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 ?
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.