Google will develop Android OS entirely behind closed doors starting next week
Google will develop Android OS entirely behind closed doors starting next week
Google is adjusting how Android is made, with the AOSP branch moving behind closed doors, leaving the entire OS to be privately developed.
So, are we going to get any European alternatives to android?
It's just a slow locking down to stay in control... We just need to all shift to proper #Linux phones instead of linux-by-google. Could be nice to see some European moves there. There are plenty of good developers within the EU. The biggest issues would be in funding that development and to market it properly to artificially kickstart adoption of such a platform. There are already phones made in Europe; Fairphone is Dutch, I think?
And you think Fairphones are made in Europe? They are made in China, just like all the iPhones and Google Pixels.
Fairphone is indeed Dutch, and they even make a point on their website of paying a decent living wage to all Chinese workers making their phones.
Typed from my Fairphone 4 running /e/OS
We have some European alternatives to Android.
- Ubuntu Touch Germany 🇩🇪
- Postmarket OS Europe 🇪🇺
- Sailfish OS Finland 🇫🇮
I used postmarket os in past and I can recommend it… it has terminal for people who want to tinker with it but it can be used without terminal. Os is very easy to use and supports many devices, their support channels are hosted on matrix
What hardware works probably for it to be a daily phone? Looks like none have the camera more than partly working and most have worse problems.
Pissed me off phones aren't just like PCs. They shouldn't need Device Tree and custom ROMs. We should be able to install whatever OS we want and be confident it can work.
Typing this reply from Sailfish!
Hardware support is the main issue for me, all of these 3 none support my phone (Pixel 3)
Odd as Ubuntu Touch is fully optimized on the pixel 3a.
It's been mostly this way for a while reason why it takes a little bit before lineageos releases the next version. AOSP is just fully down stream. What will be concerning is when those releases get longer and longer. As another comment said we all just need to figure out linux phones. Been eyeing a pine phone for a while now should probably pull the trigger.
I would recommend against the pinephone. While the hardware is well supported, the hardware sucks. Voyager in Firefox runs at around 4 fps, while the battery percent drops every minute and the back of the phone is uncomfortably hot.
You would be better off with a Pixel 3a, oneplus 6 or poco f1, which are all supported by PostmarketOS. While many hardware features don't work on these phones, they all have rudimentary camera support and have actually good SOCs that perform well.
I just found FuriOS phone the other day. Looks promising.
FuriOS is based in Hong Kong like Pine64.
More spyware please!
I'm trying to degoogling my life for quite long time. This is what is curreently missing:
- wallet: only apple, samsung and google solutions out there for all Europe. There is a EU project that unfortunatlely cannot be used in the UK. I mean, to understand how sick the system is, think that most of all credit cards out there are owned by the US.
- Family link, something to managed kids devices
There's hope for the wallet thing in the future.
https://f-droid.org/packages/net.taler.wallet.fdroid/
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.html
iCard allows paying with their cards from their app.
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wallet: my current solution is Garmin Pay. For that you need a compatible Garmin watch. Once the card is added to the watch, all the payment is done without even passing by the phone, just communication between watch and payment terminal. Garmin watches work really very well with Gadgetbridge. Cards have to be added via the Garmin App, and possibly via a phone running a stock OS (mine didn't work from the aftermarket ROM, but may be bank dependent)
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Family Link: For other options you may need to do a factory reset and install a device manager app, that then needs to be enabled via ADB. Or use a custom ROM. No pleasant options out there.
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I wonder what this will do to grapheneOS. I was just about to flash it on my phone this weekend.
Yet another example of companies circling the wagons
It says in the article the code will still be released in the same way it's been for ages.
Is this the end of Graphene and related AOSP builds?
No, as it says in the article
Do you people know some of those banking apps that work without google, maybe a list of them?
This website can sometimes help with working out whether something works without Google Play Services https://plexus.techlore.tech/ | https://github.com/techlore/Plexus-app?tab=readme-ov-file
Sooo ACSP?
"...Google isn’t changing the speed at which these new builds arrive. Rather, this will potentially streamline the process and prevent conflicts when merging the branches.
This does not mean that Google is making Android a closed-source platform, but rather that the open-source aspect will only be released when a new branch is released to AOSP with those changes, including when new full versions or maintenance releases are finished."
I honestly read that as ASCII and got confused.