I was looking at buying a new android device with either android 12 or 13. and I wasn’t ready to see how all phones shipping with these versions have forced sign-up using a mandatory phone number. the step cannot be skipped , and workarounds are very tedious and sometimes require a PC.
Where is the EU when you need them. how is it acceptable to force people to sign-up to your spying software when they want to acquire a smartphone?
Are there no laws in place to forbid this type of bundling between hardware and forced subscriptions ??
Are there any privacy non profit organization that can take them to court ?
Sure, there are workarounds. But workarounds are a sticking plaster. The trends are all wrong and one day we are going to have to fight all this rather than work around it.
Searching for apps in Aurora is currently broken, requiring yet more obscure workarounds in order to install anything that is not super popular.
And then a large bunch of Play apps don’t work or only half work because of a Google Play Services dependency, often totally superfluous to the needs of the app. Seems to me the writing is on the wall for free computing on Android.
On desktop there is slightly more hope, if only because the hardware is less cutting-edge so it’s easier for FOSS to keep up with change. And because of the web, and PWAs. IMO these should be the focus of campaigning and regulation.
Of course, I didn’t mean to argue against strict regulation, on the contrary, it would be sorely needed on the nigh-enslaved to Google platform that is Android.
Just wanted to share what we can do right now to avoid some of those issues. About app searching in Aurora I think I had it working sometimes, but right now it doesn’t seem to work, it should depend on which anonymous account session you get logged into, otherwise you can still search in the website and open in app after you have opened the result you were looking for.
Unfortunately forcing app developers out of relying on Play Services is going to be a tough one, so in that regard you will probably remain restricted to mostly open source apps if you can’t/don’t want to use MicroG
What do you mean by that?
Agreed about the general situation on Android.
But what will that leave, in the end? Anything involving money: out. Anything commercial on a map: out. Banking: out. Streaming and other content apps: out. Between the cloud paradigm and DRM and Safety Net and its inevitable successors, what is de-Googled Android going to actually be able to do?
Take photos? OK. Play music like an MP3 player circa 2005? Maybe, or maybe not: only recently I had terrible trouble finding a FOSS music player that can reliably delete a local file without it hanging around in the Android media cache. The dev of one such app explained that it’s because Google is making it ever harder to manipulate local files, they seem to want people to forget the whole paradigm of files altogether. And indeed it seems younger people don’t much understand the concept of files these days.
So yes, right now we can jump thru hoops and make things work. But for me it is not a very hopeful situation.
As I understand it, desktop has more breathing space for two related reasons. 1: the web is still an open ecosystem (servers, clients and software) and the web, being the top layer in the stack, is always going to work better on bigger screens and more powerful hardware. And 2: desktop hardware is generally more mature technology and thus easier to make work with Linux than the world of mobile hardware, which is chaotic and fast-moving and undocumented and spread between a ton of different manufacturers. I am not an expert on this but that does seem logical.