We are going to move away from Google, by basing our new future on AOSP, which is also primary maintained by Google…I smell another FireOS level product on the horizon. Still Android, but worse.
Linux-mobileOS!
That sounds nice and all but linux still is subject to exploits and the open sourced nature of it makes it an enticing target for state actors to include extremely well made obfuscated exploits. I dont know how to win here, tbh.
“State actors” already have the ability to spy on anyone they want. It’s a whole industry
All you said, is infinitely worse with closed source
deleted by creator
With closed source auditing is not possible.
Microsoft windows must always be assuned to have backdoors and no one will ever find out.
Uhh maybe more likely 15 years ago and also goes for everyone else. Actually, what are you even saying?
So that title is just a straight up lie. They want to use a de-googled Android.
To be honest I was hoping for an alternative OS, competition is always good. But a de-googled Android could possibly be good, but being Chinese I assume instead of Google telemetry you’ll just be replacing it with CCP telemetry.
Honestly, I think a person in either nation should consider using the opposing nation’s stuff. Harder for the US to backdoor Chinese encryption, or for Chinese to backdoor into an American phone. Play the bastards off each other.
Odds are, that the Trump Regime will use American apps and phones to identify and track targets for ICE traffickers. China probably does the same to Uighurs. The less attack surfaces they have, the better for their respective peoples.
That sounds funny, but In that reality, the government with all its power will find a way in (they probably already have programs (as in departments) for finding their way into other countries tech).
Better to just install a proper de-googled android build (grapheneos, etc) and only use wifi (if data/phone num not needed) for the best odds.
In a couple of years (with more r&d, development and investment) I bet this will change to being use a linux phone.
Apple building backdoors for CCP and sharing any and all data with them: am I a joke to you?
US telemetry == CCP telemetry, I can’t see how CCP will be more damaging to regular person.
I think it’s just that they were saying his won’t end up benefitting us. It’s just changing who is holding the binoculars.
Why bother switching then?
Because, at least for now, the US has the greater power to fuck up our lives with the information gathered.
If it’s not proper linux I don’t care
A rumor of plans??! Tell me everything!!!
Gurl let me spill the tea, there’s word floating round in China that some bde powa playas be considering maybe kinda putting something together.
Pretty soon they’re going to pencil in a meeting about possibly arranging a committee to discuss preliminary plans to do a feasibility study.
Make it so
How easy is it to degoogle Android? Don’t currently use Android or iOS but dumb phone options are getting pretty limited these days.
If I got an Android phone I would probably be looking at something second hand because fuck paying 3 figures on a phone. I know I wouldn’t use data at all, call/SMS SIM only. I guess another option is not needing to degoogle it as it will never talk to google once I have finished downloading maps of the country for OSMand and a few other apps. Then it can be on Wi-Fi to allow communication with my PC over LAN but don’t allow it access to the internet.
If it never touches the internet after setup I guess outdated OS doesn’t matter too much.
If you’re looking at getting a new (used) phone, I would suggest GrapheneOS (the most secure/private de-googled rom afaik).
You need a Pixel phone, the newer you get the longer you will keep getting software updates for the future (if you keep the phone past these many years of support, then I believe switching to a other rom will be required for security patches etc. Each phone is supported until Google stops supporting them I believe). You said you don’t care about updates because you can keep it from connecting to the internet, but it’s a plus anyways.
If you plan on never touching a google service, GrapheneOS allows for that (nothing google by default), but on the other hand, if you need google play, etc for banking apps or whatnot, they have that covered with Sandboxed Google Services (which you can run solely in another user profile on your phone for added privacy).
Anyways, I think GrapheneOS in a great option & their website has much more info if you’d like to continue hearing about it:
p.s. you can check their website for how long different pixels will have continued support before (if) you get one (incase anyone else is reading this).
Ironically, pixels are best for de-googling (stock android that can be easily un- and re-locked)
You have to be careful to get a phone and model supported by one of the projects. Check all compatibility and install instructions before buying a phone. And if you need a manufacturer supplied unlock code, make sure the manufacturer still gives them out . Some will discontinue that service after a few years.
For graphene os you need one of the gogle devices - i’ve never tried it but i think its the one most people like.
lineageos supports more devices usually older.
I recently got lineageos working on sony experia xa2 - very happy with it. But to get there i had to go try like 6 computers before one of them sucessfully sent the bootloader unlock code over the ADB. For some reason usb is temperamental when doing stuff like that
It is a lot easier on really old stuff like samsung galaxy s3 or s4 if you can tolerate something that old. Maybe you’ll lso end upon an old version of lineage.
Once you get the bootloader unlocked it is generally straightforward. but modern phones make that fist part awkward.
The only issue with projects like LineageOS is that the camera usually sucks because the full fat camera driver isn’t released to the public, it’s only the basic driver. The camera can still take photos but all of the features you’ve become accustomed to are not there. This was my experience and what the LineageOS team said during the Samsung S5-S8 days.
It depends on your definition of ‘deGoogle’. You can disable the Google apps on most Android phones. They’ll take up storage space, but won’t run.
If you’re getting a second-hand phone and want to completely deGoogle it, you can check if (1) the bootloader is unlockable and (2) custom ROMs are available online (e.g. Lineage OS compatible devices). In general, Xiaomi, Motorola and Pixel devices have unlockable bootloaders, but not all their models have custom ROMs.
If you have a phone with custom ROM support, pretty easy. I’ve been running LineageOS without GAPPS for like 5 years now. Most stuff just works, but to be fair, I am not using any of the cool kids apps like google pay or android auto.
Yeah guess I don’t really care for most of it. Can get anything I want as an apk or mostly just on fdroid. VLC and an SSH client would be nice.
I just got my Pixel 9a and put GrapheneOS on it. The only thing that seems to not work right now is KDE Connect, but I’m unsure if it might be me doing something wrong rather than being impossible.
It runs just fine for me, huh. Certainly not because of lack of google services.
Maybe graphene is doing some firewall things? KDE Connect needs some ports open (to the local lan) to talk
Easy for manufacturers to deGoogle. Trivial.
Before anyone gets too excited, the headline is clickbait. The bigger Chinese phone brands are looking into de-googled Android. They are still going to use Android.
several prominent Chinese smartphone manufacturers, including Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus, are exploring the possibility of developing versions of the Android operating system that do not rely on Google Mobile Services.
Chinese laptop makers are also in search of an OS that isn’t Windows. Queue a race to prop Linux with Android support on that side of things.
de-Googled android sounds even better. The story is cooler than the title!
I mean they just replace Google with their own Chinese data-mining services so, no, not cool.
No no no, it’s not Chinese data mining.
it’s just socialised data with Chinese characteristics! Much better.
Exactly what happened with Indonesian release of Huawei.
Also, more ads everywhere. Even your lock screen.
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called “the People’s Stick.”
—Mikhail Bakunin
I like your spirit, but I don’t think a Chinese equivalent to Google Play Services would be more desirable
All I want is unified push really. Then you just choose your server or host your own.
Or just Linux. Like furios or phosh, etc.
I wish more apps supported unified push!
a duopoly is better than a monopoly but 3 platforms would be better
This is why my next GPU its gotta be Intel
Just read for a second about intel’s history on anti competition practices eg they would ban stores from carrying out amd cpus in my country in Europe
de-Googled android sounds even better.
They are already degoogled for the Chinese market. What the Chinese Android variants to not have is a shared replacement for Play Services and a shared app store because everyone is doing their own thing for maps API, payment, …
I run that already with CalyxOS. I dig it.
I thought android in China was already de-googled
Some Chinese phone release outside China also began to de-googled as well. At least that’s the case for Huawei in Indonesia.
So like how Huawei was hyping up their new mobile OS which was really just skinned AOSP?
HarmonyOS is not AOSP anymore. It does not run Android apps anymore.
This was a transitional stage, HarmonyOS Next is running a fully different kernel and runtime
Well there’s that, but I was talking more about how they were selling it when hey first announced it. My point is that with stuff like this, the companies have lied before. I’ll believe it when I see it.
It also says:
It is currently unknown whether these companies would aim for compatibility with existing Android apps or follow the path of Huawei’s latest HarmonyOS NEXT, which removes Android app support entirely
So, it’s not clear yet.
The US/China decoupling is happening everywhere.
I live in Asia. I’m European and meet a lot of Chinese tourists. Trying to find a common ground with digital services we both use is impractical to the point where we often can’t connect online.
The front line is everywhere, there be no shelter here.
They got you searching for the thin line between entertainment and war.
de-googled Android you say?
ISeeThisAsAnAbsoluteWin.jpg
Too bad that what you want in a Google-free Android distro isn’t what the manufacturers want.
Waydroid is pretty nice, integrating the Android apps as regular apps in the Linux UI.
Waydroid is very close to greatness. My major hope there is Valve contributions to Waydroid for probable Steam Deck integration will make it incredibly seamless. There’s also the Android Translation Layer being developed
https://gitlab.com/android_translation_layer/android_translation_layer
Am I the only one who never got Waydroid to run even basic apps…?
KDE connect is already pretty sweet
What about /e/OS?
Haven’t tried it
We need phones with standard Linux. Without strange “Java only mediator” or something. Just a normal OS.
Android is a pain in the ass.
We need phones with standard Linux.
Already exists. Several iterations are active and work as a daily driver: phone, sms and mobile networking works reliably, apps exist. Just not as many as on Android, and some features are not part of the OS. This is enough for many to declare them “a failure”. That and limited hardware support.
Google has coddled us for way too long, and at what price.
Exact! And please no bloatware!!
Oh wait, before anything else : NO, and I really mean NO AI and/or VR shit. Just none. None A T A L L
So you exclusively want ai. Got it.
-Microsoft, probably
Clippie coming right up!
So AOSP
Dude, you get free third party bullshit with every update. What’s not to love?
I don’t believe that they’re likely to do GNU/Linux. I bet that they’re going to do a fork of Android off AOSP or something like that.
Android’s had a huge amount of work put into it to make it suitable to be a consumer mobile phone OS, and the companies here aren’t doing this because they want stuff that GNU/Linux does, but rather because they’re Chinese companies worried about a US-China industrial decoupling and its risks for them. Like, they were okay with the technical status; what changed was that they started to worry about having the rug pulled out from them.
That being said, I can at least imagine that helping GNU/Linux phone adoption. So, think about what happened with video games. There were some major platforms out there – MacOS, iOS, Windows, various consoles, Android, GNU/Linux. That fragmented the market. Trying to port software to all platforms became a huge pain. What a lot of game developers did was to target a more-or-less platform-agnostic engine and let the engine handle the platform abstraction.
If the mobile OS space fragments further – like, Android splits into “Google Android” and “China Android” — my guess is that that’ll help drive demand for platform-agnostic engines to help improve portability, and porting one engine to GNU/Linux is a lot easier than every individual program.
Is this the year of the Ubuntu Touch Smartphone?
Probably not, but it should be.
Oh dear … Are we gonna be forced to snap on phones too?
is it ready for normies to daily drive?
No. I have a second phone with it just to play with.
It’s functional, but rough. App support is lacking, VoLTE doesn’t work still which means on countries like the US which shutdown 2/3G you cannot make or receive calls. The UI is clunky and dated.
I think a lot of these issues would go away pretty quick if it got a lot of attention. But then it’s unlikely to get much attention without that stuff. Vicious cycle. It’s a good base to build on.
thanks for the insight. if you use google voice app on it would that work as a replacement for VoLTE?
There isn’t a Google Voice app. It’s not Android.
You could probably place calls from the browser but not receive them.
I heard of some people setting up IP phone stuff for it, but it doesn’t seem simple.
Seems pretty polished, but I genuinely don’t know. None of my devices support it, so I haven’t had the opportunity to test drive it.
At some point, “normies” are just going to have to break down and learn something.
I think postmarketOS will probably win out on market share for Linux phones, mostly because it can use regular flatpak apps, you don’t have to develop special apps, which i thought you had to do for Ubuntu touch (which I guess is now called ubports). Not sure, someone correct me if I’m wrong about the specially built apps part.
Palm OS was really good, but without a great app store it never stood a chance.
I would love to have a phone that I could just plug into a USB C dock and use as a normal computer. They’ve got plenty of processing power for that now. Every single program I use except for games could run on a phone if it used normal GNU/Linux.
Convergence! I think Ubuntu tried to go that way for a while.
Samsung Dex already does this with Android.
Was about to say that - while it’s sadly proprietary and most FOSS Apps are not well supported, it is a nice showcase. But I don’t think it’s actually used much by people.
Which is kind of sad.
Honestly love Dex, it’s such a smooth transition
I was given an old Chromebook tablet by a friend that wanted to get rid of it, and it just happened to have mainline Linux support. I was able to get postmarketOS running on it, and got gnome shell mobile as the DE. It works, and works well. The apps that support the touch interface and are made to be responsive, etc work really well, and the waydroid integegration works fantastically well. I was able to get android version of jellyfin working, with vlc, and a few other apps I use daily. All this in 4GB of ram, I’m really impressed! This screenshot was running gnome shell I think, I’ve since switch to the ‘mobile’ variant of it, and running system monitor with android vlc and android jellyfin running, zoomed out so you could see all the apps running at once.
Its time for a Linux phone, I put in an order for the 2nd batch of this phone, hopefully they start shipping soon, they supposedly already shipped the first batch to users.
What’s that link got to do with PostmarketOS? It does not look like FuriOS is a version of it?
Good catch, while I guess they’re not using postmarketOS, that’s what was supported on the device i had, and what enabled me to test out the mobile version to gnome shell, and try out the phone app ecosystem. It seems like its ready for prime time, especially since waydroid performs so well, android apps can fill the void for any missing native Linux apps.
Furiphone flx1 looks promising
They have been promising a good Linux phone for forever. Is this one any good? Will support last?
No idea as i haven’t gotten mine yet. They’re still filling the next pre-order batch of production, but from the reviews on their website, it seems as responsive as you’d expect from android, which was a huge problem with Dev phones like the pinephone, they were way too sluggish with terrible battery life.
postmarketOS?
Honestly, I think the old FirefoxOS could do well these days. Literally everything an app can do can be done by a browser with a decent caching/local storage scheme. Slap a decent camera on that and it would be amazing.
If you can implement an equivalent to Apple’s Secure Enclave on a device running that, I’ll be interested. I haven’t seen even a device running Android doing that yet though.
Yeah, Meego was really nice.
I worked with it. Just Linux. Rpm was at that moment.
GNU/Linux is about 100x more painful than Android…
How so?
Let me know when there’s a phone with Linux that has a security implementation that matches Apple’s Secure Enclave.
No idea what that is.
Google meet Zune!
You probably should’ve led with the fact that this is Chinese phones, not like Samsung and shit.
Samsung has it own OS on some phones.
No they don’t; they killed off Tizen over half a decade ago. All modern Samsung devices run on Android. OneUI is a skin, not an OS.
They
allmostly run android with GMS. They do apply their own skin, and sometimes Manufactures try to market it as a seperate OS. For example “NothingOS” in the Nothing phones, which is just stock android with a fancy skin applied.Thanks, I didn’t know about that.
There’s only Samsung, or shit.
Congrats, you sound exactly like some Apple fanboy.
Yes I do like my iPhone! Samsung is not bad, used the Note for many years.
Clearly you didn’t understand the point I was making. I never said you weren’t allowed to like a product.
Clearly, but do I get an Apple fan club t-shirt?
Maybe if you send enough fan mail to Tim Cook
Haha, thanks man. Good chat, you made my day.
I’m not all that keen on Samsung myself, but the ‘and shit’ here is a stand-in for the other makers of android phones for the US market. I’m sure google would be happy to supply a list, but I can’t be fucked to go find it.
I’ve got a Huawei tablet post the play store ban, it was a pain to use.
Huawei is not the Android phone other than Samsung.
It’s pretty much all shit. It’s just “what flavor of shit would you like today?”
Please, do not post clickbait
It makes sense for Chinese smartphone OEMs to move away from the Google version of Android. In the medium to long term you are setting up yourself for failure if you are reliant on an American company.
Unfortunately, the United States cannot be trusted.
It’s not like China can be trusted either. This is a matter of not relying on your adversary.
Sure, but with China everyone more less knew this. The US has used up the last benefit of the doubt that they had in the past 5 months.
“everyone” yeah, in our bubble maybe. never underestimate the carelessness of the consumer
It’s not like China can be trusted either
What exactly are you talking about? China has at no point in my lifetime exerted economic violence or taken violent policy turns towards harming other economies. They’ve been a reliable trading partner since they opened up to trade in the Deng Xiaoping/Nixon years, and done absolutely nothing remotely comparable to the US tariffs of recent (or economic embargoes to “enemy” countries like Venezuela).
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic here. I hope you are. If not a quick search on Wikipedia would show China’s aggressive behaviour towards its neighbouring countries.
To what? Linux? I’ll believe it when I see it.
To what?
Read the article and find out.
The article exposes the title as a lie. People shouldn’t reward that kind of journalism by reading it.
So they’re switching from Android to Android.
You mean the brands that literally do this already? Pretty bad article
