after like four years i'm starting to think about putting google services back on my phone. hmm
(mainly because there are some apps i'd like to have on me at all times nowadays)
but also, like, fuck google? i don't want to have constant data be collected from my phone activity. hrrhbhgh
part of what made me gut my phone and make it dumb as hell was i despised feeling like i was being spied on constantly. nowhere felt safe.
alternative is get another phone to put apps on, and have it so i can only use it while i'm connected to wifi. i dunno tho. that's not an elegant solution
@machinesbleedtoo I'd touch neither.
@landley @machinesbleedtoo @GrapheneOS yeah.
I consider the delay/non-public access to be a major dick move and hinderance.
i use lineageOS w/o google services, afaik it works fine if i choose to install google services and from a quick look it appears they have settings that *can* limit some of the problematic data flows. but with some apps its impossible, ofc
i wish more apps were developed to work independently of google/apple. but a surprising amount of apps still function w/o google services for me. like duolingo, but i can't do the mic related activities, presumably bc it uses a google service for that for e.g.
@machinesbleedtoo yikes!
I think it's bad that #Google really #enshittifies #Android for no valid reason...
@machinesbleedtoo not only that, but @EUCommission actively #sabotaged any #domestic (#EU) competitiors with backfiring ideas, like demanding that #AppStores pay #VAT in the buyers' nation without having EU-wide infrastructure to make this even possible.
Competitiors like #AndroidPit #AppCenter got killed by that.
https://appdevelopermagazine.com/important-announcement:-androidpit-app-center-to-close/
Whereas in #China there's still some competition, but #Huawei's #AppGallery demanding a 50% cut before taxes for #Games makes #Steam look like a saint!
@machinesbleedtoo @kkarhan I'm using a Pixel 3A from 2019. Its ability to read QR codes broke a couple years ago. I downloaded three different QR reader apps, and all of them give the same failure as the built-in file thing. The relevant plumbing just isn't working, and it's shared.
(On several occasions I've put my phone into airplane mode to make something work so it stops trying to use a cloud service and does the built-in thing, but alas that doesn't help for the QR codes.)
@machinesbleedtoo @kkarhan There's some horrible DRM checking layer in proprietary android those things use to black out screen capture mode and refuse to run without, which is sometimes a problem with graphene and similar? But I think some things fake it so the player apps can still work? I haven't bothered to dig into it yet because I've stuck with the spyware versions out of laziness...
It's yet another thing where piracy has far better customer service than anything you pay for.
@landley @machinesbleedtoo Yes, #Widevine and any other #DRM should be #outlawed, because it's intellectually insulting how trivial it is to circumvent shit like it.
self-made skeleton
Kevin Karhan 
Rob Landley