I do not consider a win, and I will continue applying pressure where I can.
still just not gonna update my phone for a while until they’ve for sure have allowed side loading. Got my pixel because it’s just a nice phone, and i can put graphene on it when it’s paid off. Half of my apps are all from f-droid, too.
You cannot install graphene until it is paid off?
Some carriers lock the bootloader until you’ve paid off the phone.
Phones produced for sale through Verizon have a permanently locked bootloader.
Fuck Verizon for this exact reason. Never buy from them direct if you can help it.
Why is that?
Would you be able to change the IMEI as I would have thought those were encoded on the hardware chip. If you could it means they couldn’t blacklist the phone if you stopped paying.
Paying you can spoof it
Can someone please come out with a phone that’s an actual computer and help stop this nonsense?
Phones cost a lot of money at this point and I’m completely sick of them being some locked down, surveillance ridden pile of crap. A reasonably built one would be able to replace a laptop at this point if it weren’t for these artificial constraints imposed by the stupid fucking suits running things.
https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/astro-slide-5g
This sounds up your ally
furilabs flx1s. I’m using one
Valve should make a Linux phone. Smaller Steam Deck with a modem
Battery life is limited by cell modem drivers being closed source and having to be reverse engineered.
I have been looking into an alternate hybrid radio device using Reticulum. Though with that comes a new less convenient user experience for a lot of apps.
If antitrust was being enforced, Google execs wouldn’t even dream of attempting this bullshit.
Antitrust regulation is probably the easiest way to fix the biggest problems in our society, it is 100% bipartisan, and it is easy to explain to the average US voter. The only group that is against it is the billionaires/ultra wealthy. Instead, politicians are all hyperfocused on culture war mudslinging and bullshit that makes no difference.
Break up Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta (just to start), and watch how the tech industry explodes with innovation again, and the tech billionaire becomes an endangered species. The AI bubble will burst as companies actually need to compete to survive, and thus won’t be burning as much resources on crap that clearly doesn’t work.
I, as the owner of my device, don’t want to wait 24h.
I hope this will popularize the ROM community again. It gradually faded out due to mainstream ROMs having every perk of the custom ROMs but now the custom ROMs can start offering freedom, which no official ROM will offer.
Is there a tap to pay system that works on custom ROMs? I thought those really required SafetyNet/PlayIntegrity/Whatever-it-is-now.
I would rather not give up tap to pay but I will if I have to. It seems like trying to Magisk my way into getting Google Wallet to work would be a PITA.
I, as the owner of my device, don’t want to wait 24h.
then dont. adb is instant
Why would I need a computer to do something that the computer that I already have in my hand can and should do?
bec malware. people get hacked on android and make google look bad.
It’s not side loading. It’s installing software on the device you probably paid multiple thousands for that you no longer own.
Multiple thousands!? My phone was like $250
not all people are americans
Lol same, I spent $250 on a used pixel 8, threw grapheneos on it the day I got it. Honestly my dream scenario right now is that sailfish let’s me just purchase a sailfish X license for a community port
Congratulations!
That’s multiple thousands in some countries
To call the install of apps of your choice as «sideloading», means that they have won.
That’s the name of the command, though. It’s
adb sideload. Anything else is installing.That’s not even true. If you install an app through adb, the command is
adb install <path/to/app.apk>adb sideload is for installing OTA packages
bs, i did install apks before using
adb sideloadit worksI don’t know if adb sideload will fallback to a regular install, maybe it does as a convenience for people who don’t read the docs? In any case, you said:
That’s the name of the command, though.
And I demonstrated that you’re wrong by linking to the official man page (aka the docs) directly from the master branch of the public git repo. Here’s the relevant part which describes the sideload command:
sideload OTAPACKAGE Sideload the given full OTA package OTAPACKAGE.
idc what those stupid docs say. i know i installed apps with that command before
Exactly?..
I’m writing an app that I will distribute only through f-droid. The people I would like to share it with are typical, non-technical android users. Before those changes I could just send them a link to f-droid apk and explain it’s just another app store or send a link to the apk directly and probably most of them would be able to install it. Now I would have to tell them to do all those weird things first, things that look suspicious and that they would not understand the purpose of. I don’t think anyone will be wiling to do it. This is not a win. The effect will be exactly the same - serious limits on distributing apps though alternative channels.
Narrator: No, they did not, in fact, win.
It is always like this. Make a very anti consumer decision that everyone hates, then tone it down so the half of those people will say “we won”. This is a loss.
Reading the article it looks like they found a decent middle ground. It lays out how the steps help prevent people from getting scammed.
My galaxy will let me install but then I get this when I try to run the app:
Disable Google Play Protect. It’s a scam that doesn’t protect you at all, it just gives more control to Google.
Google Play Protect is designed to protect Google Play from competitors
Christ
I had this too. I installed it from playstore but maintain the software now via aurora. So far it works…
no.
i’ll look into this, but they seem to have used the old strategy of announcing something absurd then back down to what they wanted because of “community pressure”
bonus for not looking bad in comparison, while still being bad.
Of course we didn’t win. the more hoops you have to jump through, the fewer people who will install their own apps and then you lose all of the community support. And Google didn’t promise not to change their plans in the future. So you know that they’ll promise this now. Maybe they’ll backtrack a little if they have to and they will try to ratchet things up six months later anyway.
Real solutions involve either breaking up monopolies or breaking up monopolies, which is why some of the other cell phone vendors’ actions recently look positive. If there are two versions of Android that are popularly used, then the banks will have to support both of them and then everyone can run away from Google whenever they feel like it. But if there’s only one popular version and Android itself gets more and more locked down then that is Google seizing the entire market and they will cut out all of the other cell phone manufacturers as soon as they can. that will be just as bad as Apple.
the win in this is that many people realise how locked google has made android and how blatantly and arbitrarily google exerts their control over it. hopefully that will be input to some consumer decision (when sailfish becomes an alternative) and a tiny bit more people will consider their choice when getting a new phone. and maybe it also helps some regulation to be agreed (in europe, obviously).
nobody here read the part where side loading was never going to be disabled
