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For a long time I thought side loading was something special because it didn’t say “installing software”, so it must be some very special procedure that is required for mobile devices because of limitations or requirements with the hardware, right?
Yeah no, it was just a made up marketing term to push people away from installing their own software on their own devices
Fuck all big tech companies
What’s going on? Why does it feel like every megacorporation have become completely openly anti-consumer? Yes, companies have always been shady and doing everything for profit, but at least they did it subtly and backtracked as soon as the backlash came. Now they’re just shamelessly force feeding us spyware and “digital-only licenses revokable at any time”.
I think theres two aspects to it
- social licensing - e.g. Google tries and gets away with X, so the others now perceive they’re less likely to receive excessive pushback and are emboldened to go for it. This is why I feel there needs to be a pervasive and continuous push towards consumer rights - smaller cases can snowball quickly in the wrong direction, never so in the reverse.
- share price driven margin pressure, a figurative ideal business that balanced perfectly its price/margins/costs against consumer demands/buying power would still be pushed to make graph go up and right - the usual enshittification argument.
The first feeds into the second, once your competitor moves against consumer interests, C suites are/perceive they are then under pressure to match peers, else fall behind.
Screwing over customers is baked into Capitalism, even more so with the current scale and concentration of a handful of business operating in a weak regulatory environment.
This is such an overwhelming power grab in line with all the other crap they are currently pushing like disabling Manifest V2. The US urgently needs to ramp up their antitrust legislation, or else - if you extrapolate the current trajectories - they might soon be in a position where the US government has to do what google says and not the other way around
Remember when Apple were supposed to be the bad guys and Google/Android were “one of us”?
Marketing at its best…
Adb won’t work to disable/remove ADV?
GOOGLE is the malware.
If we define malware as it is defined here, windows defender is malware.
What’s the difference between malware and windows?
Malware is well maintained by its developers.
It might as well be if you’re trying to do something it doesn’t like. I created the registry entry in my VM and it still keeps turning itself back on.
Is this something we can opt out of, like how we can for Play Protect?
AFAIK you can only avoid it by using a custom ROM like GrapheneOS
My phone doesn’t have any custom ROM support yet, so I guess I’m screwed? I love F-Droid, but this missive amounts to just ragebait for people who don’t have Pixel devices.
Buy a phone that lineage os support then. Way more options than pixels. Pretty cheap used, you just have to accept one from a few years ago. and make sure that any required bootloader unlock from oem can still be done.
I’ve been meaning to switch forever now…
I’m all set then.
The implementation about to be done is actually just another smaller step to trying to be completely locked down.
In the same way you have to go and allow developer options to install apks outside of the play store now, this new thing will take you a couple more clicks to enable it and have a one time 24 hour waiting period before you can install whatever you want.
You can buy a DeGoogled Android from Fairphone or Murena. Or if you have a Pixel, you can install grapheneos.
Best way is to not include it in the first place by using another ROM. If that’s not an option, you can always remove it via root. It may also be possible to use ADB/Shizuku to get rid of it, but Google could add checks to prevent ADB from removing it. Then again apps installed via ADB aren’t subject to verification.
