This will effectively kill android as a platform for general purpose computing. A lot of users are going to just... not install software if it's sufficiently annoying, and devs are going to gradually stop developing stuff if there just aren't a lot of users. The future of android is gambling skinner boxes. And you can be damned sure that they're going to stick that shit into dumbphones if enough people drop out of using smartphones.
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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Google is going to make this harder than Apple to sideload apps
As I understand it, the options will be
- Enable developer mode, wait 24 hours, enable installing unverified apps directly on the phone. My banking app refuses to launch in developer mode and I expect other banking apps to behave similarly
- Sideload over usb. This seems like the lowest friction approach but it's quite inconvenient and unclear if app updates will also need to be installed over usb
So not as bad as apple, but still very bad imo
I'm really starting to feel like a cornered animal.
no kidding.. the enshittification is only picking up steam now
we're gonna need a bigger more expensive word for enshittification of this sort.
You could always buy a Chinese smartphone
It's really not about me being able to find an individual solution for myself. I do use imported chinese devices without play shit for my personal stuff and a still supported grapheneos device. By choice I route all my internet traffic through remote jump boxes and shit.
I do almost all of my internet on hard mode. But I cannot avoid the worst downstream impacts of these changes, and neither can you, because they are social in type and scale.
big problem with "privacy" concepts is the idea that the problem or any solutions are individual. it is not an issue that can be meaningfully addressed at the consumer.
Can't seem to crystalize my thoughts into the reply I want to make, but this really reminds me of how liberal countries individualize the problem of dealing with (usually "external") existential threats.
Like issuing advice and toothless water restrictions during drought. Pandemic response. Climate change. etc.
I have snapped pretty harshly in other threads at people who push the "its your problem and you can deal with it" type of attitude and I haven't quite understood why it provokes such hostility in me because I don't think it's a purely altruistic concern for people who aren't technically capable of protecting themselves.
The intuition that I'm feeling is that a lot of people who don't have anything to gain by doing so still push and mainstream issues into the "individual solution" problem space as a coping mechanism / psychological defense.
Like if you make the problem individual, then it becomes a matter of individual opinion whether something is good or bad and whether we should be actively involved in doing something about it. Maybe there's a self interested part of us that subconsciously knows that when things are terrible and terrifying that there is self soothing "value" in convincing yourself that you had a choice and opted in even if that means you're to blame.
So, perhaps, my response comes from seeing "just get a china phone bro" people as basically victimizing themselves and encouraging others to do so, thus actively removing any potential in themselves or others to even make informed decisions in their own self interest.
MAYBE I'm doing too much thinking on part of this. Maybe the other take away is that this too is as inevitable as the climate apocalypse. Shit pisses me off tho I tell ya whut
Will Xiaomi phones work with f-droid, if they still use (their version of) Android?
I've had an 11T for 5 years and just got a Redmi Note 15 and it works great.
The phones come with dev mode enabled, you can also just toggle the bootloader unlock from the dev settings (this may cause issues with like banking apps and such).
Do they come with play services / play protect / play store shit installed and enabled from the factory or do people enable that later?
HyperOS is just a wrapper on stock Android from what I can tell. So you still have to deal with the Google stuff and disable whatever factory bloat they install.
This is pretty serious
It's getting to the point where I'm going to turn off my phone and put it in a Faraday cage until I absolutely need it for something.
I used to work with this scientist lady and she kept her phone in a Faraday cage she had made from a cereal box and foil. It was very sweet.
Turn on airplane mode if you do this. Otherwise, it destroys battery life as the phone uses full power to search for a signal
No, sorry. All smartphones will have an anti cage lock, built in. This is to stop child slavery, you see? Incidentally, all vehicles will also count as cages unless you enroll yours in a 'verified safe-box' program. Only $20 per year and an ID scan.
Not sure I understand how this works. Dev signups are just "open"? So you can register any package name so long as you get to it first and lock out the actual dev? That's, um ... yeah. Nice "security" solution there.
At this point I'd import a Linux phone but I can't even guarantee it'd work in my country because of carriers doing IMEI black / whitelisting.
At this point I'd import a Linux phone but I can't even guarantee it'd work in my country because of carriers doing IMEI black / whitelisting.
I dunno if it'd help but FuriLabs tries to list out which carriers they work with: https://furilabs.com/FAQ/#faq-189. Seems like a decent variety of countries.
URL as written is 404 for me, but this link works for anyone else who's interested.
Thanks for the list, it's a useful resource. Unfortunately confirms that the phone won't work for me.
Prolly gonna dox myself a bit here but it's a peculiar quirk of my country's emergency call regulations. All phones are required to be able to make an emergency call on any carrier, via roaming if necessary. This is to avoid a situation where you -think- you can call, say, an ambulance, because you can when you're in your carrier's coverage. But one day you end up out in the boonies where your phone has to roam onto another carrier to do it. That carrier -doesn't- support your phone, so you're fucked. Seems like a good idea, but the implementation is absolutely jacked, as is most tech regulation here. Functionally, it means that if -one- carrier doesn't support a phone, -no- carrier can legally support it. This kind of creates a situation where any carrier can stop another carrier from selling a phone just by blacklisting it on their own network.
I'm sure this absolutely never gets abused /s.
Ahh, I think that might be my bad; the URL – as written – doesn't work for me, either. I must've somehow triggered autocorrect or something that capitalized that "FAQ" part.
Ah, that's a shame. Heh, maybe but a basic Google search out of curiosity ended up listing the three very countries first listed in the FuriLabs link so you might be safe (at least for the fairly lazy amongst us).
I’m sure this absolutely never gets abused /s.
Heh, I couldn't possibly ever see how…~
Does Signal run on actual Linux phone distros? That's pretty much the only actual "app" I need....
The Signal Desktop app should be possible to run on arm/aarch64 devices: https://github.com/dennisameling/Signal-Desktop/issues/1
According to postmarketOS, it doesn't run well out of the box on mobile yet: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Applications_by_category#Other_protocols
Similar situation here, but importing a phone would skyrocket the prices that's already bloated by taxes. And the govt would require an extra ridiculously high IMEI registration payment for using the fucking phone.
Can anyone recommend phones you can get which Google don't have dominion over?
iphone, feature phone or linux phone
GrapheneOS has announced they are directly working around this. It officially runs on pixels and unofficially on some other phones. They are also putting out their own phone in the next year or so.
Yeah Graphene is amazing.
Ironically Google made the Pixel very easy to unlock and flash with other firmwares, so from a practical point of view, a refurbished pixel phone flashed with CalyxOS or GrapheneOS might be an accessible and not too expensive way to get out from under their thumb yourself.
I also have an android device intended for the Chinese domestic market and its Android firmware does not come with Google Play Services or Play Store installed and you don't need to use either to use the device just fine. I don't know but I assume this is common with other major manufacturers but mine is made by Lenovo.
The clock is still ticking because nothing gets security patches and support forever. I know there are people making alternative phones I just don't know if they're any good or how many made it to market etc. Hopefully Motorola and Graphene's partnership isn't just for big contract vendor stuff and that we'll see a retail market Graphene phone in the next year or two.
European governments are starting to realise The Problem with US tech, so hopefully it'll buy Graphene a bit more good will than its been getting in recent years and drive some of the demand for genuinely secure phones. Probably a pipe dream tho.
wrt pixels, many secondary market devices are carrier OR bootloader locked, in either case you can't use them for custom ROMs. In the latter case, they are commonly sold as "unlocked" because most people don't care to install a ROM.
It is not simple to get the correct device. If you buy new, direct from google, it will be bootloader unlocked. otherwise you have to find a seller who can tell the difference, which isn't most of them,