Google’s Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. In its quest for ever-greater profits, the tech giant has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source nature over the last decade.
Originally published on The Lever, but that one asks you to sign up.
Unfortunately the Android experience is getting more and more bloated and users’ freedom to tinker with their phones or sideload apps is getting more and more difficult. The Play Store is riddled with more ads than useful content. Just try searching for something, and oftentimes more than half of your screen is ads.
I’ve been with Android since the start and I hate what Google is reducing it to. It pains me that the only viable alternative is Apple and I feel trapped.
F-Droid is a decent replacement for the play store. Lots of FOSS and less-enshittified apps available.
Unfortunately many of the apps needed just to exist as a member of society are only available in the Play Store.
Support devices like the Liberux Nexx or the pinephone, especially if you are a developer!
We’re all trapped. If you’re not using either Android or iOS, you’re pretty much screwed.
Technically, you can use one of the alternate phones, but the software support still leaves a lot to be desired. You can get most basic things working, but when it comes to crucial deal breaker apps like anything involving payments or banks, it gets a lot trickier. The world has become increasingly dependent on mobile phones, and if your phone can’t handle train tickets, mail deliveries, restaurant reservations or pay your bills, it suddenly becomes very difficult to live in the 2020s.
More and more hardware also depends on specific iOS or Android apps, and those apps may also require GAPPS or some OEM Android. At some point, it just isn’t worth the hassle, and it becomes easier to pick either one of the toxic platforms everyone else is already using.
I feel like the standard should be two phones. A disposable ‘banking’ phone: tiny, no camera, no speakers, small SoC, just the absolute bare minimum to live.
…And then a ‘media’ phone without all the enshittification.
Play Store is truly vile to use. It just feels gross and scammy and like a mine field of low quality slop and scam apps.
iOS isn’t great either but it at least feels a whole lot better. The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.
That’s probably to reduce brigading? Android and iOS are infested with all sorts of fraduelnt marketing techniques like fake reviews, and mass fraud reporting for competition sounds like another.
My experience with the iOS app store years ago was worse than Android. Searching for apps that were not chock full of spam was useless. I had to research the apps outside of the store then find direct links to them due to clones with the same names.
I have no idea why Apple and Google allow so much hot garbage in their app stores.