this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
73 points (98.7% liked)

Free and Open Source Software

22421 readers
15 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Gaywallet@beehaw.org
alyaza@beehaw.org
73
Your Google Android device is about to stop being yours (keepandroidopen.org)
submitted 2 days ago by Nexus@infosec.pub to c/foss@beehaw.org
14 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/46445602

Is this still going to happen? What can we do?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Nexus@infosec.pub 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone 1 points 4 hours ago

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.