Bluetooth and WiFi can be tracked as well, even with “anonymized” WiFi MAC addresses.

Firefox can be installed from Mozilla and managed by Obtainium. Much better option all the way around.

I’m looking forward to 10 years from now, when this new novelty called, WRITING YOUR OWN SHIT (and reading it!) comes back into prevalence, and everyone thinks it is such an original idea.

(If we, or the Internet, are all still around then, anyway.)

Especially when it involves modems. Qualcomm had a vice grip on them for so long, and still mostly does, so there’s little competition, and no good competition. They make great modems, but they’re also a US military contractor and can’t truly be trusted. Competition, is also generally good.

In the context of basic communications, market share really shouldn’t. Phone calls are a standard, SMS is a standard, MMS is a standard. RCS should equally be a standard, along with IMS video calling that has been in the 3GPP spec since Rel99 (that’s 1999). Flip phones in the early aughts could do video calls (in Europe) way before FaceTime was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye. Every phone right now could do out of box voice call/video call/text/picture messaging regardless of platform, if the cellular standard bodies would grow a pair.

Problem is, companies like Apple and Google became huge, unregulated, and monocultured.

How we humans allowed something as basic as communication to be put behind walled gardens is just a failure of humanity.

There is no technical reason. The carriers/cellular industry gave up on their efforts to push RCS and let Google own it all for the most part, and with it, everyone lost openness.

It’s also why Samsung Messages is on a slow burn EOL. The Samsung/Google partnership had Google encourage Samsung to drop their RCS support and just push Google’s app, after Google decided to sunset the openness of the messaging API. Third-party SMS apps will all slowly die. Probably also partly why Signal dropped SMS support. It was around the same time.

Android’s weird changes are nothing but badness, and will likely get worse. Hopefully the open OS community can start focusing more energy behind alternative mobile OSes that aren’t dependent on a corporation.

Another route one can go that takes a bit of work is Obtainium. Hand-pick the apps you want to show up and feed their GitHub, F-Droid, etc. links to manage them. Since F-Droid has some issues with how they build packages, it can be used sparingly but not avoided then.

Go app by app until your dependence on the Play Store goes away. Then disable or uninstall (probably can only disable on most phones, I’ve seen anyway) the Play Store completely. Slow way to gain independence from crapware. You can then export your Obtainium config to a JSON file to import on future phones/other phones so you don’t have to duplicate the work.

Some bonus points, the non-Play version of one app I use shrinks from 120MB to 30MB when all the Google dependencies are stripped. You also gain back functionality like full filesystem access and other things Google forces apps to remove from the Play Store flavor.

More freedom. Faster apps. Less overhead. Less Google crap. Not a big scary transition.

While this was an inevitable move, it makes me curious if they are hitting a point where Gemini is becoming so integrated in all their software stacks and they’re just insanely paranoid about any precious “AI” code leaking that they just decided to close the gates early.

Probably for the best long-term. Having this weird dependency on the generosity of a corporation was always a liability. Whatever comes next can hopefully avoid it.

Hopefully someone like the EU, to combat ewaste, eventually requires all hardware manufacturers to sell their mobile hardware with bootloader/firmware flashing unlocking requirements. The work then will be for the community to write support for all these various makes and models of device, but the endgame being actual device freedom. Although with the world seemingly leaning hard into Authoritarianism and Fascism, it might not end up being the right time and freedom will remain underground.

A pity too, all phone hardware at its core is generic ARM computers with various devices connected to fairly generic interface busses. They just encrypt bits of code so the sauce to make things work is hidden.

KaiOS is one alternative, it was FirefoxOS. It’s pretty sluggish though. Maybe on more decent hardware with some optimizations it’d have a possibility. A lot of Nokia feature phones run it.

The complexity of getting the closed binary blobs to run modems and other hardware will make it exceedingly difficult to extract the necessary files and configurations to keep third-party OSes afloat. Then there’s the matter of carrier configs, carrier compatibility, expensive carrier certification, and even then, carriers may still just ban the device because they don’t like it.

Options will end up being:

• Tearing apart ROMs for blobs and backport/reverse-engineering patches to make them run on alt OSes.
• Find some hardware based on janky Chinese modems that will have little band support, lackluster performance, and likely banned by most carriers.
• Start a new company with the pull to design a new phone OS and hardware with chip and carrier support.

Not impossible, just exceedingly difficult. These systems are heavily integrated and heavily proprietary.

Funny part is, this move will actually make Google lose more money, as Google will lose hardware/software sales, and software dev over this. More people will end up on iOS in the interim, and out of it will come some new mobile OS that will make Google’s mobile OS irrelevant in 10 years.

Let’s start now, start a company, base a new phone on QNX, have an Android emulation layer for apps until a proper SDK is developed, and just take the wind out of Google sooner than later.

The best answer is to leave Gmail.

It has turned into this weird thing. The short of it is: antennas and battery, and a touch of telemetry.

There are so many bands across so many frequencies, as well as needing multiple antennas for MIMO that they all take space.

Large batteries are required to run the modems and ostensibly laptop processors, and also…

…All the telemetry gathering they do requires power, also adding to the desire of a big battery. (The last one is fascinating, a phone on GrapheneOS will last 2-7 days on a charge depending on use. The same on stock Android will barely last a day.)

When users find information that they wish to retain – such as schedules, event details, reservations, or listings – they can capture it by pressing the Plus Key or swiping up with three fingers. AI Plus Mind intelligently saves the relevant on-screen content to a dedicated Mind Space, helping users streamline their experience by capturing precisely what’s needed and keeping it organized in one accessible location.

So…it’s a screenshot shortcut?

Hey, now, that’s the “power” of “AI” at work! /s

Pretty much have to buy a phone that supports a custom ROM as the Qualcomm-based Samsung phones are basically impossible to downgrade unless an exploit is discovered.

Funny/sad thing is, even Apple lets you downgrade your OS for a couple of weeks after a major release.

Battery charge status is now on the bottom instead of the middle, oh dear, now you have to make sure nothing is covering that part of the screen. Battery pill: dumb.

The swipes/gestures/resizes can be disabled, but then unless you theme it, you’re stuck with their iOS icons. And if you haven’t noticed, say you turn off the iOS Control Center (quick settings on Samsung) gesture to get back double-swipe to quick settings, they changed the touch point to make that happen, and you can now pull down quick settings from the middle of the display accidentally, as well as being more sensitive in general.

OS seems slower and chunkier, even on S24.

Redoing all the lock screens to be more Apple-like with Apple-level widget limitations and removing the ability to see notifications/icons is annoying as well. There’s one that puts the time towards the upper left that used to just have a cute little row of notification icons to let you know what was going on. No more! Now it’s this neutered garbage.

Samsung used to be pretty reliable at releasing OS updates that didn’t break core Samsung behavior, and actually try to be unique.

Now their phones are just like one of those Chinese iPhone knockoffs.

Install something like Rethink DNS or DDG App Tracking Protection to see what telemetry the app is sending without your knowledge.

Being able to revert back to OneUI 6.1 would be so delightful. OneUI 7 is trash. Too bad, at least on the Qualcomm variants (so US and most of world) there’s no way to unlock, no way to sideload, no way to roll back. You’re just stuck with whatever pile of shit they choose to feed you.

Oddly, one of the most annoying aspects of OneUI 7, is how damn slow the phone locks from the time when you press the power button to screen-dark. Half the time I figure I didn’t push the button, so I hit it again, and launch the camera in my pocket instead of locking the screen.

Not even radical. Just doing anything within the scope of their elected duties. Ever.