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Cool. So what happens if I run a version of Android that doesn’t inherit Google security theater cruft? That is to say…what if the user simply…does not…upgrade the Android version to be affected by this (eg: uses an old phone or blocks OS version update?).
My phone is going on 7yrs old. Perfectly happy with it. When it breaks, I will get a phone of the same era (2nd hand or new-old stock) or investigate other options.
So, it seems to me, the winning move is not to play the game (in any one of 100 diff ways).
Or am I missing something here? Is there something that will prevent older tech from working? Because if so, I am happy to YOLO my phone and switch to a dumbphone if I have to.
As I understood, they will roll this out through “Google Play Services” and not the Android OS. So, any device with Google Play Services will be affected.
You can read more here: https://github.com/keepandroidopen/keepandroidopen.github.io/blob/main/src/content/pages/en/index.md
Thanks for that. I’ve been meaning to (re) disable Google Play services. I have a few older phones too that never had it to begin with. I wonder how/if Aurora Store will be impacted. Presumably, if you don’t have Google Play Services functioning, you don’t get the poison pill. But…given that Big Evil likes to just … do shit (cf the recent 4GB forced ingestion of their LLM with Chrome) I dunno.
In any case, step 1 is probably nuking that.
I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to stop using Android. I don’t need my phone. Sure, it’s convenient and often helpful, but it’s not something I can’t live without. Fuck these assholes.
Are you sure you can’t? Because when my phone was stolen last month, I came to terms with how much the modern world needs one to have one.
