@ajroach42 UK feels likely to insist upon a digital ID "card" which will effectively mandate carrying Android or IOS. And quite probably handing it unlocked to every cop and city official.

@ajroach42 Folks tend to wonder why I refuse to go the easy road. I always reply "Some of that stuff might make my life easier, yes. But I have the option to work around these complications, by lifestyle and training, and I'm doing this so I know what to do to compensate when using that stuff becomes infeasible for one reason or another."

@ajroach42 I live in Denmark. It is very hard to get by in daily life without an Android or Apple device. I tried, for many years, until my current employer gave me a work phone (which runs Android).

There is an ubiquitous payment app that has largely replaced cash. It won't run on anything but an Apple or Android device.

If you use public transit (which I do), you can currently use a plastic card with readers mounted in buses, trains and stations. But this will be phased out next year and replaced with an app that only runs on Apple or Android devices. You will effectively no longer be able to use public transit unless you own an Apple or Android device.

There is a national authentication system (used by banks, public authorities, etc.) which *can* currently be used with a little token you can have in your pocket (one which displays numbers, and one which reads them aloud, for blind citizens) ... but you can't set it up without using an Apple or Android device. There have been talks about phasing out the code tokens entirely, so the only option to authenticate yourself with public authorities requires owning an Apple or Android device.

And all of this won't run on eg. a Fairphone with elementaryOS, because all the Android versions use Google's "authenticity verification" features, effectively locking out anything not fully controlled by Google.

It feels like living in a kind of digital vassal state fully colonized by two foreign tech giants.

@ajroach42 I suspect they're going to get the same sort of pushback that Windows is with Windows 11 - people aren't going to abandon Android, they're going to perch on the last "good" update that they can and rely on community patches and updates and unofficial forks to keep them alive.

And hopefully this protest with our dollars will mean something, but even if it doesn't it'll at least buy us some time until something new and better rises to fill the vacuum.

@patrick That's fair. It's entirely possible, likely even, that I've misunderstood the rules here.

I didn't read much into it beyond the fact that it looked like a bad day for unlocked bootloaders.

@ajroach42 @Longplay_Games no what? thats sentencing phones to death. i hadnt heard that. what the hell

@geniodiabolico @zillion I'd also love a real pocket computer with some purpose made software for pocket computing (as opposed to shrunk down linux)

@geniodiabolico @ajroach42 They're still for sale on Amazon! I wrote most of a book on my PalmPilot. There must be _something_ now. Perhaps Google has just opened up a whole new market.