DeadNinjaHow Google Tracks and Scans Everything on Your Android Device
ORbituary
RedstoneValleyThe irony of having to buy a Google phone to get rid of Google services will never cease to amaze me. :/
ScottGraphene is working with a different OEM, so, we may not need Google’s devices to run GrapheneOS soon.
CerebralHawksWe don’t know the OEM and chances are, it’s one whose hardware won’t work in the west, where the personal information Google harvests is worth more.
To Google, this move from Graphene is the trash taking itself out.
Bold to say someone else is likely wrong when you yourself admitted we know nothing. Why do you believe this other than your own pessimism?
We know Google sells the data. That’s their core business. They’ve never been shy about it either.
The main demographic of GrapheneOS users are in the west and team GrapheneOS team are a meticulous bunch. Why would they work with an OEM whose hardware does not work with western cellular networks?
1985MustangCobraif its a Chinese OEM im going to lol
DJ PutlerNo way would the devs ever be that based. They seem like big “Uyghur Googlers” if you catch my drift. The whole FOSS scene has been ideologically inoculated against the foreign countries that challenge the tech-finance-military monopoly that is the root of their problems. GOS is still a treasure of and it is the most fun forum to debatelord on tho - when wife sees it she thinks im working >:^]
I guess we’ll find out when they announce their mystery partner.
I just hope it isn’t HTC or Motorola. Neither of them have done anything good in the last 10 years. And Google bought the HTC hardware team that made the Pixel 1.
Samsung is my hope. I think Samsung is big enough that they can sell certified Android phones and also open ones. I don’t think they will though. I would imagine it would be a smaller OEM. Or a shittier one.
The real irony is paying Google what you’d pay for an iPhone 16 and getting iPhone 11 performance and they’re spying on you and selling your personal information to who knows who. Okay but you wiped the phone and installed custom firmware that doesn’t track you… but you still paid Google the price of current-gen iPhone and got a phone with the performance of one from 5 years ago. Google still won.
The personal information is the point, that’s the real gold mine, and they’ll get it from enough people to not care about the less than 1% of Pixel owners flashing Graphene. For those users, they’re happy to sell generations-old tech at a premium. And they call you a sucker behind your back. And then tell you Apple is the big corporate overlord you’re running from and make it sound like Apple is the enemy. (I’m not saying they’re not, but that’s a convenient story among fandroids. And it may not even be accurate. Because iOS has no open source component though… we don’t know.)
As a GrapheneOS user, having the fastest hardware is not the goal. Pixels can be purchased for a very reasonable price second-hand or from discount resellers. Apple’s hardware is indeed remarkable and iOS being closed-source is not the root of the issue - it’s that they insist on a heavily locked down bootloader, so I will not for a moment consider Apple unless by some miracle they open up their phones to third-party OSes.
I can agree with most of that. I like the Mac a lot more than I like the iPhone. But a Mac can install Linux. They also used to run Windows, and I think they can run Windows ARM but I’m not sure. I’ve also heard Windows ARM is not very good anyway.
Fortunately, Macs don’t require iPhones. My wife has an Android phone and has no problem with using Mac. She just doesn’t get Universal Clipboard, which is nice, but not a deal breaker to lose if you have other reasons to prefer Android.
wait…you think…having an iphone spares you from all of that? oh you sweet summer child.
No, probably not. I’m just saying Google absolutely does sell your personal information. Apple says they don’t. What I said was that because it’s closed source, we don’t actually know.
We do know that Apple does track certain things. Telemetry, they all do it. What we don’t know is if they sell personally identifiable information. I think if it could be proven that they do, someone could sue over their “Privacy. That’s iPhone” campaign. They certainly wouldn’t be able to use it in any country where false advertising is not legal.
The difference between a computer company and an advertising agency, I suppose.
i don’t trust apple to protect my data and sell it as much as alphabet does.
Wilmobuying second hand phones is like buying clothes with a hole in it. your going to have to replace the battery or the phone alot sooner than buying it new
Batteries are good now though. I buy almost all used tech where possible. No complaints. If you get a sufficiently new used phone, it’s not physically possible for the battery to have undergone enough cycles to degrade noticably. Very good value early on I’d say.
ive boughten used phones and had opposite experiences. the batteries were severely degraded
Moreover GrapheneOS requires Google Play Services to use most apps, so you’re not only using a Google device but also Google Play services! There are much better truly deGoogled alternatives around
Inevitable Waffles [Ohio]This is patently false. I run GrapheneOS with no Google play services installed. The only issue I have is no paid app updates and some apps won’t send notifications since they ran through Google. I use my phone though mostly as a phone. I have almost no social media and I do not use banking apps on my phone. I choose to use website versions of anything on my phone so long as I can.
Not to mention, the replacement OSes like /e/os and the others don’t have the hardening of GrapheneOS. Cellibrite recently was leaked they still can’t crack open GrapheneOS.
NovalingThat’s a lie, you can totally avoid Play Services if you truly want to with GrapheneOS, as it literally isn’t installed by default. If you only use Fdroid apps and have no need for push notifs, then you can truly use GOS with no Google.
But the average person probably needs those things mentioned, so you can download a sandboxed version of Play Store and Services instead.
So it is true, and not a lie, because as you say yourself “the average person probably needs those things mentioned”
Quite a thing to call someone a liar and to then literally agree with them
I mean, that’s the reality of using an Android phone. 95% of apps are built to use play services in some way, and while most of that can be ignored, apps using push notifs are almost always going to be play instead of unified push. Make the choice of either living with no push notifs, or having push notifs.
You can use GrapheneOS without push notifs, it’s just inconvenient, and the average person wants convenience. This isn’t a Graphene problem, it’s a big tech influencing Android problem. The original comment makes it seem like Graphene is the issue, but other ROMs are going to encounter that same issue anyway (as I said, Android problem). So therefore I didn’t lie, asshole.
Maybe you can use microG to get around notif issues, but that does require logging in. Use a Linux phone at that rate if you’re not gonna use push notifs and don’t need Android.