Comment by garciansmith
4 days ago
It'd be nice if they put a little sticker on the box or a flashing warning when you go to buy the phone noting that you'll be unable to use it as you desire for 24 hours if you are not willing to bend over to your corporate overlord.
Alternatives like GrapheneOS and Lineage are the way to go for right now, but I worry as things get more and more locked down that those options won't work with a lot of apps.
> I worry as things get more and more locked down that those options won't work with a lot of apps
I am increasingly interested in a dual-prong approach of building a parallel world of OSS apps, platforms, etc, plus an adversarial inter-op project for duping and wrapping apps/services from the commercial/normie world. We have some solid bases with Android/Graphene, Linux more broadly, wine, and Android VMs like Waydroid. Even if things don't get a lot of users, if the users it has are highly technical on average things can probably chug along.
Yeah, I do hope that an "inter-op" idea can be possible, otherwise anyone who doesn't want to join the duopoly fully will slowly be unable to interact with more and more aspects of commerce, government, etc. I guess the GrapheneOS method of integrating Play Services but keeping the user in control (e.g., being able to block Play apps' internet connections) is something like that, but ultimately it's controlled by Google and there are problems with Play Integrity, meaning some things just don't work.
I don't think Graphene quite embodies the "adversarial" aspect I'm talking about. They explicitly don't do Play Integrity spoofing, even though they can, because they're committed to the more political avenue of convincing banks and such to use an alternate non-Google attestation framework. It's admirable, but I expect they'll lose considering the vast disparity in resources and power between them and their ideological enemies. I like the idea of committing more energy to the cat and mouse game of cracking apps and spoofing checks at this point.