Comment by shadowgovt
3 months ago
This has the potential to be disastrous for Google, but maybe not.
Personally: I don't use Apple because I like being able to whip together little apps to side-load without having to check in with a walled-garden mothership. If Google is going to move closer to Apple in that regard... Apple's UX ecosystem is better, so I have far fewer reason to keep using Android.
I suspect this won't be disastrous for Google, because where will people care about this go? Apple, who is even more restrictive? This is just another in a long series of incidents showing why we desperately need a real alternative to the mobile duopoly. I would ditch Android over this, but there's no realistic alternative available to me.
Damn the future sucks ass.
It's a good question. I've looked at PinePhone, but last time I looked at it in detail it was light-years outside my needs for usability (very much a "we are CLI authors and are trying our hands at a mobile UI as a hobby" situation).
I think I'll look into what Android phones are out there that aren't glued to the Google Play ecosystem. Side-loading is still a feature the OS core supports even if Google switches it off (for now, and AFAIK the OS is forkable if they press the issue).
I think the only thing hat can save us is a jailbreak. Either for iOS or Android to let you sideload apps.
Alternatively, and that’s almost bullshit, the dumb phone trend continues and we might get devices like PDAs. Get a dumb phone and a small camera and then your PDA for everything that is essentially an app. Not sure what OS they’d run but I don’t see another way.
I think "disastrous" is a bit too strong of a word, but I don't see any "real" reasons mentioned here why it won't be. Sure, there are "cheap" phones that are (almost always) Android, it's also probably true that "most people" use those and wouldn't switch no matter what. But there are also Pixel phones, Samsung Galaxy phones, you know, what people call "flagships". Why people buy these? It's been a long time since they stopped being competitively cheaper they Apple. Even flagship Huawei phones now cost the same as an iPhone. Who buys them? Well, I did. Solely because I couldn't install software I want on iPhone. If I truly won't be able to install what I want on my Android phone — I don't know yet, how I'll deal with that issue (surely I'll figure it out) but I promise you — I'll buy an iPhone for the first time in my life, if only to say "fuck you" to Android. And I urge you to do the same. Vote with your wallet.
Android also allows apps that can run arbitrary code, like emulators and various other runtimes. I think iOS still doesn't? I have not written an Android app in ages, other than at work, but I often write silly little things running in the Löve 2D Loader, or TIC-80, or DOSBox, or just command-line tools running in Termux (I hear there is an X-server as well to run GUI applications from Termux?).
As long as they still allow running stuff inside of apps like that I will probably not abandon ship yet.
They recently allowed emulators, like RetroArch, to be on the app store. They still require the emulators to be written in Swift AFAIK. Still quite a bit more restrictive than Android, but they have slowly been opening up.