There are phosh based phones and over time more people will hopefully switch to them, use them, and work on making them better. Phosh-based phones are currently are not as usable as something like GOS, but with Google challenging itself to become more and more enshitified in the interest in marginal tiny profit gains (even if it destroys their brand over the long term) nerds needs to band together prepare for an alternative. Part of this is going to be advocating for Apps that work in Linux mobile Phosh environments and just refusing to use containerized apks and part of it is going to be people doing what they can to support native linux phone apps that work well in Phosh.
iOS jailbreaking used to be incredible too.
I guess it might still be for those who slipped into the “window” to do it, but I have no clue what Cydia looks like these days.
Cydia is practically dead, replaced by Sileo or Zebra, and most tweaks are paid now.
I miss when people did stuff for a hobby or for fun. Literally everything wants your money these days it seems.
Oh that sucks. It’s par for iOS though.
Yeah, me too. So what if apps were simpler than they are now… that would be nice.
It truly was a great time when the scene was really bumping. Maybe one day we’ll pendulum swing back to something along that peak jailbreak scene.
Maybe…
I feel like iPhones had a sweet spot between the 4 and the… I dunno. A few generations after that? Where jailbreaking was rampant and incredible, and the phones are basically like the 16 now.
Then Android had a ‘sweet spot’ after that. Their quality and UI fluidity really caught up, to the point where my old Razer Phone 9 still feels faster than an iPhone 16.
After that… well, I dunno where to go :(. Feels like both platforms are locking down.
You made me wonder if there could ever be an avenue for Apple to support this, especially with Google just getting worse and worse with android.
Apple makes a ton of money on just hardware sales. Imagine if the next iPhone had an option that would delete iOS, possibly blow some kind of security fuse in the CPU that voids your warranty (because they still have to be dicks), and reboot into an unlocked bootloader. They could boost sales and be even shittier to Google by rolling their own distro of Linux/Android/BSD for the phones with solid drivers for everything.
That veered off into fantasy land immediately, since that is not how Apple does things. And they do have services to sell too. But even if they only enabled open access on older models it could move a ton of units. Interesting to imagine.
Capitalism will never give you nice things. Sorry.
I think world peace is more realistic than that
would be nice
Omay, but, and hear me out on this: what if we added microtransactions to your email app and keyboard app?
Ahem. My HTC 7 came with malware in the keyboard, baked in as an unremovable system app!
And if you oay, it’s not private.
It’s not like everything (or rather every dev) necessarily wants your money. We’re forced to monetize even our hobbies in an attempt to live a worthwhile life. It’s a cancerous system infecting everything and everyone.
To develop great FOSS software without the need of monetization is an enormous privilege.
Doesn’t help that Apple wants €100/year + a supported Mac (average €100/year for the hw upgrade treadmill)
No, you’re absolutely right.
I am more angry at the system than at the hobbyists. I apologize for coming off like that.
everybody could use more money. gotta be turning more and more of your life into a hustle for capital’s insatiable maw.
so now we pay for mods.
Because the default commercial software is trash.
yup, mostly because of capitalism
I held onto jailbreaking till the end. I have a iPhone on iOS 17.0 and TrollStore for permanent sideloaded apps. It’s pretty awesome! There hasn’t been anything like a jailbreak or TrollStore since then. I wish I had bought an iPhone 15 on iOS 17.0 at launch so I could hold onto this as long as possible. Having a lower end iPhone I’ll probably need an upgrade in the next year or so.
You can get a similar experience to TrollStore by paying for an Apple developer account or a third-party signing service that abuses Apple developer accounts. It seems android users may have to do a similar thing in a few years.
There’s so much bullshit with smartphones now that make them a pain to use, I’m honestly considering at this point to just get a flipphone and buy separate devices for the things it can do. Get a camera, MP3 player, and portable DVD player and live life the way people did 20 years ago.
Oh, I totally agree, dude! I was thinking the same idea for a while too
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Camera problem – You have the best camera on your device, but sometimes people don’t even set the best settings lol. Plus, you’ve taken tons of photos with your phone camera that you never look at, so what’s the point? A small camera is a great idea or polaroid.
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Mp3 - I don’t have use Spotify or some streaming music platfrom. Because I listen to specific random songs that’s not alwasys available on Spotify etc. So I just download my songs with yt-dlp on mp3 files!
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Portable DVD player - I personally just download my videos (youtubers or movies) and then watch on my phone.
I’ve started to get more selective of my photos and even began printing them, sometimes gifting to friends. Now I actually end up looking at them more often.
Oh hey that’s cool! Do you print them like in those machine in shops or at home?
I do it via online shops that let me get them from a nearby physical store - it’s pretty neat that I can even select the paper size.
I tried printing once on photo paper on my mom’s printer, but colors were very off, despite configuring everything for maximum quality.
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Wait what ? Side loading blocked
Well it was a good run, time to look into custom roms…
I left them only because Pixels were good enough, clean enough, and custom Roms couldn’t update themselves.
If there’s one that can, I’ll happily switch back.
Huh? I’m fairly sure Lineage does OTAs and has been doing it for a loooong time. And there’s other ROMs that have OTAs too.
Nice! I haven’t used ROMs in a looong time so that tracks. Last time was CyanogenMod
Bootloader is blocked so no custom roms. You will take whatever shit they are slinging and like it.
Wait, really??
Bruh, wtf are we gonna next year once it’s fully locked down? 😡
Where is the st. iGNUcius of phones ?
I am very happy on GrapheneOS. Even in terms of flashing it was much nicer experience than what you had to go through back in the days
😢 AOKP was king. I miss all the extra silly features they packed in. You could make it look almost nothing like Android by the time you were done.
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so apple fixed the battery life thing? i knew macbooks have insane battery life, but i thought iphones still couldn’t do 2 days which i think is the line between shitty and ok. anyway samsungs could never and still can’t do more than 2 days in my hands, but I’ve been amazed that my p8p with graphene can easily get 4 days (I’m a pretty light user).
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Lmao, yeah, batteries have improved quite substantially for all phones in the last 14 years. Unless you want removable batteries, then everything is worse now.
I remember this “don’t be evil” slogan. But what was it from?
It was Google’s.
wheeze
Don’t forget rock solid app gets an unexpected update 3 years later and now is jammed with ads and offers an ad free subscription at $14/week
Yeah app purchases sure went to shit, didn’t they? Sorry turns out buying an app one time for a small fee isn’t good enough, we need you to buy it again every month.
And the apps that do have lifetime licenses went from $5 to like $80
Dude fuck that noise.
I bought a lifetime copy of hex edit like 30 years ago. 20 years later I needed something and the dude answered and sent me a new code.
Fucking rock on hex edit brother!!!
An in-app-purchase screen would have been a great fit.
I’m glad I heard of Discord’s plan to add ads to their Android app beforehand so I had the chance to disable updates. It’s annoying that Android keeps reminding me there’s an update available, but it’s less annoying than ads.
Blocking basically all ads on your phone is trivially easy.
- Find “Private DNS” (or something similar) in your settings
- Set it to dns.adguard-dns.com
And that’s really it. There are other ad-blocking dns providers out there, and they all use slightly different block lists. I like adguard because their blocklist is less aggressive than others I’ve tried, and I’d rather an ad or two get through than for something legitimate to stop working.
You can also set it up as your dns provider in your router to block ads on your entire network. People tend to like to self-host adguard or pihole for that, but as long as you don’t care about a dashboard or manual dns entries, using a free dns is as easy as it gets and is very effective. I self-host as a hobby and I still just use adguard’s public dns.
Also TrackerControl FOSS app that filters ads on your phone directly. Can enable/disable different stuff per-app. Must have no proxy/dns to work.
Iam still sad not having titanium backup with root on my current phone :(
Try Neo Backup.
It’s worked pretty well for me in the past.
Reads really nice! Sadly iam not rooted anymore. I got too annoyed about the update procedure of a rooted phone in the last years. :(
I’m gonna carry around my steam deck and add a USB camera module, a GPS module, and add some meshtastic radios modules, and I’m gonna daily drive it as the ultimate all-in-one device, and Mr. Google Pichai can’t stop me! xD
good idea however if you ever feel like needing a phone again… i have one word for you:GrapheneOS
Isn’t GrapheneOS just another android os?
I mean, if google is on track to ban sideloading, there’s not doubt they will also ban bootloader unlocking.
Though graphene is shopping for phone OEMs rn, hopefully there’ll be a graphenephone soonish.
Only for Google Pixels
As gross as Google’s endless enshittification is, I blame the consumers for most of it. People vote with their wallets and they’ve been voting for the locked up walled garden crap option for the past two decades, especially in the US, where there is literally a culture of “ew, you have a green message bubble!” and chasing a status symbol is way more important than things like actual ownership over your devices, digital freedom and customization. And funnily enough, Google’s hardware sales have started increasing steadily since they’ve started copying Apple’s shitty model.
Ah yes, the consumers having no real practical alternative between apple and android means they support all the bullshit Google is forcing onto android /s
How do you propose I vote with my wallet when using something like grapheneOS requires buying a pixel?
The time to support Android was 15 years ago when you could install any OS on any device, side load anything you wanted, root, mod, replace your battery, have full control over your file system, expand your storage, etc. Or 10 years ago, when Google was selling completely unlocked developer oriented phones, offering most of its services for free, opening sources, and actually innovating in fields like computational photography while also researching interesting concepts like modular phones.
If you feel like you can’t vote with your wallet today it’s because the market as a whole has abundantly shown that it really doesn’t give a fuck about any of those things, and it will always give the dominant position to whoever markets more aggressively or more effectively, even if the business models of those companies go against the consumers’ interests.
People in 2007 jumped at the chance to buy a ridiculously overpriced phone with no physical keyboard, a VGA camera without flash, no MMS or 3G support, no apps or customization whatsoever, no expandable storage, no battery replacement, terrible repairability, locked in to proprietary accessories and software, and so on. This, while the competition at the time was putting out cheaper phones with things like OLED screens, professional optics with xenon flashes, dual SIMs, microSD support, the latest connectivity standards, etc.
And when Apple patent trolled, took away things like the headphone jack, or normalized imposing ridiculous costs and taking huge cuts from developers, did people stop buying their products? No, they bought more.
I’m not defending Google at all. Their decline is abhorrent, but it’s a corporation, and corporations will always choose profit over everything else. It’s really naive to think they’ll offer their customers the more ethical option just out of the goodness of their hearts, especially when the market has been taking for granted or even actively discouraging the things that positively differentiated them from the competition.
Even with Graphene, it’s increasingly likely that it’ll be dead to new Pixels in the coming years. And I say that as someone posting this from a Pixel 9 running Graphene.
By not using GrapheneOS obviously.
Also GrapheneOS is about security not about privacy or freedom. So GrapheneOS is just not really part of the discussion here.
Which is buying a new/used Google Pixel which is still supporting Google. Even if we got it second-hand, the development for GrapheneOS still depends on Pixel phone device and making it support the newer model which is still in a way, support Google as you still getting their product to then jailbreak it.
You’re not disproving my point that there is no feasible way for me as a consumer to have a functional device without begrudgingly supporting either apple or android in their walled garden bullshit. No amount of “voting with my wallet” will fix this without a proper alternative
It kinda depends on what you define as “functional” though. Because depending on that it is definitely feasible to vote with your wallet.
In my case for example, I use a fairphone with lineageos and microg. This means I have to live with some minor inconveniences around banking and such. But, for me, this is a functional device and I can do everything I want to do with it.
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I spent $500 on a Murena only for the thing to brick a month later because the cord or whatever connecting the rechargable battery to the rest of the phone somehow split off. Would’ve been open to shipping the thing back to them for a repair/replacement since a local shop was unable to do so, but they use UPS for shipping and there was no way in hell I was going to deal with the absolute mess it was to receive the phone to begin with a second time.
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I bought the Murena One since it was the cheapest model that was close to the specs of my phone at the time. Figured $500 was already overpaying considering how much lower cost my previous phone was, but also, who the hell thinks about a $500 phone bricking in a month? I just find it inexcusable regardless.
I remember wanting to get the removable battery, but they didn’t offer that with the One, and I’d be losing specs if I got a model in my budget that did have one. I also wasn’t going to spend over a grand for a phone with the Fairphone models available through them at the time.
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Doesn’t work that way. We should stop attacking each other and start attacking the people actually responsible for this nonsense. Apple both was the first for gluing the phone together and removing the headphone port. Every other device manufacturer follows suit such that people cannot choose. Samsung was publicly mocking Apple for locking the bootloader and guess what? Which Samsung phone can now freely install any operating system? That’s right, none of the more modern ones.
Only the new battery initiative from the EU which forces manufacturers to make batteries normally replaceable again, will change that in 2027. Short version is, if there isn’t any sort of bigger power forcing them to do something, they will refuse to, as long as screwing you makes more money. And in most cases, it does.
It works exactly that way. The reason other manufacturers follow suit when Apple does something stupid or anti-consumer is because people buy Apple regardless. When Samsung, as a corporation, see that their main competitor has cut costs by taking out features, and it’s still leading the market, there is absolutely no reason for them to not eventually do the same.
Everyone who’s replied to me so far conveniently talks about what they can do today while ignoring that my comment is about how we got here over the past two decades. Yes, it’s true that people don’t really queue for phones anymore, and it’s true that we don’t have other options now. But when we did have the options, people still preferred eating up the crap one with gusto, and usually for very shallow reasons. If you’re one of the few who didn’t, then you have no reason to feel called out by my comment.
Regulation like in the EU still requires people to vote politically for representatives that take these things into consideration, which again, clearly isn’t something that happens in the US. No “bigger power” is going to simply come out of nowhere to protect the consumers’ interests if the consumers themselves don’t give a shit about their own rights in the first place.
I understand that it’s a sad and tough reality to accept, but no amount of screaming at corpos on Lemmy or Reddit is going to undo the damage. And installing GrapheneOS on a Pixel is not the moral flex people here think it is.
Ah yes, I too blame the overworked and underpaid population that were never given a real education besides a dysfunctional and authoritarian public school system which contains at least 50% pro-status-quo propaganda and omit real useful information, and teaches kids to obey teachers and the school admin, and subjugate their free will. /s
“I get in line to buy shit phones because I’m oppressed, overworked and underpaid”. Alright. Hopefully the corporate overlords will do something about it, then.
When did you last see a queue for a new phone?
This is why I moved to iPhone a few years ago. Every premium android was a legit knockoff of iPhone in every single way, down to the lack of a headphone jack and SD card slot. Why continue chasing these phones that aren’t even as good as the real thing?
Android USED TO be better than iPhone, but Google is just gung-ho on enshitification. Apple, for the walled garden that it is, at least works well with its eco system. Android is so fragmented and complicated that it’s collapsing under its own weight.
I just hate that so much. The openness was one of the two reasons why I got an android phone. The other one being the price.
AOSP
Android Open Source Project
look inside
not open source
mfw
You can still use AOSP to make your own phone, but you’ll just have to built your own apps too, since eventually, all of google play apps aren’t gonna work on degoogled Android.
you’ll just have to built your own apps too
We are well on our way.
I was confused before I made the switch. So many of the most useful kinds of apps weren’t maintained anymore by anyone on the Google Play store. I had this surreal feeling that the app ecosystem was getting worse every year.
And then I installed F-Droid and figured out where all of my favorite app developers went. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Not a big deal, considering that FOSSIFY project offers all the basics you’d need for a degoogled phone: call app, messaging, contacts, calculator, calendar, gallery, etc. F-droid also has a good selection of apps, though most people, me included, will still need whatsapp one way or another. At least that thing doesn’t need any of Google’s “essential” apps.
