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Has anyone tried a Murena (/e/os) phone?
I am thinking about it.
This move doesn’t look like a co-incidence,first google acquires android ,then you now have to use your ‘‘google account’’ as user detail to signup for most services, Now they’re tip toeing towards This techno Lockdown kwowing full well how many pesrsons use Adroid phones…Who owns google Satan?
TD;DR
(FOR EVERYONE)
Here is the petition that we all need to sign:
https://www.change.org/p/stop-google-from-limiting-apk-file-usage
(FOR DEVELOPERS or “DEVELOPERS” 😉 )
Here is the form that we need to fill:
(Please UPVOTE this so others can see!)
VPNs will be forbidden, age will be verified.
Coincidence that all are gaining traction?
The tech companies are doing a great job at making me uninterested in the hottest new phones. I used to follow the news about them and know the tech specs and stuff, because I’m a nerd and gadgets are fun and smart phones in particular are the intersection of SO much technology and engineering. Moore’s law was alive and well during all my formative years, so I am even conditioned to expect the excitement.
But lately, not only have I been ignoring what the big players are offering, I have been ignoring the phone I already have! Instead I have a PC at the end of the couch with a monitor on an arm that s swings right over my lap.
I use my phone pretty much just for music, web browser, Voyager (Lemmy on the go), and occasional texting. When I am at home I will sometimes misplace my phone for hours and just not worry about it.
I have already pushed the megacorp phone + social media experience so far out of my daily life, that if future options for open linux phones are rough around the edges and don’t have tap to pay then oh well I don’t think I care.
It’s much easier to live without the shiny new thing once you see how well your brain does when separated from it. (and you have some loved ones who are still hopelessly addicted to the scroll)
Everyone is talking about getting a fairphone and whatnot but I’m concerned about the open source apk communities shutting down since the market share and interest is killed by this.
Dear terrorists, I don’t like your actions, but if you still exist and want to cause destruction and deaths, please, do it by attacking main offices of big corporations. That will be a tragedy for whole world. Thank you!
I’ll be frank with you. As long as my customers are captive on either Apple or Google platforms I can’t do shit.
Call your representativesHire a lobbyist to donate millions of dollars to election campaigns for your representatives
I’m doing my part ! Mail send with help from fdroid.
Remember to contribute to postmarketOS!
You can put this on a Nothing CMF Phone 1 btw.
So, does it mean that degooglized android phones will suffer as well?
We need alternatives to big tech. They’re reigning in and locking everything they can down, and the states are loving them for it as it solidifies their ability to control us.
Europe is slowly working on that. Ironically, Trump’s policies were kind of a blessing to Europe, because it forced politicians to finally start working towards strengthening the independence of the region.
They’re kind of already is. It’s the free and open source community.
The problem is phones are actually incredibly impressive pieces of hardware and the fact that we can Mass produce them has diluted that opinion. I’m actually to look into building my own phone and I wanted to have at least some near-flagship specs. I know how to design my own circuit boards and get someone to print them. But acquiring CPUs that perform at least 1/4 as well as Pixels or iPhones is objectively not possible, these companies have deals with manufacturers for exclusive products. And even if you could these chips are so precise you will never be able to figure out the signaling yourself.
Maybe things have gotten better now that we have ai and you don’t need to be any sort of expert in anything you just need to be good enough at decision making problem solving and communicating to acquire the skills and knowledge to work on these chips. And by the time you’ve done all the work and acquired all the hardware you might have spent close to 3 to 5K on a device you could have just bought for $800. All for what, to circumvent privacy breaches that should be illegal in the first place?
And that’s the root problem we’re trying to solve. Another symptom of these companies being able to engage in the bad behavior that they do is that they gain the ability to overvalue themselves. There should be no safety or privacy concern when engaging in the purchase of any device for the same reason that people should not fear food poisoning every time they go to the grocery store.
That’s what the regulators are for. This is a legal issue not a technical one.
But the only underlying cause for why we’re not regulating tech companies is because fear of privacy violations is not reducing market activity. Apparently people are still going to use their phones even if their phones are listening to them having private conversations. Apparently people will still buy shit off of their phones even if their phones are going to use that data to show them ads.
Apparently the harm of your privacy being breached does not hurt enough to prevent you from doing good things.
Now if Android takes away my F-Droid, Tasker and Termux I’m gonna throw a fit. That’s not privacy that’s self-determination, I bought an Android because I can customize it to be as low friction for me as I need, if my phone starts giving me friction then we’re going to have problems.
What we need is a good linux phone that is affordable, has hardware that isn’t slow, and isn’t over sold to an annual pre-order.
Sadly, if the first two are true, the third one becomes an issue.
What we need is a large company to see that is a sign of huge pent-up demand. Apparently, HP and Dell are both talking about switching to Linux as their default OS for desktops. Once all the desktop manufacturers find themselves in the business of selling hardware with Linux on it, either mobile manufacturers will copy, like Samsung, or the desktop folks decide to make their product smaller.
What everyone has wanted from the beginning was a desktop in their pocket. The amount of time that no one has produced that despite major demand, and the amount of development that has gone into building any other stack, just feels like willful suppression at this point.
Is there some government somewhere telling large-scale manufacturers that they can’t build something as free and open as a desktop that isn’t at least the size of a laptop? Because it actually takes less technology to make something that’s open than something that is closed. And there is just as much appeal for the consumer to not restrict them.
What we need is a good linux phone that is affordable, has hardware that isn’t slow, and isn’t over sold to an annual pre-order.
That’s not enough, sadly. That phone must support, at the very least, all the national ID and banking software. And that bit might be tricky.
This always gets brought up, and is the chicken-and-egg problem, but only sort of.
Supporting software designed for different platforms is not the phone’s responsibility. It should be the government and bank developers’ responsibility to build software for platforms their citizens and customers use.
Android and Apple do not jump through hoops to run Windows desktop software, for example, and the notion is kind of absurd to begin with. Yet this argument is used for Linux smartphones all the time.
Some of this also applies to people without phone / with dumbphone.
It’s a kind of “yes, but actually no” situation.
Way back when, smartphones were a relatively new thing. Nobody gave a crap, so building a new OS that had similar capabilities to the competition was easy. We had a bunch of those over the years.
However, every new OS means new architecture, every architecture means developers having to take it into account when building apps.
Eventually, the smartphone market essentially defaulted to Android and iOS - long gone are Windows Phone, Blackberry OS, and a dozen others.
They didn’t die off because they somehow had to - they died off because they couldn’t keep up with feature parity with Android and iOS.
Nowadays, everything is being made for these two OSes. And by “everything” I mean things that are actually crucial to people - banking apps, ID apps, train ticket apps, parking lot apps - things that they either cannot replace with “not in a smartphone” solution, or can, but it would force them to juggle cards and papers.
Any new OS coming in must take that into account. If Linux comes to mobile phones but can’t run national ID apps or banking apps, it will have a market share of maybe 1% - the hardcore fans, and the “technological preppers” who are always anonymous, always off-grid - and that’s that. No users further users will switch, and because no users switch, no developers will take it seriously enough to make their apps work on it.
Windows Phone is a great example of this. At its height it had around 20% of the European market share. And what happened? Snapchat (massive at the time) and Google actively worked to undermine and destroy it, because they knew that - in the long run - it’ll be cheaper than having to hire a third group of developers. With 3rd party alternative apps being constantly blocked, the OS eventually went down to sub 5% in its biggest market, and sub 1% in the US, and Microsoft finally pulled the plug.
An OS coming in without critical app support won’t ever get to even 1% of market share in any region larger than “local Linux fanclub”.
Android apps do solve a lot of UI problems a that are unique to the phone interface. If only Linux could run APKs. Oh wait, it can. Linux can run anything.
Those who have the expertise should start contributing and working more on Linux for mobile. Postmarket has made great progress it just needs more manpower
What kind of roles do they have for people who don’t know how to code? I’ve considered helping translate things before, but my languages are among the most popular, so it’s almost always already translated.
Out of the loop here. How can google lockdown an open-source operating system? I know they are involved in developing it because it benefits them, but does that mean they own it?
