• 001100 010010OP
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      251 year ago

      Ahh, so the only thing saving us from a corporate dominated future is laws…

      Well I’m an American, I’m sure if they wanted, they could always make a EU version and US version. I a bit worried for the future.

      • @[email protected]
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        141 year ago

        Android is open source, and there are many forks of it already. If they were to try this, those of us who care would just run a fork of Android.

        • Jeff Van Gundy
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          61 year ago

          Assuming that there will be phones with unlockable bootloaders sold in the US in the future. There are precious few of them now. Importing’s always an option (and quite easy these days), but then you run into the problem of band support.

        • @[email protected]
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          31 year ago

          Burning a new ROM is just as hard fora regular user as jailbreaking an iPhone, so practically it doesn’t make a difference if android is open-source or not.

          Also, even though core android is OSS, what you and i run on our phones heavily depends on the play framework which is Google proprietary. Amazon has tried and failed to fork android before with its fire devices and that hasn’t worked.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 year ago

            FYI GrapheneOS is trivial to install (you don’t need to do all that exploit and root nonsense you used to have to!) and runs entirely without Google Play Services (unless you want to install them in a less-invasive way, which is also officially supported)

            • @Orygin
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              11 year ago

              Trivial to install if you have a pixel phone. As far as I can tell on their website, no other devices are officially supported, and building your own rom for your phone is out of reach for most (even advanced) users

              • @[email protected]
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                11 year ago

                Correct, they say that pixels are the only phones that are secure enough for their needs (and the fact that they’re pretty developer-friendly I imagine is a big plus)

            • @dkn
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              11 year ago

              This also applies to most custom ROMs such as Pixel Experience, LineageOS or ArrowOS. Lineage can be installed with or without Google services on most phones

      • @gammasfor
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        31 year ago

        I mean they could do that, but then they take on the resource overhead of maintaining both an EU and non-EU version of the OS.

        And for what? To stop the tiny percentage of people who do side loading of apps from doing so because reasons?

        It financially doesn’t make sense for there to be anything but one version of the OS.

          • @dkn
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            11 year ago

            I feel like they’d not even mention it in any press material and just include it in the software update discreetly

          • @[email protected]
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            41 year ago

            Doesn’t Apple already allow side loading to some degree?

            You can just put an app onto a iDevice through iTunes, without having to run it through the App Store. Apple even puts out a specifically outdated version of iTunes that still retains much of the App functionality.

            It’s not as though they’re trying to build the feature in from scratch.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 year ago

            Why would it be a huge undertaking? Allowing installing apps from package files obtained from anywhere seems like a trivial change to the software for a company with a lot of resources.