this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
131 points (87.4% liked)

Asklemmy

44149 readers
1446 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 109 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I trust Apple more than Google. May be misplaced faith, but that’s the primary reason.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 30 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Using Google services is not a strict requirement to run Android. There are whole online communities around unGoogled Android.

[–] djsaskdja@reddthat.com 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I’ve long considered making this switch from iPhone to an ungoogled Android device. What always bothered me is still basically having to install proprietary apps from a Play Store adjacent source. Like the Aurora store is basically just the Play Store logged under someone else’s account. I know you can side load but that’d be a pain to maintain updates. Wish there was like a Flathub-like store on Android I could use instead.

[–] sunzu@kbin.run 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] djsaskdja@reddthat.com 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There's no proprietary apps on F-Droid. It doesn't even have Signal which is open source.

[–] iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure what's your pain point then? With Aurora you can install and automatically update proprietary apps. You can use anonymous accounts so you are not officially logged in (does this still work?). If you want FOSS, then fdroid. There's more updating tools such as unobtanium, but seems what you want is Aurora.

[–] djsaskdja@reddthat.com 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I’d just like to be completely free of Google’s app distribution infrastructure if possible. I’ll have to look into unobtanium. I haven’t heard of that one previously.

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Google s is the largest, but not the only one. Amazon, Samsung and some OEMs have their own app stores too.

There are alson sites that archive and distribute apks, like Apkmirror.

I have a tablet logged to nothing (as in no account, not the OEM) and all my apps come from fdroid, obtanium or apkmirror.

It started as an experiment, and honestly it's (for me) not a big hurdle, but an app store would make things easier, that's for sure.

[–] djsaskdja@reddthat.com 2 points 5 months ago

Obtainium does look sick. This might be what I was looking for.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 months ago

I am not sure why you think this is so bad. You have a way to upload the apps you can’t get on F-Droid (default or by adding repositories (I have microG, DivestOS, Molly, Cheogram repos)). Many apps work fine enough without Play services with microG—except the stupid banking ones that don’t want you to root, run custom OS, unGoogle, or literally do anything with the device you own.

Personally I hope this is all a stop-gap to Linux phones. I tried Ubuntu Phone last year & while parts of it looked great, the rough edges were apparent—especially the chroot environments for applications not in the Ubuntu store.

[–] ignism@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

Same here, try to de-google my life while sitting comfortably in the Apple ecosystem as the happy hypocrite that I am. But the ecosystem is also the main reason to stay, not that it is hard to get out, but it is just a vastly superior experience if you don’t want to spend unlimited hours to customize every goddamn setting. Also, the ecosystem’s main feature ‘continuity’ is unmatched on other systems.