Yeah, I tried non-google forks, and I couldn’t find my food badda-bam-bam-tisch /s there’s a joke in there about AI ruining dining as well but I digress.
I have actually dabbled in 3rd party ROMs, but the trouble is that, at least in Denmark, I need my phone to be trusted. And unlocking the bootloader breaks the trust. All of a sudden I couldn’t use my phone to sign with the national ID app (mitID), I couldn’t use MobilePay (a ubiquitous Danish venmo-like app) or my banking app, and Netflix started to bitch.
The ID app is especially bad. I use Firefox as my default browser on my android phone. But most implementations of the ID app doesn’t work unless you have chrome as the default. And forget about not having google services running, that breaks all sort of official apps.
What we need is an EU founded android clone, that all government apps must support. Something that doesn’t require an overpriced Pixel phone(I’m looking at you Graphene). No google services, and the user must have admin rights.
An EU regulation, requiring that all phones, tablets and PCs, must make available methods to install an OS of your choice. That’s what we need. That would be a great way to fuck over both Apple, Google, and the US dominance on tech in general.
Why not Ubuntu Touch? Linux is European from the ground up and is an extremely solid foundation, UT even has features that Apple and Google have struggled with forever, like full compatibility with desktop apps. It just needs polish and app developers, and that’s where EU funding would come in, as you’re suggesting for Android. From what I read it also has a working Android compatibility layer.
Not that I’d discard the idea, but it just seems more likely to succeed with more phones, if we stuck with android, just in another flavor.
The desktop app argument may sound cool on the surface, but to me it’s almost a counter argument. But that’s because I used windows ce pocket (or whatever it was called) before smartphones became a thing. It was really just a PDA with a GSM modem, that could make calls. Anyway, at the time people hadn’t figured out the smartphone UI, and everything required a stylus. I mean, even the keyboard required a stylus, because the interactable objects were too small to reliably hit with your fingers. Running desktop programs on your phone requires some tweaking to work.
Running desktop programs on your phone requires some tweaking to work.
I‘m curious to see how Ubuntu Touch addresses this. Nowadays smartphones are just normal computers, so you have to wonder whether the historic restrictions of Android and iOS are still relevant. I‘m inclined to see it as a user-interface problem only (small screen, touch vs click), which is a fully solved problem on web, with responsive layouts. Not sure what happened to Windows, but that’s also quite old and maybe it was just not well designed.
Yeah, I tried non-google forks, and I couldn’t find my food badda-bam-bam-tisch /s there’s a joke in there about AI ruining dining as well but I digress.
I have actually dabbled in 3rd party ROMs, but the trouble is that, at least in Denmark, I need my phone to be trusted. And unlocking the bootloader breaks the trust. All of a sudden I couldn’t use my phone to sign with the national ID app (mitID), I couldn’t use MobilePay (a ubiquitous Danish venmo-like app) or my banking app, and Netflix started to bitch.
The ID app is especially bad. I use Firefox as my default browser on my android phone. But most implementations of the ID app doesn’t work unless you have chrome as the default. And forget about not having google services running, that breaks all sort of official apps.
What we need is an EU founded android clone, that all government apps must support. Something that doesn’t require an overpriced Pixel phone(I’m looking at you Graphene). No google services, and the user must have admin rights.
An EU regulation, requiring that all phones, tablets and PCs, must make available methods to install an OS of your choice. That’s what we need. That would be a great way to fuck over both Apple, Google, and the US dominance on tech in general.
Why not Ubuntu Touch? Linux is European from the ground up and is an extremely solid foundation, UT even has features that Apple and Google have struggled with forever, like full compatibility with desktop apps. It just needs polish and app developers, and that’s where EU funding would come in, as you’re suggesting for Android. From what I read it also has a working Android compatibility layer.
Not that I’d discard the idea, but it just seems more likely to succeed with more phones, if we stuck with android, just in another flavor.
The desktop app argument may sound cool on the surface, but to me it’s almost a counter argument. But that’s because I used windows ce pocket (or whatever it was called) before smartphones became a thing. It was really just a PDA with a GSM modem, that could make calls. Anyway, at the time people hadn’t figured out the smartphone UI, and everything required a stylus. I mean, even the keyboard required a stylus, because the interactable objects were too small to reliably hit with your fingers. Running desktop programs on your phone requires some tweaking to work.
I‘m curious to see how Ubuntu Touch addresses this. Nowadays smartphones are just normal computers, so you have to wonder whether the historic restrictions of Android and iOS are still relevant. I‘m inclined to see it as a user-interface problem only (small screen, touch vs click), which is a fully solved problem on web, with responsive layouts. Not sure what happened to Windows, but that’s also quite old and maybe it was just not well designed.