to my understanding, a custom ROM such as iodéOS shouldn’t be (directly) affected by Google’s decree as they won’t include / patch out the sideloading requirements from AOSP, correct?
Here’s the problem:
In consequence, the F-Droid project is appealing to regulators and competition authorities to scrutinize Google’s proposals, and for developers and users to put pressure on politicians.
We can’t wait for them to allow us to have freedom neither ask for permission, we can just keep using and building freedom tech regardless of their permissions. Otherwise they will just keep pushing us into gulags.
This cannot be stressed enough: This freedom is an inalienable human right that cannot be “granted” by a government (nor taken away).
Correct, govts are not here to help but to enslave.
You can do some actions:
https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/1nc0p8o/collection_of_actions_that_can_be_done_regarding/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1
There are other things we can do too. Recently I replicated the contents of my Native Alpha apps page (F-Droid/izzyondroid), on to my Droidian phone so as to get a similar level of the functionality I’m getting from my degoogled XA2, only to find that around 20%+ of the web apps I have already saved have now been replaced by PWA’s. A little research followed to find out that PWA’s (cross platform apps), are taking over from ios/google apps because… a) they can be downloaded directly from the owner’s site and b) they are cheaper for the site owner to build and maintain than platform dedicated apps.
Now I know that this won’t provide an answer to all our problems but as far as your average user goes it will go a fair way to solving an awful lot. If I take my partners phone as a distinctly ‘non techie’ user example, I could most likely replace 90%+ of her Gapps on Native Alpha. Most all of her stuff is centred around shopping, free games and special interest sites (mostly horsey) etc, etc. PWA’s for Telegram, Instagram, X, Tinder and other social media/MSM sites are already available.
PWA’s are the future I’m thinking with maybe the odd exceptions but it would be nice to see iode adding a more security focused version of Native Alpha to their pre-installed apps list that closes down some of the malware/spyware risks associated with downloading them along with giving you the PWA option when there is one.
One would hope so, but given PWAs have been around for almost 10 years its still a pretty slow up take - but hopefully the snowball is far enough down the mountain now interns of knowledge and awareness for them to become the norm.
I wish there was better visibility of what sites support them when you go to a site - i.e. more obvious browser flag or something?
The pessimist on me still thinks G and co will find a way to get their hooks into them, once they get significant weight of numbers in usage…
This is what I’m getting at really. It is difficult to identify the sites that offer them and there is almost no recognition of their existence within the FOSS community support structure. The thing is that many site owners are becoming aware of the fact that putting your own platform dedicated app on to the Gapp store can be a bad thing as the search engine prioritises the ‘sponsored’ apps so you run the risk of losing a potential customer to one of your competitor’s apps that just happens to be higher up the search list.
Educating both site owners and users by promoting PWA’s has to be the way forward in the longer term if screwgle continue this monopolistic policy of access denial to custom ROM users. PWA’s have improved a lot since I ditched the big G (2019), but so have web apps generally. Even the sites that don’t offer PWA’s seem to work satisfactorily in Native Alpha, the only downside being that you need to have a web connection. Some kind of browser flagging to detect PWA’s and easy access security such as using fingerprint would be very useful features to add.
Here’s a link to an Adobe review of PWA’s for anyone that wants to know more.
https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/progressive-web-app-examples
More reporting: Google confirms Android dev verification will have free and paid tiers, no public list of devs - Ars Technica
Some are saying this will make f-droid die as a project, but it will stop people from using f-droid on android stock devices, right? Custom roms like lineage iodé and graphene will still be able to use f-droid from my understanding