That sounds illegal.
Depends. Are you from the EU or not?
I am, that’s why it sounds illegal. :D
This article is a thinly veiled ad paired with fearmongering to get gullible users to buy the shit phones they sell (or not, some people have been on “waitlists” for 5+ years after providing a full payment).
Granted, their phones are fully open, but have next to no apps.
Personally I’ll stick with Android 12, rooted, and see what the future brings.
…in Singapore…
This is an ad
Purism is sketchy btw:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKegmu0V75s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IjUryQOlgk
(Louis Rossman videos explaining how a customer was denied a refund for a “pre-order” and then they tried to coerce Louis to take down the video.)
Edit: typo
As a person who experienced the customer support regrading preorders I can confirm this firm is extremly sketchy.
Kinda depressing that all of big-tech seems to have given up “innovating” (finding applications for publicly-funded research), and have become rent-seeking dinosaurs.
Capitalism baby
In parallel, Google has rolled out its Play Integrity API, which allows developers to limit app functionality when sideloaded, effectively pushing users to install apps only through the Google Play Store.
All of this while EU forbids Apple to do the same, what is the idea here? Measuring how EU reacts?
…did you read the ad…? It quite obviously answers your question and calls out the difference. The large, glaring one. The one that probably even a first grader would grasp.
Is it the same though? Google is allowing the developers to choose to prevent sideloading. I thought Apple’s issue was that they prevented side loading completely.
“Purism makes premium phones…” Haaaaaaaaa 😂
Correction: purism sells mediocre phones for premium prices.
Not bothered if necessary Il patch every apk before installing it, one more stupid American move that will ultimately give the entire market to the Chinese.
Why is it so hard to “Don’t be Evil”
That would mean less money, at least in the short term, but also in the long term as it grants the user the autonomy of optionality, the power to choose some of Google’s edicts. Really it’s about the power to shape the choices of the users in the future. Take their power away. And in the future this will be conducive to leverage this power against the user for more money.
I asked the AI about it, in case anyone is curious https://chatgpt.com/share/68454a70-5cd8-8005-8075-3579244f0ce4
I’m tired of this evil is related to money. When did our species die on the hill that money’s more important than humanity itself?
The moment money became the only way to get food.
That is bullshit, the economy is created to force you into the labor market. This is just a symptom of capitalism.
In Singapore, lots of boomers are downloading scam apps from facebook lured by promises of discounts and free gifts, handing out accessibility privileges, and they’ll even argue vehemently against loved ones and bank staff when confronted. When it all inevitably blows up, they blame absolutely everyone except themselves, including praising Apple for some reason.
Being the largest voting block, they managed to get banks responsible for reimbursing their losses and there was even an idea floated of getting everyone to contribute to a shitty scam insurance fund. Many major banking apps are paranoid af and block usage from simple things like usb debugging turned on.
Absolutely stupidity. And there’s nothing we can do about it when the politicians love them so much.
Degoogled ROMs are gonna be the bomb in the future.
effectively pushing users to install apps only through the Google Play Store
I wonder what this will mean for Aurora and Fdroid etc.
This is my immediate first thought seeing this. This fucking sucks. Part of the whole benefit of something like LineageOS or e (OS?) was being able to use Fdroid to stay away from Google as much as possible. Now this is going to potentially make things weird.
I hope f-droid has nothing to do with Google play store, thought they are their own store without connection to Google.
doesn’t do anything to f-droid, but probably kills aurora a bit. the developer can prevent their app from being sideloaded. why would one prevent that if they are distributing via f-droid too?
K bye
Yikes this really doesn’t look good. Is there any reporting on it from independent journalists (or anyone else who isn’t also advertising their own competing operating system)?
Not that I’ve seen and I’d take what Purism say with a grain of salt: they’ve acted like pretty shitty gatekeepers themselves. Nothing they mentioned in the article seems too egregious in truth and they’re exaggerating the scale of it: Play Store app DRM exists already, and the restrictions on browser-downloaded apps they mention can be bypassed (albeit by having to go into settings) and don’t apply to apps installed through other apps stores (F-Droid, etc).
