Still blows my mind how many people are surprised about this while they've been the ones enabling this behavior for the past decade. The writing has been on the wall since Android 5 at the very least and everyone kept gaslighting themselves and each other about it.
Phones are the single most important surveillance and control devices of corporations and governments, so all of them must be built to perfectly support all the oppression they're used for, this is the actual reason why BlackBerry and Windows Phone had to die, they didn't get with the program. What do you mean you can link all your social media in the system settings and not download any spyware apps, not see any advertising and still gain all the benefit? What do you mean you can buy a whole phone for cheaper than any official accessory for a modern phone and have it still run reasonably fast years later? If Android was owned by some stubborn company that refuses to adapt like the competition it too would've been forcefully killed off, custom ROMs, APKs, actual choice in hardware, thriving indie developer community, what about that sounds like something that would be tolerated in the current world? They took away your removable battery, audio port, SD card, IR, gave a huge ugly hole in your screen just to follow braindead trends, shut down every half decent manufacturer only leaving chinese crap and 1:1 Apple clones + worse bloatware than china (samsung), increased the amount of irremovable corpo and government spyware (remember google "contract tracing"? its still there, dont ask questions what governments use it for now), took away your custom ROMs all while gaslighting you and you fell for it every single time before and bought it up without question and only now you notice when they put the final nail into Android? You'll keep buying and submitting all the data anyways, and using google in general, so they've done everything right.
Why now? Digital ID. The current Android model allows you to bypass it, that needs to be killed off before they roll it out globally. They know many people don't want it and won't enroll by choice so wouldn't it be convenient if your next iPhone and Android was completely unusable until you make a Apple/Google account which will require submitting your ID and doing the 3D face scan which'll be sent off to the government database. The perfect proof of how addicted people are to phones is that there is no place underground/tech savvy/whatever enough where people reject these surveillance devices hence the existence of this thread too, so this is the perfect way to enforce it. If you didn't drop the smartphone already based on all the already available data there's a 99.9% chance you won't when this happens either.
Also they saw the EU accepted Apple's bs, so they get to lock down Android to the same completely unusable level as iOS while not breaching anti-trust laws, win win.
I didn't go out of my way to look so I'm gonna ask if anyone hangs in Android developer circles still, whats the FOSS devs take on this? Are they quitting? Will continue development only for custom ROM/old Android users? Are they complying? I'll lose trust in any developer who puts up with this overreach, the goal is censorship and control anyways, any apps they don't like they won't certify, are we seriously gonna convince ourselves alt YT clients and such will get certified to begin with? Hopefully no one is that delusional, I'm hoping this is gonna be the wake up call for all these devs to finally drop this dead worthless platform and spend their time on more useful things and that hopefully might at least push a few more users over the edge to finally drop the surveillance devices.
WalkTheEarth If I was in the UK Android being useless would be least of my concerns.
the-syreth-clan Too new but otherwise the only okay compromise, I'm willing to use older phones for now but its been set in stone for years at this point im never buying any new phones again.
