive for a second hand market altogether is really reasonably possible, personally. May as well pull a Google phone out of the ecosystem and deGoogle it. Who knows? Maybe you sell it yourself years down the line to someone needing a very cheap phone and end up introducing someone else to nonGoogle or Apple OS’s.
I bought refurbished ans jnstalled graphene
Buy pre-owned.
LineageOS. It’s less hardline on “the hardware must have these specific security features” than Graphene, and works on WAY more devices as a result.
I just want to know what is going to my fdroid apps when this comes in. Will they all get binned? Disabled? Just fail to load until I jump through the new “untrusted” sources hoops?
What gets me is that upstream linux has had this solved by trusting repo keys for years, why not let the end user be the trust arbiter
Because you’re not the end user, you’re the product.
yes that is the cynical take, and I mostly agree, but installed apks list their install source, so if that information is there, then its simple to give the user the ability to mark said source as trusted. But to do this under the guise of security, when there is more malware on play than fdroid is such a head scratcher
Yoy described the current solution I believe.
The more hoops they put in place to jump through, the less people would consider going outside Google Play. And the more control Google has on the ecosystem.
yes that is the cynical take, and I mostly agree, but installed apks list their install source, so if that information is there, then its simple to give the user the ability to mark said source as trusted.
For now.
Here’s the plan:
- Normal Cellphone
- Kobo
- MP3 player
- Thinkpad
- A Faraday bag
1 will make calls, texts, pay parking fees, let me into concerts and call 911, and nothing else
2 will allow me to continue to read anticapitalist books without being tracked
3 will allow me to continue listening to anticapitalist music without being tracked
4 will allow me to continue discussions about how shit capitalism is with my fellow scorned and continue saying Trump is a pedo and 8647 when I feel like tossing more darts at his mental image, use XMPP, IRC, TOR, Ygg, you know, the gang.
5 will allow me to ditch the fascists when I’m done playing the part of a normal citizen on a daily basis.
There will never be progress so long as device owners cannot unlock the bootloaders on their phones.
That’s a law/regulation id love to see
Buy from better brands and regulate companies that lock down bootloaders
first results on a quick search for phones that allow bootloader unlocking.
Hopefully, all of the devs, (or at the very least, most of the them) move over to help speed up and improve the alternative OS’s
It would be a beautiful kick in the face to Google if there a relatively quick mass migration from Android to any or all of those.
https://www.howtogeek.com/buy-these-brands-if-you-truly-want-to-own-your-phone/
Don’t you just hit that option to allow APKs that takes 24 hours to go through?
I can’t wait to be interested in an app, and have to wait an entire 24 hours to install it on my own computer
At least until google removes that option as well
From my understanding, you just have to wait the 24 hours once to allow 3rd part apks. You don’t have to do it for every app install.
30/9/2026
there aren’t 30 months in a year…
American entitlement shows up again
should’ve put a /s at the end
I had a guy earlier saying the same thing in a serious matter.
I use GrapheneOS, personally. Whenever I get a new laptop, I fully intend to install Linux Mint on it.
I just installed Mint on an old and slow laptop, literally win7 era piece, works way smoother and faster than it ever used to.
At the least support lineageos.
Google has been reducing the amount of AOSP updates released each year.
And moving necessary libraries into Google Play Services instead of having them in AOSP at all.
Because Google absolutely hates everything good and decent now.
Is this a one time 25 or is it monthly like a subscription?
It’s a one-time payment. Google’s FAQ says it’s:
The $25 fee for the Full Distribution account in the ADC helps cover administrative costs. We are actively working to support multiple forms of payment to accommodate developers globally and will have more details when the console launches. There is no fee for developers who qualify for a limited distribution account.
So it’s a fee to cover administration that Google itself decided to implement for no reason.
Keep in mind you also need to provide a lot of personal information to become verified and officially able to distribute apps for Google certified devices.
£25 for now, who knows when they decide to add more fees…
should be one time
