If I am already using a rooted but proprietary smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S23), downloading my apps from other sources than Google Play, how would Google be able to control what I do with it? If necessary, I could just stay on my current OS build as well. All in all, while politically and philosophically, Google’s new policy is bad, I don’t feel threatened by it with my current understand of the situation and technology…
De-Googled forks of Android would have just reversed that limitation
Reversing malicious changes is an extra burden. Google has been slowly making everything worse for years and the forks haven’t been able to do much about it.
In have e/OS on the Fairphone 6 that comes degoogled. It’s great. I was pissed that microG had calls home, but I just uninstalled it and everything is fine. Most people probably need MicroG for banking, purchases, etc. It could probably harm their sales to not include it. Even if I didn’t delete it, there are so many security layers in this thing and so many obfuscation efforts that I don’t know that it matters. I use NextDNS and deny all Google queries too. So at this point, my battery life is so good that I now am even more alarmed at how many resources are used by corporate bloatware and malware. I still had 97% battery at the end of the day recently. Previously, I frequently charged during the day.
I’m guessing that maintaining such forks would be prohibitive. Especially since they do have resources to play cat and mice
But I don’t really know much about Android code, I’m just relying what I’ve heard