My de-googlified second-hand Pixel 5 is getting pretty banged up, the mic seems to be slowly giving in, running low on storage, battery life/degradation is starting to be an issue, firmware support has ended so even third-party OSes will only provide "extended support"...

I've looked around (even considered just getting another, slightly less busted one), and at some point considered a new Pixel 9A (just recently released), but then realized that would be *basically* the same size and close to par in price as the Fairphone 6 (also just released). So, given the incremental improvements of the FP6, I decided, what the heck, I love my Framework, why not just get the _Framework of Phones_ 😛

First impressions: it *is* big, but I think I can get somewhat used to it. Got the one with /e/OS pre-installed, might look into others if I don't like it. The built-in camera app is trash, but thankfully, GCam can make the camera on it at least usable.

#degooglification

I am attempting to delete the contents of a Gmail account that I created and began using in 2008.

I have already downloaded the entire mail file, and imported it into Thunderbird, so I won't lose anything relevant.

However, deleting the messages from Gmail is proving to be a challenge. You can select everything and "send it to the trash" but only 100 messages get dumped in at a time, and Gmail throws this unusual error message that seems to indicate they will continue doing this work in the background, but in 24 hours of doing this, none of the work appears to be getting done in the background. The message count remains the same.

So does anyone know how to actually trick Gmail into letting me completely empty this inbox other than 100 messages at a time?

#DeGoogleify #DeGooglification #enshittifcation

Reason 6,721,579 I love my de-Googled Android: no I don't need OR want your app, and neither do I want to use the "social media share targets" your marketing department decided to recognize…

#degooglification

A #degooglification lesson, AKA "centralization is bad" even when the Good Guys™ do it because it makes you less resilient:

One of the key piece of many (but not all) degooglified Android systems is a tool called "microG". It basically "pretends" to apps that you have Google Services installed, emulating the many system APIs basically all apps depend on.

One of these APIs are Location. In fact, you used to be able to install "add-ons", download a CSV of cell-towers and run mobile cell tower-based approximate geolocation fully locally. Well…

https://github.com/Helium314/Local-NLP-Backend?tab=readme-ov-file

> Note that microG has stopped supporting UnifiedNlp backends with 0.2.28.

https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/releases/tag/v0.2.28.231657

> The new location stack does not support UnifiedNlp modules anymore. This was a step necessary to take to get locations properly working on latest Android versions. […] For now, the new locations stack is relying exclusively on Mozilla Location Service for network based location.

You know what comes next? 

So at the end of 2021, I got an ASUS Zenfone 8. It was brand new, unlocked, costing around 800€ at the time, it replaced my aging Pixel 3... with a phone that, in many aspects was a step *backwards* (particularly in camera quality).

Well, it's 2024, the phone is barely 2.5 years old and *already* the last time it received security updates was *last November*. Not to mention how it's stuck on Android 13... NBD, says the intrepid homebrew modder, I'll just install a custom ROM..!

HA!

You *think*!

Apparently, over a year ago ASUS broke their (proprietary) unlocking mechanism by pulling the plug on the servers, and haven't ever fixed it. You can't unlock the bootloader, can't install any other OS.

My $200 Pixel 5 from Ali Express is a more secure and more capable phone than this piece of junk right now. How is this even *allowed* by consumer protection agencies??
#degooglification

I was today years old to learn about https://unifiedpush.org/ (thanks to @nlnet!) and holy wow!

Since switching to CalyxOS, private, reliable, but battery-efficient push notifications has been a "choose one, at best" sort of situation and this changes *everything*!!

Matrix (Element), Mastodon (Pachli), Telegram (Mercurygram) works, there are even forks for Signal! 🚀
#degooglification