With the recent changes to how Google is doing things with Android, is it even worth it anymore? Should I just accept whatever version of Android comes with whatever phone or are custom ROMs still worth it? Assuming they still exist after all of this, idk what’s going on.
I think the ideas that android is an open os died a long time ago. If the android flavour doesn’t have the Google Play binaries it is next to useless
I really enjoy graphene and the separate user profiles with no google integration.
If a google app, or something from play store is needed they’ve developed a compatability layer and sandbox for play services and store.
It’s a lot of security toggles and permissions.
But not having Google sucking your data at every level of the OS is great.
Wirh the isolated profiles, you can still have a fully googled system which you can fully lockdown at anytime, while having a pure aosp high security profile.
It’s fdroid and Izzy/codeberg and ironfox and termux and a few other repos on main.
I don’t do snap/insta/meta/etc and have no need for apps that drain my soul, anyway.
Anyway, yeah, google fucking sucks.
I was going to go into a rant about Ubuntu and Snap but then realised you were talking about Snapchat, show how much I use any of those big tech “products”
Rant away!
I, too, dislike that snap as well.
Canonical are doing some not cool things these days.
Good thing mint has lmde as their backup plan.
Not useless. Maybe “useless” if you intend to use it as an Android device, but if you just want a Libre mobile OS built based on AOSP, not having Google Play is a feature.
Just build an OS branching from the latest AOSP source code and voila, it’s practically a “linux phone”, no need to build another linux mobile OS from scratch.
I mean, even without FOSS zealotry there are plenty of Android derivatives without Google services in them on weird Chinese emulation handhelds and SBCs and the like. Never mind fricking Huawei, at least until last year, and depending on how much you think their newer one counts as not-Android.