Google just has to keep it below the threshold of annoying ordinary people

EU politicans like van der Leyen are terrified of Trump, and do not have the backbone to stand up to American corporations.

According to the blog post, LOS simply won't include the AndroidDeveloperVerification package. If that's really all (for now), people with custom ROMs who also mainly use F-droid don't have much to worry about. It might actually bring a few more people around to degoogled Android.

You can put the time until lockdown banner on your website if you have one, they have a guide for it and it's simple.

I don't think it is common at all - I think we need to make it common, by asking all the time - especially those of us that are less easily replaced.

I know the guy who administers the company-owned devices at my current company. He's stretched thin enough that I'm quite sure the answer would be no; he just doesn't have the bandwidth to consider the possible implications of such a thing.

Not that I don't, uh... basically do that anyway in a lot of cases. I have a lot of latitude. But I don't think it's as common to be able to make those requests as you might think.

This feels like AI slop.

The EU is far more concerned with forcing age verification into everything. Only allowing apps from approved stores helps them do that so I doubt they're against this

Just cracked the spine of Cory Doctorow's Enshittification. I'm right there with you.

I don't have a Google account. I've had issues. The app for my CO2 sensor has the CHECK_LICENSE permission activated, which asks your phone for a Google account. I can't use it with the new version of the apps. I've complained and the company responded that I should have a Google account so there is no issue. We shouldn't need to make workarounds and bridges to use the gadgets we buy.

It'll be interesting to see how this turns out long term. Google absolutely will abuse this and consumers and regulators will catch on eventually. It might take some years, but the EU might step in when things get too lopsided.

many applications will require a Google account to function

Yeah, it might be a good time to stop using those apps. That's privileged statement I know since I started using Lineage as part of my smartphone-purge, but when it comes to many every day tasks, I haven't ran into any problems.

Note every day tasks don't involve:

• Using Whatsapp*
• Taking Uber
• Going to any professional sports game

* I did find a way to bridge Whatsapp to Matrix-Synapse through an old iPhone and a docker container which is neat.

So it looks like there's just a small hurdle to get it working.

The name is taken from a group of elementary particles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepton

The alternative ROMS will be affected by this because many applications will require a Google account to function. There will be workarounds, but overall this effectively changes how the phone I spent my money on works: they are altering the terms of the deal.

This is not going to change anything. Google decided to become a bully and they'll succeed.

It's all a result of hardware manufacturers not bothering to create a common open source Android fork and keep giving more power to Google. Now even Samsung cannot operate their App Store without every single app in their store signed by Google.

TL;DR: This will not affect LineageOS directly. But it may affect users running the stock ROM on their device.

— Lineage OS blog, Developer Verification: What it is, and how it affects you

Bazzite is excellent, especially with all the hidden away developer tools under the hood, like distrobox. I have been using it as my daily driver for about two years after jumping from Fedora. Very impressed.

How about LineageOS?

I don’t know why I had assumed Sony was still using CRIADX etc

It doesn't, but we aren't dealing with sensible people here.

If they actually do this I’ll emulate ARM to drop x86, idgaf

Minix in a sense is more successful than Linux as it runs in every Intel as a backdoor for the NSA.

Not sure if Minix is still used as a teaching OS but I'm the textbook is still likely around.

It would be somewhat ironic if Steam got 64-bit support on ARM before x86.

This was fairly easy because they already had ARM64 support (Switch) and x86 Linux support. That meant they had already worked out any architectural differences and they had a set of Linux-friendly libraries. The only real hurdles were:

1. Getting a non-Frame ARM64 Linux system for testing
2. Steam ARM64 teething issues since Valve has been working on the expectation that nearly everything will be either x86 or ARM Android builds run through a wrapper
3. A single library that uses a funky build system

If they'd outsourced the Switch port to a porting house or didn't already have Linux support, this would have been a ton of work.