Comment by fermigier
6 days ago
It is a disgrace how Google has managed this situation.
To recap the storyline, as far as I understand it: last August, Google announced plans to heavily restrict sideloading. Following community pushback, they promised an "advanced flow" for power users. The media widely reported this as a walk-back, leading users to assume the open ecosystem was safe.
But this promised feature hasn't appeared in any Android 16 or 17 betas. Google is quietly proceeding with the original lockdown.
The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using). If installing a basic APK eventually requires a Google-verified developer ID, maintaining a truly de-Googled mobile OS becomes nearly impossible.
If this finally pushes adoption of truly open Linux phones, then this will end up being a good thing, and the greatest favor that Google could do for the open source community.
Tragically, Linux phones have languished and are in an absolute state these days, but a lot of the building blocks are in place if user adoption occurs en masse. (Shout out to the lunatics who have kept this dream alive during these dark years.)
It won't though, because there's a ecosystem of banking/insurance/whatever apps that have bought into the android/iphone lockdown mindsete that people will simply be locked out of. Open alternatives can grow when there is a viable means of slow growth, and cutting off the oxygen to such things is the implicit intent.
> banking/insurance/whatever apps
I know banking apps are the typical example, but I've always wondered why. I use my bank's app maybe once or twice a year when I need to Zelle someone, which I only need to do when they don't have Venmo. (Unless we consider Venmo a banking app.)
I only have one bank's app installed, the rest of my banks I only interact with over their website, on desktop.
As for insurance, I've never had an insurance company's app installed.
Am I just an outlier here? Honestly, if I switched to a non standard OS, I'd be more annoyed about losing, say, Google Maps, Uber/Lyft, or various chat apps. Banking and insurance just don't come to mind at all as something I need my phone for.
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The best solution for this is to buy a $30 burner phone at Walmart and use it unactivated, tethered to your main de-Googled device. You can use the burner for only tasks requiring Play Integrity.
Make sure to leave one star reviews on all such apps that you run into.
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I’ve found the mobile websites for a lot of these cases to be fine. Not a great UX but not a blocker
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In theory, it's possible to have a third party (other than Google or Apple) to provide attestation on third party hardware.
You can have a separate core and kernel to run such code. They don't have to be powerful, but they'll need to be small enough to be verified by the said provider. For most of the code that doesn't need attestation, they can be executed on normal hardware.
The provider also has to convince the regulator or banks to trust them. However, if that's solved, the user should feel no difference between pure Android and alternative platform plus attestation.
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In that case a two phone approach makes sense. I was willing to try that out, to give Ubuntu Touch a trial on my main phone. This might incentivise it even further for an off-ramp of the Google/Apple duopoly.
I’m old enough to remember the days that banking apps required Internet Explorer and didn’t work on Firefox. Eventually, they were dragged kicking and screaming to support all modern browsers.
The Wero payment system will cover the entire EU but apparently doesn't have a web portal the way ideal has.
Soon we Europians will only be able to pay using either an iphone or an Android device.
Hilarious
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So what you're saying is we go after the banking system next.
Decentralized banking is the future!
INB4 someone mentions some edge case like 'grandma got scammed' or refunds.
Don't banks/insurers/whatever have websites that are often mobile friendly?
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Microsoft's shit show seems to be pushing Linux adoption
LMFAO what are you doing on your banking app all the time
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There's no point. Remote attestation means your device needs to be corporate owned to be trusted. Even if you had your own linux phone, it wouldn't be able to interface with institutions such as banks and governments. They trust Google's keys, not yours. This doesn't quite end free computing, it just kills it for normal people and ostracizes us hackers who insist on owning our systems.
GrapheneOS supports remote attestation:
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
Some banks have added their verified boot keys. I think it helps that GrapheneOS is well-known by now for great security practices (most likely more secure than all vendor phones out there).
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Not sure what gov require, but most credit unions do not use such lockdowns
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Until Android is crippled it will continue to take resources away from Linux Phone development and companies that will launch phones for it
I got downvoted heavily about a year ago saying we need to abandon Android and the industry needs to pivot back to just putting GNU/Linux on a phone already.
Of course, now Google is doing what Google was always going to do.
Have a look at this post
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723594 from Emre @emrekosmaz
It is a smartphone that runs Android, launches Debian, and dual-boots Windows 11
Actual link https://nexphone.com/blog/the-tale-of-nexphone-one-phone-eve...
For me as a desktop linux poweruser, I find this potential transition pretty intimidating, I've never flashed a phone with a custom rom let alone switch to a completely different OS, and I am not sure if the phone can even be reset to its original OS, if things go south.
/e/OS at least has a browser based installer[0] for quite some supported phones. I definitely recommend trying it out, installing a custom os on my phone gave me the same feeling when I first ran debian on a laptop struggling under windows (even though the performance gains aren't that apparent in my opinion).
[0]https://e.foundation/installer/
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Don't worry if you're not ready, just as on the desktop, there are pioneers ahead of you that will clear the way <3
It's relatively easy. It's basically a command for each step you want to do and it tends to fail gracefully nowadays.
If you can install a linux distro you can flash a custom rom on a well-supported phone.
If it were more mainstream I could see GUI apps to manage all this for people, if they don't already exist. Idk I just use adb.
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Expecting Google to give up control of one of the only alternative operating systems is right up there with believing in the tooth fairy.
What you're saying should happen, but it will only happen when the government legislates it happens; which frankly they should be doing (along with nationalizing a few other software projects to be fair).
A trillion dollar transnational corporation with massive monopolistic tendencies will never ever do the right thing. Expect to force feed it down their throats.
In general, governments seem to be much more invested in making it illegal to have anything that is too open and too free. Even EU is lusting for draconian control features like chat control where you don't own and operate the software you installed on your device even if, at the same timem, they're trying to gnaw on the influence of Big Tech.
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The limitation of linux phones is hardware. I have been watching the progress of postmarketOS on the fairphone 4, and looks promising.
No, gnu/Linux is nowhere near usable as a daily driver mobile device for 99% of the population.
Besides having terrible battery life and security, it's just a hobby thing. Android has had millions of dev hours poured into it to be what it is.
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https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
Sent from my Librem 5.
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Adoption would mean that orgs like the European Payment Initiative behind Wero would adopt Linux phones even other AOSP ROMs. Not seeing that. Banks and streaming platforms that require DRM are keeping most (non-activist type) users locked in.
It may push a minority of users who really care about open source to Linux phones. I expect the majority of users will grumble but cave and re-adopt mainstream Android or Apple.
But there is a lot of resources put into the android ecosystem already. Even open source apps like anki, syncthing etc
> If this finally pushes adoption of truly open Linux phones...
It won't.
Even if you have linux, there are still third parties that have control over your hardware. Even if you're using graphenos, you can't block the sim or the cellular radio stack, and likely other modules on the SoC, from at-will access to every sensor on the device. You can at least protect your files, unless there's a mitm or other vector that graphenos can't cope with. And at worst, they can simply clone all your encrypted bits and wait on Moore's law or sufficient cubits to go back and crack the copy, on the off chance there's anything they want with your data in the first place.
What a lame and useless doomer POV. Do you refuse to go outside because a lightning strike could kill you at any instant? Why let things that aren't in your control (yet) stop you from taking control of the things you can now?
My phone has hardware kill switches for modem, WiFi/Bluetooth and mic/camera. All three together also kill all sensors.
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FYI: GrapheneOS only support devices with isolated radios. These radios cannot access other sensors. More background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46841033
The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using).
I don't think this is true, right? An AOSP build can just decide to still allow installing arbitrary APKs. Also see this post from the GrapheneOS team:
https://mastodon.social/@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social/116103...
You can’t really do that long-term as Google will change code that will not match however you are not enforcing this policy
So at the very least you’d have to keep patches up to date.
Long term divergence could be enough that’s it’s just a hard fork and/or Google changes so much that the maintainer can’t keep the patches working at the same pace
I couldn’t read your link as it asks to join mastodon.social
All distributions involve maintaining patch sets. The question is what the marginal burden of this particular patch is.
But that just sounds the big community demanding this has to put together a proper KDE-like team to maintain Android in the way they want instead of waiting on Google's code?
The patch set for graphene is substantial, this is a relatively minor change.
Doesn't require me to sign in or create account...
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The enforcement mechanism is in Google Play Services, not AOSP. To laypeople the difference doesn't matter but to folks looking for alternatives it does, so the discussion is often muddied and imprecise. This is like when YouTube removed public dislike counts and it turned into "they're removing the dislike button!"
There is an implicit shame in disgrace but faceless entities have no shame. They'll just put out another press release written in corporate newspeak by an LLM and move on withe the plans anyway. This is standard Google behaviour. They do it with Chrome, they do it with Android, they'll keep doing it with all their captive markets. I fear that in practice even having an "advanced flow" will make little difference as some applications will refuse to work if you have it enabled anyway (in the same vein if debugging is enabled, for example).
Nothing about Android is open except the absolutely minimum amount of linux kernel that's required to boot the thing. Then it's blobs and restrictions all the way to the screen.
Good thing restricting side-loading isn't legal in the European Union! Not a problem here. Apple had to enable side-loading on their EU-based phones and so will Google if they restrict it.
Yes it is, and no they didn't. Apple has to allow (heavily restricted) alternative app stores, and I'm not clear on whether any actually exist right now.
What Apple restricts and is legal are not the same. Apple is doing malicious compliance and the legal system ain't buying it. But it takes some time and iterations to shake out.
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https://altstore.io/
My understanding is that how Apple is restricting the alternative app stores is also illegal in EU, so I don't thinkt this is the end of this story.
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The kind of "side-loading" of notarized apps outside the manufacturer's app store that Apple allows in the EU is exactly what Google proposed to do for all its Android builds. We don't want that.
If a lawsuit tackles this problem in the EU, will we finally also see somebody go after MS for their obnoxious code signing certificates?
While MS code signing certs are more circumventable for power-users than Android's new approved developer program, their pricing is far more prohibitive for independent OSS developers and hobbyists, costing hundreds of USD per year.
How specific is the law? What if side loading requires a "trusted" signed certificate where trusted means from Google Play?
Not even playing devil's advocate, just wondering how many loopholes actually exist.
Good news: You (as a community) can now finally wake up from your dreams and get some things right!
It's really a shame that you always wait until you really get forced. Particularly in situations when every individual's inability has consequences for the others as well. I really gave up all ideas of a better world. With this community, the best you can hope is that the decay will be slow.
So everyone who would describe himself/herself as a FOSS enthusiast, or at least a friend of a somewhat open system where the user has some actual rights beyond sole consumption, put some pressure towards having actually de-Googled systems. A system that mostly comes from Google, would not fit my definition of that term at all! Even if they removed some parts of it. It's an euphemism. And it's dangerous because you constantly get trapped by these euphemisms. Ever. Single. F'ing. Time.
The only reason I was sticking to Android for years is this. And I think there is no moat for Android. I would rather switch to iOS if both platforms are same restrictive.
You'll miss having a keyboard that works
It'll be sorted in about 9 days.
I did this last year. Reluctantly. And using iOS still hurts. But it’s better than that Google crap.
I developed my own Android ROMs from 2009-2011, complete with my own tuned kernel. I ran the local Android developers MeetUp group and evangelised Android development. When Honeycomb launched I helped OEMs test their beta firmware. For free.
But as Google has become certified Evil, the direction of Android has been very clear. In practice I honestly can’t say it’s now any more open than iOS. Except it has a lot more avenues for Google to mine your data to sell ads. And the quality of third party apps on it is decidedly worse.
I thought long and hard about getting a Linux phone. But I need a good camera on my phone to take random snaps of kids/pets/etc. And the Linux phones just aren’t there.
I hate the shitty duopoly we have ended up with. But I now realise that the openness of x86 and pc as platform really was an accident of history.
Why does there seem to be a growing push to tie real-world identity to nearly everything we do online? The justification is almost always "safety". I know this trend has been developing for years, but over the past couple of years it feels like it's accelerated globally.
There's strong political backing for it now.
Online anonymity makes it harder for TPTB to punish dissidents.
Before we had mainly one excuse: to protect the kids
Later we got a new one: to reveal Russian shills/propaganda bots
Now we also have: to filter out AI slop
Any problem the internet experiences will eventually become an excuse to eliminate online anonymity.
I think people in power have realized the impact of misinformation campaigns. And to be fair, western countries have proved to have the resilience of a wet paper bag against foreign influence and private interests.
I honestly can’t imagine a good solution here. A move back to the early 2000s internet would be the ideal middle ground, which requires separating social stuff from informational stuff, and both from engagement algorithms. I have no idea how we’re supposed to put that genie back in the bottle.
And to be clear I’m not saying this as vouching for the current push, I hate it as well.
Yeah, propaganda works, and the US wants to stop foreign propaganda, but the problem is they still want to push their own brand of US biased propaganda so they can't put in any sort of useful journalistic standards requirements upon media conglomerates or it will tie their own efforts up in court and lawsuits.
> I honestly can’t imagine a good solution here.
"just stop" is a good solution. Stop asking for ID, stop pushing for apps, just stop the general trend towards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification .
Yes, misinformation is a problem. Deanonymization is a bigger problem. If you can't say anything anonymously, it becomes much more difficult to fight entities bigger and more powerful than you.
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I think one major issue is the shortening of people's attention spans. People consume snippets of information that show a tiny fraction of the full story. They don't spend 10 minutes reading an article or watching a video, with a few exceptions. More people probably watch clips of Jon Stewart than actually watch his show. I think we ought to start addressing that issue, and see how it affects the efficacy of misinformation campaigns.
"Misinformation" usually meaning information the people in power would rather you don't get to see and make up your own mind about.
Personally I'm excited about the death of Android, now resources can be put toward mainstreaming and maturing the Linux Phone ecosystem
Hopefully 2026 or 2027 will be the year of the Linux Phone
Strong disagree. Linux, its permission system and its (barely existent) application isolation are lightyears away from the security guarantees that Android brings.
Desktop OSes and their derivatives are woefully behind in this regard, and unfortunately the will to bring them up to par is incredibly weak. Of those in mass use (Qubes OS is neat but its user base isn’t even a rounding error), macOS probably does the most, but it’s still lagging behind iOS and what’s been implemented has come with much consternation from the technically inclined peanut gallery.
I understand some amount of reticence with commercial OSes, but there’s no justification for being against it on open Linux based desktops and mobile OSes. We really need to get past the 90s-minded paradigm of everything having access to everything else all the time with the only (scantly) meaningful safeguards coming in the form of *nix user permissions.
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This might be a strange take in these times, but I feel like the browser largely solved the "I need to run potentially adversarial application code in a sandbox". For native applications, stick to stuff that's vetted and in well-maintained repositories, or well-known open source projects that you trust. All of this technical work just to be able to run hostile native code ignores that you don't have to, and probably shouldn't want to, run sketchy code on your device. Installing random untrusted software is bad, even with the most advanced security model in the world. At the very least it will probably abuse whatever permissions it has to spy on you to any degree it can (which is a lot, even for web pages) and to send you advertising notifications.
This assumes that the mentioned systems are the only security considerations on a Linux system. Clearly this is not the case so I am unsure why you omit other security-related aspects of Linux here.
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Android brings malware apps and security fixes that come after months rather than next day compared to GNU/Linux.
The isolation is nice but not so important once you stop running malware constantly.
The security of Android doesn't mean much to me as long as the front door is left open by design for Google, and therefore the government, to directly spy on you.
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You can build those things on top of Linux, like Android did. Linux has containerization and all.
Not lightyears. About 20 years, which is how long it took Google to pile on the mountain of complexity and inefficiency to accomplish this.
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I.. don't think it will happen. For several reasons too. It is not that I don't think Android will change substantially, but the following constraints suggest a different trajectory:
- AI boom or bust will affect hardware availability - there is a push on its way to revamp phones into 'what comes next' -- see various versions of the same product that listens to you ( earing, ring, necklace ) - small LLMs allow for minimal hardware requirements for some tasks - anti-institutional sentiment seems to be driving some of the adoption
I think adoption will hinge on whether existing Android apps will just run on it with something like waydroid/anbox or not.
Gaming on Linux took off with Proton. Linux on phones might go the same path.
I understand why mobile/tablet OSs are so crappy compared to desktop; in the past these devices had no resources cpu and ram wise and had to heavily watch battery consumption (the latter is still true mostly, but that should be up to the user), but my phone is more powerful than my laptop and yet runs crap with no real usable filesystem and all kinds of other weirdness that's no longer needed.
However, I have 2 Linux phones and Linux on phones is just not there. Massive vendors (Samsung, Huawei, etc) would need to get behind it to make it go anywhere. Also so banking etc apps remain available also on those phones. We can already run android apps on Linux, Windows apps, so it would be a bright future but really it needs injections and support for large phone makers.
I hope the EU/US mess will give it somewhat of a push but I doubt it.
FWIW, Nokia did develop a pretty good Linux phone back in the day (Maemo/Meego) with Nokia N9 (it even received rave reviews from consumer tech sites like engadget), but it did get killed off as they got absorbed into Microsoft (we all know that didn't age well).
Similarly, Palm Pre, and especially HP Pre 3 was a wonderful WebOS incarnation.
Ubuntu Touch did seem like it had a future, but it was a massive sink for Canonical so it was defunded as well.
The user experience was there on all of these: the apps, not so much.
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> death of Android
death of personal computing freedom, sovereign compute, and probably soon our ability to meaningfully contribute to the field as ICs?
A lot of really bad things are happening to our field, and Google is one of the agents responsible for much of it.
> A lot of really bad things are happening to our field, and Google is one of the agents responsible for much of it.
I mean, breaking news from 2010, but of course never assume things are so bad that they can’t get worse.
This is one of the most naive things I see people repeat.
The reality is that we're lucky to have mostly-good things at all that align with most of our interests.
Yet people get so comfortable that they start to think mostly-good things are some sort of guarantee or natural order of the world.
Such that if only they could just kill off the thing that's mostly-good, they'll finally get something that's even better (or rather, more aligned with their interests rather than anyone else's).
In reality, mostly-good things that align with most of our interests is mostly a fluke of history, not something that was guaranteed to unfold.
Other common examples: capitalism, the internet, html/css, their favorite part of society (but they have ideas of how it could be a little better), some open-source project they actually use daily, etc.
If only there weren't Android, surely your set of ideals would win and nobody else's.
Agreed that there is a ton of baby in this bathwater.
Also, the open nature of AOSP gave Google its advantage during the early days. Since then, Google has morphed into a company that would likely not make the same decision to create an open-source OS free for others to use and contribute to.
So in the end, what we as consumers actually get, in 2026:
- Google encourages application developers to use hardware attestation to prevent themselves from running on non-blessed, third-party AOSP distributions.
- Google builds basic functionality people care about (including passkeys!) into Play Services, a closed mega-application that happens to require a Google account for most features, and is a moving target for open distributions to mimic.
- Google has closed AOSP contributions to themselves and OEM partners only. AOSP releases are now quarterly source dumps.
- OEMs which traditionally allowed bootloader unlocking (and thus actual ownership of the hardware) have removed it as a matter of policy.
So what exactly is open about Android anymore? Does "source-available OS you can see and not touch" align with your interests? Because it's increasingly not aligned with mine.
I like it, because more and more people see Google as what it is: a ruthless, selfish and extremely greedy mega-mega-corporation. The less we depend on it the better.
>The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using). If installing a basic APK eventually requires a Google-verified developer ID, maintaining a truly de-Googled mobile OS becomes nearly impossible.
I have trouble understanding why this is a threat to AOSP distribution. I would have said quite the opposite actually, I don't see why they would not remove the verification and that's an incentive for people to use their project instead of Google Android.
Who could Android be possibly recommended to at this point?
I know iPhones aren't affordable for the layman in many countries. But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android? All the "customization" things I cared about when I was on Android are either doable on an iPhone now with better implementation, or something I don't care about.
I was a die-hard until I went through enough cycles of Google deprecating and reinventing their apps and services every year, breaking my workflow/habits, that I got sick of them and moved to Apple everything. And all the changes I've seen since then are only making me happier I got out of the ecosystem when I did. Unlimited Google Photos backups with Pixels are gone, Google Play Music is gone, the free development/distribution environment is gone, etc.
If people can't even develop for the thing without going through the Google process, they're really just a shitty iOS knockoff.
But this thread is about the option to install apps on your device regardless of OS vendor approval, and that's not possible either with iOS nor is iOS open source. And that's what this is all about. If you don't care about open-source and user freedom, then this change wouldn't matter to you anyway.
I switched back to Android in large part for KDE Connect. You can get continuity esque features that work with any desktop operating system. I also get to use real Firefox instead of a Safari wrapper. I still use as few Google services as possible, pretty much just Maps.
KDE Connect works just fine on iOS.
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> But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android?
How the heck this is true?!? iOS is just bad.
Its usability is bad, its interface is bad, its apps are just a ton of crap, and it _will_ keep getting worse.
I'm not even talking about its "walled concentration camp" app model.
As someone who hates both android and iOS but currently has to use iOS, I definitely hate it more. It lacks so many things one can take for granted on android. Even a usable keyboard is missing from iOS.
I love the Java/Kotlin userspace, even if it is Android Java flavour, and the our way or the highway attitude to C and C++ code, instead of yet another UNIX clone with some kind of X Windows into the phone.
In the past I was also on Windows Phone, again great .NET based userspace, with some limited C++, moving into the future, not legacy OS design.
I can afford iPhones, but won't buy them for private use, as I am not sponsoring Apple tax when I think about how many people on this world hardly can afford a feature phone in first place.
However I also support their Swift/Objective-C userspace, without being yet another UNIX clone.
If the Linux phones are to be yet another OpenMoko with Gtk+, or Qt, I don't see it moving the needle in mainstream adoption.
you're a really vanilla user then.
wake me up when there's an adblocker on an iphone.
There are several that plug into Safari, and Pihole just works. Does Android have ad blockers that do more? It's been a few years since I switched.
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Thankfully you don't really need an adblocker for apps on an iPhone. Your browser could use one, but thankfully those do exist :)
That said, I want off the iOS ecosystem, but Google has basically said guess what? We are going the way of Apple, so we don't care about you either.
So right now there isn't really anywhere else to go. I'm going to keep trucking in iOS for now, but I hope I find something better soon.
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At this point, I wouldn't recommend Android other than enjoying the much steeper discount with the headset. For me, the only thing that is keeping me on Android is easier access to commas on the keyboard.