Google’s Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. In its quest for ever-greater profits, the tech giant has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source nature over the last decade.
Originally published on The Lever, but that one asks you to sign up.
2 days ago I moved from GrapheneOS back to Stock Pixel in my 8 Pro, just to see what all the hype about the new android 16 in Pixel is about. Jesus, this is way worse than I remember. i tried it for 2 whole days, and that shit just won’t allow me to have ANY control over my phone. It’s fucking ridiculous. On Android 15 I was able to uninstall Google Drive, Meet, Youtube, and many other Google apps, this time around all it would allow was “disable”. What’s next, removing the ability to disable (which I don’t trust anyway)?
Fast forward to today, I’m back on GOS, and my anxiety levels are down again. This shit is insane, and I honestly can’t understand why anyone would put up with this crap.
I’ve been considering moving to GOS because of all the Google shenanigans, but I need to make sure everything works since my job means I have dozens of MS authenticator entries for various admin tasks. I really want to try it out, but can’t afford to have to rebuild all those entries on a new system (and the notifications not work)
I’m stuck with Google. No aftermarket OS supports my phone. :(
May I suggest you give RethinkDNS a shot? At first it’s kind of convoluted to configure, but once you have it set up the way you want, it’s smooth sailing from there.
https://github.com/celzero/rethink-app
This has been par for other OEM-flavored Android phones for years, unfortunately.
Disableis alright, not that the phone itself isn’t a privacy nightmare in other ways.Those apps are installed in the squashfs image. Such images are write once, read many and thus they can’t be mutated at runtime.
Well who made the decision to put non-system apps in the system partition?
I know, and that’s exactly my point. They used to be in the user space, now they are in the system partition. They CHOSE to do this.