@Tutanota

@Gigi

I know the US government will be all in favour but surely we can get done legislation to stop this monopoly action from other governments.

I'm going to contact several relevant Canadian government Ministries.

@Tutanota I thought I'd seen smth in the news that they were rolling this back?

has that since changed?

@Tutanota

I thought they'd rowed back on this and weren't implementing anymore?

- Why can't I run what I want on #android?

You can't run what you want because android belongs to #google and they can control their own system.

- Why can't I run a different system than android on my own phone/pad/tablet?

Because manufacturers are in an agreement with Google trying to prevent you from running anything else.

- Is there an alternative to google/android phones?

- In large volumes and markets, yes, i-phone, much more expensive just as evil. There were some x64 like MS-windows phones long ago .. but there are pinephones and a few other alternatives very few know about since there is little money for marketing.

Cut-paste from a post elsewhere:

"https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-v1 #lattepanda

Tiny little x86 4core 2Ghz pocket board with hdmi output
It seems as pinephone is getting some competition
5v2.5w (you can power it with a small powerbank) = 13W peak not enough to get your pocket warm

But for Arm there is
https://genode.org/documentation/index
#SculptOS

not so known OSes for #Pinephone released last month :

#SculptOS version 25.10
https://genode.org/download/sculpt

#Movuan (= Mobian based on Devuan)
https://gitlab.com/l2385/movuan/movuan"

@Tutanota

@Tutanota You can still switch to Graphene or Lineage, and I suspect removing Google Play Services and all Gapps will likely disable this too. If new phones become 100% locked, the value of "pre-ban" phones will skyrocket on Ebay et all and a cottage industry of modifying old phones to use any available battery may well be born. That is a job I myself have done in the past.

As of a month ago, the ability to install unapproved apps by the ADB bridge over USB is also supposed to stay in mainstream Android.

What may very well happen is that Google apps and unapproved apps could down the road be unable to coexist in the same phone. Google could severely limit any app's uptake simply by making it impossible to run it and Google Play Services at the same time.

I have do-Googled many phones before I switched away from mainline Android entirely, and it takes hours and the job grows as Google moves more stuff to the closed source Google Play ecosystem. You may have to not only kill the search assistant and replace Google Maps, but replace the keyboard app too.

Chat Control could limit Signal to use inside fighting groups or other high-privacy users simply by demanding Google ban Signal, and then ensuring that anyone installing Signal has to delete Google Maps from their phone to get rid of Google Play Services.

Won't stop me, but could mean I can only talk to a few other people who follow me all the way out.

Google also cannot as easily control phones being treated as dumb wifi hotspots with the unapproved programs run on real computers. Anyone can do that assuming they already know how to tether, no hacking required. People may have to start carrying laptops again like I did for so many years.