this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
177 points (98.4% liked)
Privacy
31808 readers
392 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I get the hate on Google. I use a degoogled phone and got rid of google everywhere else. But I am not a fan of this. Its their store. Imagine a goverment comes to your own grocery store that you built and tells you whose products to put where and how much to charge for them. Instead of trying to build an alternative to compete with Play Store we will give more power to goverments. Thats not good.
Problem is that it not really is "just a store". By using the google store you get access to the google play APIs, which are upgraded separately from the device OS - which is sensible from a security perspective, but they also were created by google specifically for regaining control over what goes on on Android devices.
A lot of applications are needlessly tied to play APIs - either because that way is a bit easier, or just because google is good at marketing them, and the developer didn't think twice about it. Some relatively basic APIs are part of google play - for example maps, which needlessly is tied to google maps. Unlike Android itself the play APIs are not opensource.
Yandex tried about a decade ago to re-implement the play APIs to keep such applications working without the play store, by utilizing other services providing the same functionality, and tried to get other companies to join them. I've visited the Yandex office in Saint Petersburg a few times to discuss that back then (just checked, most of that seems to have been 2014 - that year Yandex was sponsoring my Russian visa). The effort failed for various reasons, unfortunately - the big one being that doing this required reverse engineering API changes on every play update google was pushing to stay compatible. There's the microG project around now, but it seems to be less ambitious than what Yandex was trying to do back then.
My point is, as long as at least the API for play services isn't maintained in a way that allows full open source reimplementations - or better, google releases parts as open source where we can plug different backends in - "use a different store" is not really a possible solution for many.
This is further crippled by how the increasingly tight security measures in Android make harder and harder to add functionality that is considered "system-level" and is as deeply integrated as the Play Store.
You can't simply install F-droid and expect the same level of user friendliness and automatic app updates as in the official Play Store. Without esoteric, hackish and warranty-voiding rooting methods, you need to give manual user confirmation for every small update. You need to update 30 apps that accumulated because you forgot to manually update each of them? get prepared for going 30 times thought the same process of pressing buttons and giving confirmation for each of them.
I am using /e/OS/ and their App Lounge does the updates automatically, unlike Aurora Store/Fdroid, so it seems possible
You've replaced the whole operating system - in which case they obviously are in control. It is equivalent to a rooted stock Android device.
But if you just install their app installer on a stock Android device you'll have the same problems.