coffeeClean

I think someone mentioned this is in the Playstore services stuff that’s hardwired in to the platform. Which means if a device is unrooted you can possibly do: $ adb shell 'pm disable --user 13 com.google.android.gms'.

To be clear I linked to someone else’s post. I don’t have the Pixel phone.

If I were to simultaneously demand:

• a phone with a relatively non-evil brand (thus obscure), and
• a rootable phone (thus a mainstream one)

that leaves me with no phone at all. Because only popular mainstream models get rooted and they’re all made by the worst companies.

When my current phone loses its usefulness I might even go without. Or possibly get one 2nd hand although the 2nd hand market still supports the 1st hand market.

I must say Paypal shares customer data with over 600 corporations among other scummy things, so I boycott them. I also boycott eBay because the javascript required to use their website port sniffs your LAN and feeds that back to them, apart from other evils.

But most importantly, I’m not necessarily worried that I would personally get burnt by this. But just like my unwillingness to buy an Intel CPU with a management engine (or AMD’s flavor of this), I am unwilling to buy a product that was designed to work against me. I do not want to finance anti-consumer suppliers. ATM I don’t know how to check whether my version of AOS has this “feature”.

(BTW, I’m not the OP; I just linked their post here)

Someone in the original thread said this swindle does not apply to the US. Though I’m a bit surprised.. it’s the first place where I would expect this to happen.

Startpage is certainly more favorable than Google. But it’s worth mentioning that Startpage is a Google syndicate so Google still profits from the use of Startpage. There are a number of searx instances out there that provide Google results by scraping Google instead of paying for API access. That’s a way to get Google results without feeding Google.

I mean, you can have a custom rom on your phone etc.

The OS is not the issue. It’s that apps are exclusively distributed in the Playstore which requires a Google account to reach. People running homebrew stuff tend to use Aurora, but that app still needs Google creds to use Google’s API. The anonymous option supported by Aurora violates Google’s ToS, so it’s not a legal option that anyone could point to as an official escape from the walled garden.

I personally will not use Aurora, even anonymously, because use of the app in most cases signals to the server that they were successful in getting the app to someone and connecting. It rewards them nonetheless.

That sounds like a good option for regular users and locals. Can that card be bought anonymous non-residents using cash? It would seem to eliminate a lot cases of non-phone users getting screwed but I guess there would still be tourist cases where the 50€ is unjustified. Like if someone is just passing through and needs to change airports (though I guess those are also not the cases where someone would be forced to use a phone app).

To me it is a bit confusing what you are looking for exactly.

It’s research for this article → https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/20/comparison-of-the-human-disempowerment-severity-of-3-walled-gardens-facebook-google-and-cloudflare/

and do not have any Google account (or any GAMAM account)

That stumped me for a second. I guess #GAFAM is now being called #GAMAM? I hate to accept the renaming as “Meta” hijacked a normal word to inject their brand into normal conversation unrelated to them. But OTOH, it’s more accurate, sadly enough, since Meta owns the Facebook subsidiary.

I don’t get the 911/112 example. But maybe it’s because I’m generally confused about what you are trying to find out exactly.

Contacting emergency services is an important human right on many levels:

• right to live
• right to healthcare
• right to equal access to public services

So forcing people to patronize Google in order to install the app means people are trapped in Google’s walled garden in order to maintain their human rights. Some say “you can simply dial 112/911, no app needed”. But the app is useful in more situations as it transmits name and address instantly and supports text when you cannot speak.

Here’s a quite interesting story where someone is being denied medical service for not patronizing Google or Apple:

https://mastodon.social/@lrvick/112079059323905912

Isn’t this more easily fixed?

$ adb shell 'pm disable --user 13 com.google.android.gms'

grapheneOS and the like might work for the OP and anyone with a mainstream phone, but there are a lot of unsupported cheap obscure phones which are stuck with stock Android.

The fun aspect to this is that some banks have forced customers to use an Android for all their banking ops. So:

① You’re late paying a bill
② Creditor locks your phone
③ You cannot access your bank to make the payment because your phone is locked

Brilliant.

You can check it’s installed (stock android) Settings > Apps > All Apps > three dot menu, Show system > search “DeviceLockController”.

Is that just a “feature” of recent AOS versions? AOS 5’s triple dot menu has nothing like “show system”.