Eh, I wouldn’t say useless.

I’d say they only account for user sentiment at best. Which can have an impact, but I’d say incredibly unlikely that there will be an impact on this one.

Not using android as much as possible will have a much higher impact though.

Petitions are useless

Protests are useless

Governments and corporations conspire to implement surveilance knowing what comes next

<-- we are here

Actual resistence

That is simply wrong. Public pressure can certainly be effective. In any case, it’s definitely better than doing nothing at all.

Only if efforts can transfer over, which means devs currently standing on the paid side of Google!Android would have to move over to develop Linux mobile and develop for Linux mobile.

the year of the Linux smartphone

That’s great and all but the current linux phone offerings are… not suitable for general public use. The iPad generation will simply not be able to use them in their current state.

You do know that android is Linux under the hood right?

So we have a Linux phone now, it’s just got a crappy front end on it

There’s diminishing returns, and we have lives outside our phones. Well, most of us. We can put a limited amount of time and energy into this, but pushing Linux requires a great deal of effort and time.

Not saying we shouldn’t also do that, but in the mean time fighting to keep the options we do have less shitty shouldn’t be completely abandoned.

A. It’s not an OS update. It’s part of Google Play Services.
B. I’m pretty sure this applies even on Android 12 because it’s Google Play Services. Years back, Google started moving functionality like this into Google Play Services so your phone could get new features even if you had a bad manufacturer and OS updates were months or even years behind. It was introduced as a feature then.
C. This does work, but some apps (notably banking apps) block non-Google Android, even if there is no legitimate security reason for doing so. This will vary by OS and even phones running the same OS. Official GrapheneOS builds for officially supported devices probably have the best compatibility with apps in terms of the apps not blocking your phone. Maybe there are some rooted phones that patch apps to bypass “integrity” checks. Some features of your phone just will not work, even if you have a third-party OS with official support for your phone (contactless payments). Hopefully the EU gets on this and at least Europeans or people who can trick their phones into thinking they are Europeans will get some of their control back.
D. Most people can’t live without the apps that are available only on Google’s store or that require Google Play Services. That’s most apps. Even if you don’t need those specific apps, you will need to deal with other stuff like setting up Unified Push if you want to receive timely notifications. My parents are not going to set up a Unified Push gateway.

If only the founding fathers had written the right to bear apps shall not be infringed in an amendment.

Oh well can’t change the ancient text now, just have to be governed by it forever. 🤷 (It’s a shame the ancient powder-wigged wizards that wrote the constitution weren’t clairvoyant.)

Wait so you’re somehow trying to blame THIS on Apple too?

In what way does this have anything to do with RCS or Apple lmao

OK but that is about a 10000x bigger project

There are, but the market is rigged by monopolists. And things like banks increasingly require apps that won’t even run on customer Android ROMs easily.

The regulators are needed here.

I’m pretty sure that custom roms will remove that 24hr wait period from their binaries. Android is still open source and removing a check isn’t going to be very hard for them.

The tech ecosystem is as open as you can. Use linux. Use SearxNG. Use graphene or other custom roms. There’s options out there, you just have to start adopting them instead of just complaining online about having no choice.

i hope linux phones succeed

All of the alternatives eventually run into the same “Will my banking app work on it?” problem. The absence of a healthy app economy is the one thing that can’t be fixed by throwing software engineers at it, and it is what caused the death of Windows Phone.

Rejoice. As an Android owner, you have options of And-nodroid 😉

The issue is the hardware, we already have software

Companies have reversed unpopular decisions in the past (just saw a thing about Facebook reversing some AI thing). So there may be some possible chance of them reversing this decision. I’m not hopeful but the cost is cheap, and it has a better chance of success than doing nothing

I am not so sure. It creats activity, being passive is worse. We should encourage all type of protests, even petitions.

There are already some movements, like #Keep Android Open that ask to contact local regulators and law makers, this petition is useful to have a concrete number of people that agree and that can be used officially

here it makes at least some sense to verify that each person voted once. the mail list stuff is of course to much and should be optional from the beginning.

or making a cydia-style open source repository style app store that’s accessible through custom firmware.

Not only would that solve this little problem, it would reduce Google’s power and remove one’s data from the claws of US authorities (were the Patriot and Cloud acts let them mass track everybody using a Google product).

Just make sure you chose a non-US Linux phone.