Google’s Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. In its quest for ever-greater profits, the tech giant has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source capacity over the last decade.

Google’s Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. In its quest for ever-greater profits, the tech giant has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source nature over the last decade.

Originally published on The Lever, but that one asks you to sign up.

  • usernameunnecessary@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1091·
    16 days ago

    Unfortunately the Android experience is getting more and more bloated and users’ freedom to tinker with their phones or sideload apps is getting more and more difficult. The Play Store is riddled with more ads than useful content. Just try searching for something, and oftentimes more than half of your screen is ads.

    I’ve been with Android since the start and I hate what Google is reducing it to. It pains me that the only viable alternative is Apple and I feel trapped.

    • wise_pancake@lemmy.caEnglish
      24·
      16 days ago

      Play Store is truly vile to use. It just feels gross and scammy and like a mine field of low quality slop and scam apps.

      iOS isn’t great either but it at least feels a whole lot better. The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.

      • redhat421@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        15 days ago

        My experience with the iOS app store years ago was worse than Android. Searching for apps that were not chock full of spam was useless. I had to research the apps outside of the store then find direct links to them due to clones with the same names.

        I have no idea why Apple and Google allow so much hot garbage in their app stores.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        15 days ago

        The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.

        That’s probably to reduce brigading? Android and iOS are infested with all sorts of fraduelnt marketing techniques like fake reviews, and mass fraud reporting for competition sounds like another.

    • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
      201·
      15 days ago

      We’re all trapped. If you’re not using either Android or iOS, you’re pretty much screwed.

      Technically, you can use one of the alternate phones, but the software support still leaves a lot to be desired. You can get most basic things working, but when it comes to crucial deal breaker apps like anything involving payments or banks, it gets a lot trickier. The world has become increasingly dependent on mobile phones, and if your phone can’t handle train tickets, mail deliveries, restaurant reservations or pay your bills, it suddenly becomes very difficult to live in the 2020s.

      More and more hardware also depends on specific iOS or Android apps, and those apps may also require GAPPS or some OEM Android. At some point, it just isn’t worth the hassle, and it becomes easier to pick either one of the toxic platforms everyone else is already using.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        15 days ago

        I feel like the standard should be two phones. A disposable ‘banking’ phone: tiny, no camera, no speakers, small SoC, just the absolute bare minimum to live.

        …And then a ‘media’ phone without all the enshittification.

        • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
          3·
          15 days ago

          Basically a lot like what my work phone is for now. It’s just phone calls (yes, those still exist in the B2B world), SMS, Teams, and Outlook. Literally everything else happens on my work laptop. Most of the time, my work phone just pretends to be a wifi router + 4G modem. On remote days, the battery drains super fast, but when I’m at the office, the phone battery lasts way longer than you could reasonably expect. Then again, I don’t really use that phone for anything, so I guess that’s why.

          I think I could do that with my personal stuff too. Get a nice laptop and prioritize using that for everything. Maybe I would end up using the phone like once a day at most.

      • Turret3857@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        14 days ago

        Your options are mostly UBTouch and PostmarketOS. Due to how PMOS is designed, it doesnt fully function on the phones it supports. UBTouch does work well due to the ability to use a driver compatibility layer with android IIRC, but you still have the issue of needing a phone that can support it. (I think the latest pixel UBTouch runs on is the 3?)

        also, the security model of mobile linux is nowhere near what android is. Things that keep android secure like verified boot are not yet implemented on linux phone OSes AFAIK

    • PushButton@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      15 days ago

      Funny enough, having Microsoft making the Windows Phone again would make a 3rd player, and maybe some competition in the market.

      I don’t know many companies that have the resources to fight in this arena right now…

    • Bongles@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      15 days ago

      It’s telling how incompetent they’ve become when their LLM AI is the absolute worst one, including mechahitler before that update.

  • majster@lemmy.zipEnglish
    63·
    16 days ago

    MS keeps making Windows worse but that is not a problem because Linux is great on PCs. The reason is that PC is made out of standardized plug&play components that you can make generic OS image for.

    There is no such thing in smartphone world. Each chipset is it’s own Linux fork that gets only most crucial bug fixes while in warranty. Same is true for ARM SBCs where I believe the only board that supports generic image are new RPis.

    • flop_leash_973@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      15 days ago

      The reason is that PC is made out of standardized plug&play components that you can make generic OS image for.

      Yep, given the history of consumer technology as a whole it is really more amazing that the standard PC became a thing more than it is that people put up with what phones are today.

      We all really owe a lot of gratitude to Phoenix for reverse engineering the IBM BIOS back in the day, and going to court to fight the IBM copyright lawsuit that resulted, as well as Compaq and all of the other IBM compatible clones.

  • ohwhatfollyisman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    567·
    16 days ago

    android peaked with the pixel 2. then everyone went overboard on bezel-less displays and fast refresh rates and smart assistant services and brought the whole damn thing crashing down.

        • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          15 days ago

          TBH getting a nice dongle like a Fiio KA5 is not so bad. It’s small enough to just hang off the cord, and sounds better anyway, and you don’t have to throw it away every phone switch.

            • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
              21·
              15 days ago

              Sorry, I meant the KA1 or KA3, got them mixed up. My KA3 was like $50 used.

              I use it on my PC, too.

              Considering the cost in reference to the hardware, and that I can use it basically forever, and that it’s a lower distortion DAC than any phone? It’s not bad. And it’s a barely-noticable addon for my headphones that just lives on the cord.

    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      16 days ago

      I don’t think the issue with phones is the smaller bezels or better displays.

      That’s not what’s ruining them.

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.mlEnglish
    31·
    15 days ago

    2 days ago I moved from GrapheneOS back to Stock Pixel in my 8 Pro, just to see what all the hype about the new android 16 in Pixel is about. Jesus, this is way worse than I remember. i tried it for 2 whole days, and that shit just won’t allow me to have ANY control over my phone. It’s fucking ridiculous. On Android 15 I was able to uninstall Google Drive, Meet, Youtube, and many other Google apps, this time around all it would allow was “disable”. What’s next, removing the ability to disable (which I don’t trust anyway)?

    Fast forward to today, I’m back on GOS, and my anxiety levels are down again. This shit is insane, and I honestly can’t understand why anyone would put up with this crap.

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      15 days ago

      this time around all it would allow was “disable”.

      This has been par for other OEM-flavored Android phones for years, unfortunately.

      Disable is alright, not that the phone itself isn’t a privacy nightmare in other ways.

    • redhat421@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      15 days ago

      Those apps are installed in the squashfs image. Such images are write once, read many and thus they can’t be mutated at runtime.

      • youmaynotknow@lemmy.mlEnglish
        8·
        15 days ago

        I know, and that’s exactly my point. They used to be in the user space, now they are in the system partition. They CHOSE to do this.

        • redhat421@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          13 days ago

          Yeah. That’s a good point. I don’t know why anyone would put any frequently updated app in squashfs.

          I guess you can use the app right after you factory reset even if you don’t have much data which might be something? Are updates smaller since they’re just deltas?

          • youmaynotknow@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            13 days ago

            In all honesty, I have no idea. I didn’t give the stock firmware enough time on my phone to check on anything other than the amount of tracking and the move to the system partition.

            As for the reason for putting them in this partition, I’m sold on the idea that it’s to keep the levels of invasion as high as possible while removing the user’s options to get rid of them.

    • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      14 days ago

      I’ve been considering moving to GOS because of all the Google shenanigans, but I need to make sure everything works since my job means I have dozens of MS authenticator entries for various admin tasks. I really want to try it out, but can’t afford to have to rebuild all those entries on a new system (and the notifications not work)

      • youmaynotknow@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        14 days ago

        I had to use MS Authenticator for work and it worked in GOS, notifications and all. Now, that was about a year ago, and I haven’t tried it since. At the speed GAFAM are enshitifying everything, there’s a chance it doesn’t work anymore. I keep a Pixel 8a stock for banking and some other apps that I need (such as EV charging networks) and won’t work or are unsustainably wonky on GOS. As I mentioned in another post, RethinkDNS is worth it, but it does take some trial and error to get it to work without breaking stuff I need, but once I got there, it was all good (that’s how I keep the 8a less intrusive).

  • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    16 days ago

    Up until about two weeks ago I could use wallet on my rooted pixel with lineage and play integrity fix.

    Some recent change on their end and it doesn’t work at all anymore. I guess they don’t want to know what I’m buying.

        • edgemaster72@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8·
          16 days ago

          I think what they were trying to say is “I heard people use an Apple watch to get NFC payments working”. I’m not confident that answer=Apple (also I have no idea if that would actually help), but it’s the best I can come up with.

  • BilboBargains@lemmy.worldEnglish
    301·
    16 days ago

    The obfuscated nature of compiled code does an incredible amount of heavy lifting on behalf of shareholders. Imagine a world where x-ray specs suddenly revealed source code. The flight to open solutions would be irresistible. Windows is hot garbage but it clings to its market share like a limpet, through the magic of closed source, occupying space like a flabby tumour. It doesn’t care if it kills the host because the top priority is growth and an unassailable market share. That’s the magic of capitalism.

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      15 days ago

      Honestly I don’t think many people would care? Until the security holes became intractable, I guess.

      Its proven Android phones are doing awful stuff, even client side, and has that slowed them down?

  • VicksVaporBBQrub@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    29·
    16 days ago

    Can I get a rundown of the few non-flagship phonemakers that are currently out there? I have heard of The Nothing Phone. Are there more companies that put together Androids to operate within the US?

    • Prox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      16 days ago

      Would Moto count? I’ve been rocking their basic-ass phones for years now. Way, way less bloatware than Samsung, etc. and only like $200 unlocked.

    • MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      16 days ago

      Besides Nothing Phone, you’ve got Fairphone (sustainable/repairable), Sony (great cameras), Asus (gaming focused), Nokia (budget-friendly), OnePlus (speed/value), and Xiaomi (if you can import) all working to varying degreees in the US market - tho carrier compatibility can be trickly so always check bands before buying.

  • Canuck@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    261·
    16 days ago

    Mobile GNU/Linux is getting better, but I think it is 5-10 years out from what’s needed. I suppose people need to adopt Desktop first. The nice thing is you can install Android apps including Google Play on it natively, and they appear in your app drawer like a regular app

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      16 days ago

      It’s a bit of a catch honestly.

      OSS/community Linux graphical environments have kind of always been ~5 years out from what’s needed. 15 years ago they were behind ~5 years, 5 years ago they where behind ~5 years.

      The only difference is today. I think they’re only behind by ~3-4 years thanks to the backwards movement of things like Windows and OSx staleness.

      Mobile operating systems are in a worse place.

      • Canuck@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        14 days ago

        There are Google Play Android bank apps (mine works fine), and you can use mobile sites as dedicated app drawer icons. Their mobile site is top notch.

        NFC payments won’t come anytime soon to native GNU/Linux, but I don’t use them. Maybe Google Wallet works, I haven’t tried and don’t know if NFC can be passed through to Waydroid. OnePlus 6 is the best supported originally Android phone for GNU/Linux, someone with that would need to test.

        I just have my card in a silicon sleeve on the back of the phone and I get the same effect. I’d rather Google not have my purchase history anyways.

    • TeddE@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      15 days ago

      I just saw KDE Bigscreen got reboot. While it’s not exactly the same (its for TVs, like Android TV and Steam Big Picture mode), it’s nice to see major desktop environments(DE) adopt new UI features for small and large devices. This compliments work done by groups like PinePhone, who laid the groundwork for Linux phones.

    • jabjoe@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      My big problem is banks and satnav.

      SatNav need traffic info and there is none, so their routes are bad.

      Banks require apps to even use their website for “secure codes”. Those apps try to detect ROMs and refuse to run, not even really being Android is going to make passing that harder.

      Let alone random things like parking apps where the app is the only way to pay.

      This is a political problem as much as technical. Competition is basically dead. We need government to step in and make competition possible. But they are in big tech’s pocket and the status quo suits them too. Voters either don’t care or believe what big tech says. It’s a mess.

      • Canuck@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        14 days ago

        Satnav there is Pure Maps (OSM client), which can connect to sources like HERE to get traffic data to provide voiced guided turn-by-turn instructions. Of course there is also all the Android apps like Google Maps available, and their mobile site works fine.

        On the topic of mobile sites, you can also install them as dedicated app drawer icons via Gnome Web & Firefox PWA for any site.

        This means if your bank app doesn’t like vanilla Android, GApps, you can use a comparable dedicated web app.

        For parking, I’ve found a surprising amount have mobile sites, so I don’t need to install their bloaty Android app onto my GNU/Linux phone.

        • jabjoe@feddit.ukEnglish
          1·
          14 days ago

          Good to know. I’d really like to try a proper Linux phone as a daily driver.

  • SeeFerns@programming.devEnglish
    19·
    16 days ago

    I really want to try a pinephone or something with Ubuntu touch. It’s likely not daily driver ready but I’m still curious at how far along it is.

    • utopiah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      16 days ago

      Can’t speak for Ubuntu Touch but tried PostMarketOS on PinePhone and PinePhone Pro.

      The PP works well, good support for most things included SIM, camera, BT, etc but it’s big and bulky, also IMHO not powerful enough for Waydroid so no Android apps, “just” Linux. Relying on the browser to avoid using app is rarely practical as it’s too slow.

      The PPPro being more powerful should cover the gap… but some lack of support, specifically the camera, makes it tricky as daily driver.

      Both PP and PPPro don’t have great battery and/or power management so you can go through a day of usage, barely, and you might get stuck in a cycling loop if you depleted it entirely. That means also as daily driver, if you are not very cautious, it’s tricky.

      So… we are nearly there but unless you have a very VERY minimum usage of your phone, basically a dumb phone with a bit of CLI to remote connect to your own server from time to time, it’s probably not practical for now.

      Maybe the Liberux NEXX thanks to its power would have closed the gap but the failed crowd funding campaign shows that price point does not have a market fit right now.

      • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pubEnglish
        4·
        16 days ago

        So… we are nearly there but unless you have a very VERY minimum usage of your phone, basically a dumb phone with a bit of CLI to remote connect to your own server from time to time, it’s probably not practical for now.

        …and, that’s me.

        I gave up on my phones. There’s no way to remain connected to the modern world and my own without just keeping everything off of my phone and using it entirely in stock NPC mode. Trackers? Adware? Malware? Doesn’t matter, I only use it for calls, banking apps and cash apps. How do I access my personal, more 1337 haxxor shit?

        Laptop, although I can do a lot of work over ssh on phones and use things like syncthing and nextcloud to get around the ecosystem, still, but for the most part, I’m back in 2007, baby! We’re carrying messenger bags! We don’t care!

        • utopiah@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          16 days ago

          banking apps and cash apps

          Unfortunately that’s prevents from switching to Linux proper over (hopefully deGoogled) Android.

          • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pubEnglish
            1·
            15 days ago

            You just need a window into their world.

            Carry your Linux phone and tether it to an old android, install what you need and turn it off.

            carry two things, like some kind of asshole that carries two things!?

            When I was 19, we all carried cameras and mp3 players around too. It’s hardly a stretch.

      • SeeFerns@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        16 days ago

        Thanks for the write up! It honestly sounds like it’s be fine for me. My iPhone is already extremely bare and stripped down. I barely use the camera too, so like, idk I don’t feel like I’d be missing much?

        If I could buy a super cheap used one for testing, I’d do it. I’m waiting for my iPhone SE to die on me anyways before making the switch.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    14 days ago

    Tried to restart my fairly new Pixel phone a couple days ago by holding down the power button, but instead of showing the Power menu it prompted me to ask the Digital Assistant something. Excuse me? I don’t remember enabling that. Every other phone I’ve ever had, holding down the power button has always been the way to power down or restart. I had to search Settings to find how to configure the power button to control the power. Or course maybe I could have asked the Digital Assistant - but fuck that.

  • Zink@programming.devEnglish
    11·
    16 days ago

    I find myself using desktop Linux more than my mobile device, even on the couch with the family. Monitors on arms that can swing out of the way ftw. No cute advice for keyboards though. We have wireless ones around but I still use my wired Deck Legend on my lap. It’s an old mechanical keyboard that’s built like a tank, with the PCB literally mounted to a sheet of metal that is mounted inside the housing, lol.

    It’s almost a shame, because smart phones are still absolutely amazing to me as far as the amount of scientific and technical advancement that can fit in the palm of your hand. But I look forward to the open options various parties are working on.

  • Valmond@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    16 days ago

    I’m on hyperos and every time I have to touch anything pure Google I feel like I’m on a windows PC.

    Don’t get me wrong, hyperos isn’t a pinnacle of freedom, but all I do with my phone is basically using Firefox and take photos (+ signal, & SMS) and use the lichess app.

    It’s so infuriating, they steal our data, but just needs more. I’ll try a Linux FOSS system next phone.

    • rozodru@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      16 days ago

      one of the best products Microsoft ever produced. I absolutely LOVED my old Lumia. great phone, the OS was perfect, just an awesome all around phone. wish I still had it.