I only hope that manufacturers respond to this kind of behavior. Motorola deserves full credit for adopting grapheneos. I think some of the Chinese manufacturers have their own forks too?
How? The TOS for selling phones with Google services is that they can’t sell phones with an Android fork outside China. Even the ODM is affected, meaning nobody will ever think this.
I saw in Italy that selling phones without Google services is a death sentence, Huawei crashed from 25% marketshare to 0% basically overnight even if they already had a “plan B” where they made “new” phones using the same specs and codename but in a different shape to buy time and when they launched their fork they had a 1:1 replacement for GMS called HMS so devs could still embed Google Maps and it will be replaced automatically by petal maps. Devs could upload their apps with a single click and users could install Google services unofficially installing an “unofficial 😉” APK with all the right signatures. Nobody did that. One click = too much work = nobody touches the default
At least they can leave the bootloader unlockable for us, but fucking Xiaomi really needs to make 200 new fucking models a year with lots of proprietary bits and abandons them after 6 months so it’s impossibile for the community to make a well supported custom ROM. They copy everything from apple except the part where they should only make 4 fucking models a year. Basic, standard, pro and pro max. Don’t need a “Xiaomi Redmi note 29T pro 5G wideband edition”
To be clear, GrapheneOS or any other fork of Android is not a long term viable solution as it is still dependent on Google. We need to break the Google/Apple duopoly. And of course, Linux phones are an option but people need top get behind it.
The way google is behaving is making a hard fork more likely.
Its not a solution, but it buys time - Linux phones will take some time.
I’m guessing that features like relockable bootloaders & open source drivers help both.
I only hope that manufacturers respond to this kind of behavior. Motorola deserves full credit for adopting grapheneos. I think some of the Chinese manufacturers have their own forks too?
How? The TOS for selling phones with Google services is that they can’t sell phones with an Android fork outside China. Even the ODM is affected, meaning nobody will ever think this.
I saw in Italy that selling phones without Google services is a death sentence, Huawei crashed from 25% marketshare to 0% basically overnight even if they already had a “plan B” where they made “new” phones using the same specs and codename but in a different shape to buy time and when they launched their fork they had a 1:1 replacement for GMS called HMS so devs could still embed Google Maps and it will be replaced automatically by petal maps. Devs could upload their apps with a single click and users could install Google services unofficially installing an “unofficial 😉” APK with all the right signatures. Nobody did that. One click = too much work = nobody touches the default
At least they can leave the bootloader unlockable for us, but fucking Xiaomi really needs to make 200 new fucking models a year with lots of proprietary bits and abandons them after 6 months so it’s impossibile for the community to make a well supported custom ROM. They copy everything from apple except the part where they should only make 4 fucking models a year. Basic, standard, pro and pro max. Don’t need a “Xiaomi Redmi note 29T pro 5G wideband edition”
To be clear, GrapheneOS or any other fork of Android is not a long term viable solution as it is still dependent on Google. We need to break the Google/Apple duopoly. And of course, Linux phones are an option but people need top get behind it.
The way google is behaving is making a hard fork more likely.
Its not a solution, but it buys time - Linux phones will take some time.
I’m guessing that features like relockable bootloaders & open source drivers help both.