It was never off the menu, just rebranded a little bit.

There’s only a JD Vance there.

They’re killing third-party client access, limiting adblockers, blocking VPNs, and forcing sign in more and more. I sincerely hate it but this was inevitable. They have their monopoly, this is just the “abuse that position and enshittify for more data and money” stage. I hope an alternative takes off because I refuse to play by their rules.

Corpo marketing to obfuscate the idea of installing software and nurture dependency to pre-installed proprietary repositories for an entire crowd of dependent non-tech savvy users that doesn’t know what an apk is probably.

I avoid using the term unless I’m being cheeky about “sideloading” from Google Play.

That’s nice, but I feel we need engines with independent indexes and crawlers more than another metasearch engine that just acts as a private middleman to big tech corps.

5 Eyes has been simping for China’s Golden Shield for as long as China has had it. Now Curtis Yarven and his circle of authoritarian tech bro freaks and 5 corpos in a trench coat are running America. Then the UK gets Apple to remove ADP and now, a nation that already has a hard-on for security cameras decides to expand biometric surveillance in quick succession. Hmm… interesting.

McDonald’s wants your IQ too. Seriously, it’s in their privacy policy.

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It’s the details that make up the whole picture.

As an isolated situation, the renaming thing may be stupid and not worth giving any credence. Energy can be spent resisting elsewhere in more useful places. However along with the rest of the actions of billionare corpos that kissed the ring, it’s part of the overall trend with devastating consequences. Bullshit details shouldn’t be ignored, but acknowledged as “they’re fucking us from all directions right now and waging war on reality, and we really should stop letting them”.

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Anything that uses FCM doesn’t get push notifications. That’s most of them. Very few apps work fine, others I have set up to use UnifiedPush. Unfortunately Proton Mail requires manually checking. I’ve not had any issues with location.

I’ve had one app straight up refuse to work at all and others that throw up an “enable Google Play Services” at every launch (dismiss it and it still works), but it’s nothing critical so I don’t care. Most of my apps come from F-Droid anyway. I haven’t had enough time without the play store to see if other apps trip the play integrity api stuff. Even if it did I don’t care.

But apps can’t hijack my entire screen anymore, battery life is improved, naturally privacy and security as well. No more “update available” pop-ups on app launches or that pop-up to scan all apps that I kept having to decline. No more anxiety from waking up to a bunch of marketing notifications. There’s also just the plain satisfaction of being free.

Google has Android by the balls but I’m so jaded and done with this corpo hell world shit to put up with even their privileged system apps anymore, even if it’s less convenient. Maybe Linux phones will become viable.

It feels good to say that I’ve been rid of Google for a while. They can shove Play Serives and Store too.

Honestly I’ll still be using Proton and recommending it because it’s just good and a net benefit for everyone, but goddammit Andy you should’ve taken Swiss neutrality to heart this time and not said anything.

FYI the 41% of instances that block or limit Threads (from the source data which doesn’t have every instance), accounts for 24% of the user base of the fediverse.