Discussion
Google has become an enemy of the open web, and it's increasingly locking down Android to dominate (with Apple) mobile computing. https://keepandroidopen.org/ A once-principled company gets more and more control-freakish, for money and power.
Nothing Google does now is surprising, just predictable.
@dangillmor @lennart These days, who's going to stop them? If some government agencies starts paying attention, they'll just write a contribution check to as many Republican candidates or the president that they need to.
@dangillmor Capitalism is pure evil. And the biggest propaganda success ever was to convince a huge chunk of the global population that the modern Western type of democracy with political parties and elections ever few years was the only path to freedom, and that you cannot have democracy without capitalism.
Now before anybody accuses me of being a "commie", I think that the type of socialism run by one-party states is absolutely horrible. We need something entirely different. We need some kind of global revolution that cannot be taken over by a revolutionary elite who afterwards install themselves as dictators, even if they rule "for all the humans on the planet". We need the kind of revolution that creates cooperative networks of equals without hierarchies.
That being said, I think that we can't stop Google from doing horrible things. It's a capitalist company, nobody should ever trust any of those. Besides, smartphones, tablets, all kinds of mobile computing devices, have never been "open", except for those made by a few fringe producers; they have been cryptographically locked down since the beginning, unlike personal computers. But then again, a quarter of a century ago a consortium of digital industry leaders decided to kill personal computing, and they have come quite a long way by now; it all began with "trusted computing" and the TPM chip, which by now sits inside almost every personal computer. With "secure boot", a few vendors can decide which operating systems a machine can and cannot run. And now other parts of the computer industry are killing personal computers by buying up all the hardware for their AI data centres. Having a computer completely under the control of its user, allowing it to run any software whatsoever, that's something which the people in power have always seen as an error that needed to be patched. Putting the TPM chip into PCs was a manoeuvre to shift the PC into the same direction as gaming consoles and mobile phones. Google allowing Android users to install software outside of Google's control was always just about having a competitive edge against Apple, who never allowed iOS users to do that. Now that Android is pretty much an established platform that isn't going away, they can do away with that and close up their system just like Apple's.
It's a problem inherent in the investor-driven, remote-shareholder corporate form.
Most small businesses are pretty well behaved, because the personal morality of the entrepreneurs creates their business ethos, and in any case they are generally close to their local or online communities, which complain or desert them if they behave badly.
But the whole purpose of investors is to extract profit - they're not otherwise involved, so large corporates have no internal, natural brake on abuse, or incentive to good - and if they achieve enough monopoly there's no natural external brake either - except the government, which in the US is cuckoo.
@dangillmor
Googlefree smartphones:
https://friendica.world/display/84b6ef2b-116a-895c-242e-d53123920841
Jolla
Fairphone
Volla
Murena
Freifon
Punkt
@dangillmor dont touch my apks google
@dangillmor The simple warning that power corrupts has a polarised version with absolute power. But it fails to describe this incremental obsessive steering towards the latter.
Something that happens so often that we need to rethink how power/responsibility is handled. Across the planet.
Our genetics often still operate with small, egalitarian community notions.
@dangillmor Were they ever principled though?
@dangillmor This is so clear, as they haven't a product that in itself isn't producing value by *addiction*. Apple instead created more dependency on exclusive hardware (with returns from services, even extortively), Meta with online services (returns from ads, payed manipulation), Amazon with old goods capitalism, etc.
All of them, when they start loosing the initial grip, have to change, to another form of abuse, as any predator. They're all just slimy human garbage, with nice words.
@dangillmor
I blinked and missed when they had principles. Before Eric Schmitt?
@dangillmor
I have and Android phone. I have shut down all Google stuff. Now every time I start the phone I get ten or more messages insisting I enable playstore as my apps like the met will not work. Everything works well by the way.
@Christo_459 @dangillmor similar problem for me and a new car (running Android Automotive)... had to spend a couple of hours digging through settings and disabling apps before I'm comfortable connecting the phone through Android Auto.
My next phone will definitely be de-Googled, so then I'll have the fun of trying to get those working together...
@mossman @Christo_459 @dangillmor
Unfortunately, on stock Android operating systems, where the Play Store is bundled, it is the mechanism used to provides various important security updates in a timely fashion.
Particularly to the webview (used by lots of apps and the OS) and Project Mainline modules.
Theres less benefits to getting these updates via Play Store if your device gets regular monthly operating system updates. But even then it may be your phones manufacturer end up pushing out some of these fixes much later than how Google do via the Play Store. Many manufacturers can be rather slow, particularly on cheaper devices.
@dazinism @mossman @dangillmor
Increasing numbers of my apps are from the F-Droid store which update fine.
My next phone will be google-free
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