We are in an economy where competition is discouraged, the wealthy get socialism, and everyone else is ‘survival of the fittest’. But we can change things. Stop buying those Android / iOS devices and look for alternatives. Jolla Phone and Pine 64 made steps in the right direction. Support those companies and encourage them to expand and refine their software base, even if it means a tough couple of years struggling. You take away the user base of the duopoly, you take away their power. As for the other issues posted here, as the Tao Te Ching says, “In the land of many laws, many laws are broken.” Unjust things can be resisted and do not let anyone tell you different. Giving up some small luxuries is a tiny price to pay.
True…But Emulation on those two devices you stated as alternatives are becoming increasingly difficult due to a RAM shortage.
Historically, great changes and inventions came out of restraints. Stop looking to your oppressors for guidance. They feed you stories to tell you change is impossible. Don’t look to them, look to those who make the world you want to live in.
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Oh, that actually makes sense there. These corporations are trying to give us a sense of hopelessness to make us give up.
In a way, this is sort of positive. Google are ‘locking-down’ because they are afraid of F-Droid. You can run F-Droid and not have to touch the Google Play ecosystem. That is a threat to Google. That is why they lie and say blocking of side-loading is ‘for security purposes’ and ‘for your protection’ when they do not even fix their own house. F-Droid has zero security issues (and any risks are disclosed), but Google Play has hundreds of security issues. F-Droid shows other possibilities exist, so indeed another platform is not only possible, but we are almost there. An enterprising vendor needs to step up and answer the market. After the last batch of “Android” updates left cruddy games (likely spyware) I never wanted nor asked for, I know it is time to move on.
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Yeah, Monopoly GO & Pokemon GO are two very apparent examples. But, what about the governments? Even with devices that don’t link to any corporations, the governments will still be a major problem, as they can force these devices to send sensitive information by forcibly requiring it. So these devices would then need to ignore such laws. Like, for example, the interaction between GrapheneOS and a government, where the use of GrapheneOS is illegal.
Tell them you don’t have a phone and you don’t believe in phones. It’s against your religion. Your religions tells you ‘landline’ only. Are the governments going to come after the Amish and force phones on them? If the government wants me to have a phone that badly, I know it is time to do without. Then i can catch up on reading. Heck, I’ll probably join the Amish.
Here’s something that may shock you, there used to be a life before the wide adoption of mobile phones. And you know what? Life was BETTER. Same with life before the internet.
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True, however, having a lot of physical books actually could be bad for the environment, all that paper would have to come somewhere.
your government issued plastic id is going to replaced with government issued phone id, and everyone is going to be happy about it, cause it’s so convenient, the only question is will it have google play services on it or not, and today most people you ask including “industry experts” will say yes by all means the same way they said yes to microsoft
So, to be clear, won’t we be able to install F-Droid on custom ROMs and then install/update apps from F-Droid?
Who is “we”? The 0.00001% 'ers? Custom ROMs? Which device new will you be able to unlock in 2026?
@ArceusI You know, you are right. It is MUCH better to drown the world in plastic and toxic materials that comprise devices with built-in obsolence. Perfectly good devices with perfectly fine specs rendered obsolete. I am with you, forget books, let us just drown in plastic. I forgot, we have no such thing as libraries where we can borrow books. We cannot share books. Books have built in obsolence just like mobile devices. You are so insightful. Thank you.
As for Android, fug Google and their ecosystem. Time to break out of it.
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its so bad reading about all the mentioned android forks because none of them are available for my almost a kilogram of “phone”… i wonder if there is a way to upgrade a casual android os into a fork…
Device unlocking surely do get more complicated by a year…*
This year, it was something akin to humiliation to go through a virtual checkpoint and wait for days in a virtual line to get a “foodstamp” with an unlock code for a single Xiaomi device, all from the comfort of my home :’)
Is custom ROM usage really that meager nowadays?**
And it’s sad and wasteful, that lots of high tech portable computer and communicator devices are just left to sit or rot ildly.
—
P.S.:
* - for anyone interested,
there’s a public bootloader unlock wall of shame
available on github for everyone to boo, dread and study.
** - given, that, say, LineageOS GApps-less is quite feature rich and stable, not to mention, there’s far less clutter, than on any given stock Android device these days.
And F-Droid provides a huge, feasibly traversable and powerful collection of sane apps, that gots one cover in his virtual daily wants and needs.)
I think there should be two versions of Arceus OS: One of them an Android custom ROM (Arceus AOS), and one a mobile Linux distribution (Arceus LOS or something, but I don’t know whether it would be based on another distribution or if it would be entirely its own thing). This would make it a lot harder to shut down since if one of them gets shut down, users can fallback to the other
That is a good idea, plus adding Android support for Linux would work as a fallback plan. So Arceus AOS will be a method of getting around Google & Age Verification. Arceus LOS could be used as a fallback, that gets around Microsoft, Apple, Google & Age Verification all at once.
Maybe there should be a feature within Arceus LOS that allows users to create a degoogled Android-based container, that way they can still use Android apps if Google decides to kill Arceus AOS.
Exactly, Arceus AOS within Arceus LOS.
The container would obviously take up a lot more space since you would essentially be running an OS inside an OS, but thats why it should be disabled by default
Yeah, but, if it’s the only way around Google, so be it.