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There's one group of Android users Google's new sideloading rules won't affect
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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Just lock the bootloader again? I don't have Google on my Android and can use banking apps and most others that don't have a hard requirements on some Google API.
Most phones can't even relock the bootloader. And newer Samsung ones can't even get flashed. Recent updates removed even the ability to flash a custom recovery
Vote with your wallets. You don't own your Samsung devices.
Owning a "refurbished" (some other fediverse user told me those are shit though) Pixel 6 for a year now as I don't need the latest and greatest and wanted to test drive GrapheneOS. Previous phones were mostly new low to mid-price Motos with LineageOS. But this beats them all. The camera is great. National (FOSS) ID app works via NFC with my physical ID-card. Navigation (also offline and with integrated TTS) with OsmAnd works great. Google's camera app works even without activated Play Service. KDE-Connect works. Using the excellent Fossify apps for calendar, gallery and file manager. JTXBoard for notes and tasks where the latter are synced to my Nextcloud (as well as calendar appointments, contact list, RSS-News, podcasts via gpodder-Nextcloud sync). The exceptional FUTO keyboard supports Speech-To-Text and swiping via local AI and models (which works very good).
I install most apps via Obtainium directly from APKs from release pages on Github and Codeberg (even the official German ID app) after vetting how many devs are working on the app, how many stars it has and how much LLMs were used in the development. Then if no APK is available the next app source is F-Droid, then if it's not on there, Aurora store for pure Play Store apps, then if it's a paid app and/or it needs Play Services, I switch to the second profile on which sandboxed Play Services are enabled and I'm logged in to the Play Store.
Did not test banking or payment as I rather do that on the PC and via card/cash.
Feels very good to be tracked minimally and I hope the goated GrapheneOS devs are able to provide the means to sideload apps for a foreseeable future and the second hand Pixel market is not overrun by scalpers.