Can someone please come out with a phone that’s an actual computer and help stop this nonsense?

Phones cost a lot of money at this point and I’m completely sick of them being some locked down, surveillance ridden pile of crap. A reasonably built one would be able to replace a laptop at this point if it weren’t for these artificial constraints imposed by the stupid fucking suits running things.

If antitrust was being enforced, Google execs wouldn’t even dream of attempting this bullshit.

Antitrust regulation is probably the easiest way to fix the biggest problems in our society, it is 100% bipartisan, and it is easy to explain to the average US voter. The only group that is against it is the billionaires/ultra wealthy. Instead, politicians are all hyperfocused on culture war mudslinging and bullshit that makes no difference.

Break up Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta (just to start), and watch how the tech industry explodes with innovation again, and the tech billionaire becomes an endangered species. The AI bubble will burst as companies actually need to compete to survive, and thus won’t be burning as much resources on crap that clearly doesn’t work.

nobody here read the part where side loading was never going to be disabled

I, as the owner of my device, don’t want to wait 24h.

I hope this will popularize the ROM community again. It gradually faded out due to mainstream ROMs having every perk of the custom ROMs but now the custom ROMs can start offering freedom, which no official ROM will offer.

It’s not side loading. It’s installing software on the device you probably paid multiple thousands for that you no longer own.

To call the install of apps of your choice as «sideloading», means that they have won.

I’m writing an app that I will distribute only through f-droid. The people I would like to share it with are typical, non-technical android users. Before those changes I could just send them a link to f-droid apk and explain it’s just another app store or send a link to the apk directly and probably most of them would be able to install it. Now I would have to tell them to do all those weird things first, things that look suspicious and that they would not understand the purpose of. I don’t think anyone will be wiling to do it. This is not a win. The effect will be exactly the same - serious limits on distributing apps though alternative channels.

Narrator: No, they did not, in fact, win.

It is always like this. Make a very anti consumer decision that everyone hates, then tone it down so the half of those people will say “we won”. This is a loss.

My galaxy will let me install but then I get this when I try to run the app:

I don’t know. For one in don’t noble how bad the problem is and the that the big thing. We who install apps are not the target for this issue. But the 99% of other people who can fall for these scams is who this is for. And I can handle a little in convince if it stops some scammers from cleaning out peoples life savings.

the win in this is that many people realise how locked google has made android and how blatantly and arbitrarily google exerts their control over it. hopefully that will be input to some consumer decision (when sailfish becomes an alternative) and a tiny bit more people will consider their choice when getting a new phone. and maybe it also helps some regulation to be agreed (in europe, obviously).

no.

i’ll look into this, but they seem to have used the old strategy of announcing something absurd then back down to what they wanted because of “community pressure”

bonus for not looking bad in comparison, while still being bad.

Of course we didn’t win. the more hoops you have to jump through, the fewer people who will install their own apps and then you lose all of the community support. And Google didn’t promise not to change their plans in the future. So you know that they’ll promise this now. Maybe they’ll backtrack a little if they have to and they will try to ratchet things up six months later anyway.

Real solutions involve either breaking up monopolies or breaking up monopolies, which is why some of the other cell phone vendors’ actions recently look positive. If there are two versions of Android that are popularly used, then the banks will have to support both of them and then everyone can run away from Google whenever they feel like it. But if there’s only one popular version and Android itself gets more and more locked down then that is Google seizing the entire market and they will cut out all of the other cell phone manufacturers as soon as they can. that will be just as bad as Apple.

Then make the wait period a week, a month. Have this privilege expire every so often etc.

Try to pull warranty shenanigans if you ever went through the process.