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[–] 201 points 1 year ago (57 children)

Take the one thing Android has over Apple away. Why go Android then? Might as well go with the device that has close ties to the hardware. Guess we are going back to the days when only nerds that knew how to flash better roms will be using Android.

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  • [–] 66 points 1 year ago (29 children)

    Many are going even further. Both my friend and I are planning to get dumb flip phones next. Forget also this smartphone always online stuff

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  • [–] 45 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    no option for secure messaging on a flip phone

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You would be surprised. Most modern β€œdumb phones” run KaiOS which has an App Store.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I found the app selection on KaiOS to be disappointingly limited because they broke compatibility not long ago with older OS version, dropping a bunch of app support. But, it depends on what the user needs. I tried it and it wasn't for me.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    yeah, these flip phone people sound very dumb to me. you don't like google so you're just gonna hand over all your data and conversations by using unencrypted SMS and phone calls instead? πŸ€¦β€β™€οΈ

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I mean, yeah.

    Why would I carry one device that does everything and one device that does less and isn't really more private, doesn't make much sense.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That's not a bad idea.

    Why not completely divorce your phone from your portable computing device?

    Before smartphones, they were getting pretty small. You could probably make a phone that was just a voice activated earbud now. Then have a device that was everything but the "phone" bits. You wouldn't have to accept the locked down aspects that the cell providers demand, you could have all the variety and functionality of your home computer or laptop.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Yeah. That's too small.

    Not enough space for an proper antenna and the battery requirements wouldn't work plus the thermals the thing would kick off would burn your ear.

    The transmission power requirements between Bluetooth and cellular is measured in magnitudes, 3-4 times the power.

    The cellular modem and antenna could be fit into the charging case of earbuds but the battery life would still be terrible since most of the case is taken up by the space needed for the ear buds.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    I'm looking forward for a Sailfish OS device tbh

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    In the U.S you can't buy any of these devices because the cell networks are privately owned and one of the unofficial conditions of you getting access is that you have to have government surveillance and soon censorship on your device, as well as locked bootloaders with signing and stuff. They are currently spending tons of money in Europe to get rid of freedom of thought over there as well. You guys might have 10 more years.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    In the U.S you can’t buy any of these devices...

    No. My Father in Law has one and they're available from Verizon, AT&T, and others.

    ...and one of the unofficial conditions of you getting access is that you have to have government surveillance and soon censorship on your device...

    Where are you getting this disinformation from?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Okay I think I mis-handled the threading. I thought you were replying to the comment about dumb phones and those are most definitely available in the United States.

    You are looking for something that runs Sailfish but that OS is meant for the Euro market so its targeted at handsets meant for use there. The entire supported device list is a measly 16 handsets and all but one of those are made by Sony! It's a crazily niche OS.

    The radios inside American cells phones are controlled by parents and property standards...

    Yes, I'm aware of that. It's literally no different for European cell phones. The Jolla C2 is a rebadged Reeder S19 Pro Max S and whatever modem is buried in that thing is going to have precisely the same issues. Patents are global and at this point even the Chinese are following them, much less a small Turkish manufacturer like Reeder.

    (which is a fully programmable tracking device almost hidden to the OS BTW)

    They're all like this. All of them. Even the ones in a handset running Sailfish.

    you cannot reproduce or even modify the radios due to this horrible law in the U.S called DMCA

    The DMCA has very little to do with Software Defined Radios...which is precisely what the modem chips in these handsets are. Frankly I don't WANT people fucking with the SDR in their handsets. You can do it with lots of other SDRs (GMRS, Amateur, WiFi, etc) and people inevitably abuse the ability and fuck things ups.

    The DMCA is a rotten law but isn't anywhere close to the biggest problem when it comes to SDRs and Phone Handsets.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Literally a government backed monopoly funded with trillions of take payer dollars at this point. When I run for president one day, besides things like completely banning 100% private political campaigns and proganda, one of the first things im going to do is force the FCC to create a wide pocket of bandwidth for a open source and private mesh networks with a range of around 20-50 miles between devices with fallback modes of hundreds of miles, and maybe another fall back mode for thousands if antenna size allows for this inside cell phones. That way we can control our own cell phones and have a citizen licensed cell network.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    nobody's forcing you to use those radios. you can use a GrapheneOS phone in airplane mode

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    if you can't afford to buy a used pixel then that's valid but you don't have to dress it up in ideology to make it sound more valid

    even if the radios were open sourced, the cell network would still be inherently unsafe due to how it works

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    What kind of ideology is not wanting corporations to control your access information and stuff you buy? That doesn't make any sense. That's not an ideology that's just something everyone wants.

    Also there is nothing unsafe about the network idea if you use encryption like every other computer for the past 30 years.

    I have considered getting a pixel phone. I had one but the screen broke in my pocket I think which annoyed me. I have a Motorola phone with an unlockable bootloader but the chip set is dumb so it makes getting the one ROM available for it, difficult to put on there, and also you have to do a lot of stuff to get the ROM to have most of its basic features working.

    You are using the word ideology incorrectly. An ideology is an overarching vague and large idea that encompasses political systems. It's things like fascism or capitalism or socialism. I don't see how any of that has anything to do with things like human rights and freedom which is universally desired by all people. Even fascists want privacy they are just too dumb to realize a total state isn't going to give it to them.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    what I'm trying to say is that no other ROM besides Graphene is private because they don't adopt basic security practices like verified bootloaders

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I would never want a verified bootloader on my device. I'd much rather have an open user friendly bootloader. All you need is for sd cards to not be the default option and not allowing the boot to be written to except in the bios. Verified bootloaders mostly exist to keep people out of their own devices and to get rid of freedom with software. They do it because at first they wanted to protect their DRM and now because they want to make sure you can only access stuff Google or apple approves of. Everyone knew that's what they were doing and they denied it and they knew what they were doing anyways. Corporations just do not want people to be able to make their own decisions about stuff. Platforms like YouTube used to be amazing in the early internet days. A treasure trove of knowledge and perspectives and amazing mature content. Now it's algorithmically controlled brainwashing and corporate gatekeeping of knowledge.

    Really the only security you need is to have up-to-date patched web resources, and port blocking if you are t completely unaware of computer security. It's not bad to have an option for a safer level of access for people who don't know, but they went way beyond this to keep actual tech literate people out of their devices. Anything beyond those basic security measures are essentially useless anyways because they are going to rely on zero day exploits which people cannot anticipate. In fact most developer tools that arent android studio on a pixel device or something rely heavily on zero days and hardware bugs to get root access. What did Google do? They tried to redesign Linux to be a rootless and immutable file system. I honestly hate all of that and I just want to put Debian on a phone with working cell radios so I can use it as a cell phone. I don't even care about YouTube anymore it's essentially useless now. I'm just going to get the cheapest phone I can and leave it in the car with no data plan and build my own portable device running Linux so I can download stuff I want to listen to at work instead of using their trash. That will piss them off anyways if you leave your phone in the truck because the government will get paranoid that you are talking about something they don't want you to talk about and it will piss off Google because your data will be less valuable to them. If many people start doing this, leaving their phones in their vehicles at work, or in the house instead of carrying them, because they have become almost entirely useless unless you want to consume tictok brain rot, they might actually realize that they went to far. Since I know people can't be bothered to protest, I realize that they only thing I can do is just try to create my own solutions. I bought some raspberry pis a few years ago for this very reason just in case the UnS went full fascist. I keep old cell phones around that I know have exploits so I can install what I want on them and not get stuck in the big tech cartel of mind control and surveillance.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    They are going to get rid of those too, at least ones without gps and stuff. The age of cell phones is just over until we can get back control of our state from the superpacs and internationalist psychos who want to control everyone.

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  • [+] 44 points 1 year ago (7 children)
  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    GrapheneOS said they are working with an unnamed OEM to make devices compatible with GOS. Hopefully they are good, because Pixels may indeed be a dead end.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    If they do and it's a good phone, I may literally move back to Android just for that after 3 years of daily driving iOS. Right now choice is between giving my money to Apple vs Google so I might as well go with the one that has tighter hardware-software integration.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago

    Well said, and you're right, it's not hopeless. Most people don't need the latest superphone, personally I want to carry around a good music device, that I can read books on, and preferably have maps. Many like cameras, but I like the idea of a devoted one. The communications (/surveillance) device is a separate thing and perhaps we should think seriously about breaking these things apart, hotspot that you turn on when needed for example. How about a nice general purpose pocketable linux gadget and a secure simple telecom to give it a connection?

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    https://opendevices.ix5.org/

    There is still this. SONY's phones are expensive, unfortunately.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I'll never buy another Sony phone or Sony anything if I can help.

    I bought one and used it to miracast to various devices.

    With an update, they removed miracast capability on the phone. The same way they removed Linux from the PS3.

    Will never trust them or buy Sony anything again.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    I won't trust them to not screw me over for things outside of my control.

    I was looking into Sony for my last phone, but one of my friends ended up getting one before I did and he hard pushed me away from it. He said it was a hassle for him to unlock it, and that they moreorless said that the act of unlocking the bootloader will void his warranty (which is not legal in the US) and that after 2 tries of unlocking and having it not unlock, he returned it and went to another company (I think it was oneplus?), he also wasn't impressed with the performance vs price that he was getting out of it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    They used to have pretty good pricing. The compact versions of the Z lineup especially. Of course, they also somehow managed to have the most fragile screens in the business at that time.

    But that was also a wildly different time. You'd go to your phone company's website and see Apple, Samsung, Sony, LG, HTC, ZTE, Huawei, Motorola and a few others. Now LG, HTC, ZTE, Huawei, Sony and Motorola aren't even on the list anymore - even though some of those companies still make devices, some companies just won't bother selling them anymore. It's just Apple, Google, Samsung, Xiaomi and... I'm surprised that OnePlus even makes the list.

    Now I can still get Asus, POCO or Honor from a 3rd party retailer which is fine, I don't want to give Telia any more money anyway, but most people get their phone with a discount from their phone company on contract... So companies other than the "big 5" aren't even being considered. Plus I don't even know where to get a Sony phone. Even the company formerly known as Sony Center here sells iPhones, but not Sony phones (they do still sell a lot of other Sony things of course)

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    this is honestly my ideology at the moment... like freedom was the main reason I'm on android. Price wise it's already getting close, and most flagships have removed microSD card support by now. I'm seriously debating my next phone being an iphone just because most of my family uses them, and my convenience being on android is being actively removed anyway.

    I can't even imagine that transfer, I've been android my entire life but, every time I talk to my family I list what I want in a phone, and every time I talk to them it seems apple has marked another issue off the list with an update.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I went Apple for a bit around iphone 6. then back to Android. But Apple has solved most of my OS complaints since and I'm still Android mainly because it's open. I already know Google is making bank off my info, if they do this bullshit, I'll go Apple until Linux is baked.

    TBF, I could also see myself with a mobile access point and a small linux tablet but I don't see much in that realm either. .

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago

    Take the one thing Android has over Apple away. Why go Android then

    They've passed the critical mass wherein they can dictate anything they want without losing any significant userbase. The only people that this is going to affect is a tiny minority of people who even know what sideloading is. If you don't think so, you're in a bubble.

    These fuckers never wanted to be user centric opposite to apple, they wanted to be alongside apple in telling users what they can or cannot do. They're worse because of the whole advertising monopoly but most people don't even know what any of the above matters. They'll continue on like everyday.

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  • [–] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Guess we are going back to the days when only nerds that knew how to flash better roms will be using Android.

    Will we even have that? IIRC, Google's changing the open source model for Android so its going to be a lot harder from ROM devs to keep up to date with security patches, and then more importantly, have access to device drivers

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  • [+] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)
  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I was wishy washy on whether my next phone would be android or iOS for years, but with this change my decision got a lot easier. Was fun while it lasted, Android - but if you're going to become a walled garden I'd rather be in the better one.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's nearly impossible to even flash a rom these days, they made sure to cover that first. They want to make sure you are only allowed to watch or read what they approve of. That's what it's all about. Next time they get a democratic in, they won't even give trans people their rights back, they are just going to go after gun rights hard. Mark my words.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I personally found it very easy to install Graphene and get it up and running.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Hard if you don't have a snapdragon device. Mediatek processors have all kinds of stupid bullshit that makes it really hard to flash a file without their key. We really need to start sharing key generators for things again, especially for the bootloaders for our computers we buy.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, this seems crazy to me. This is a big differentiator. I still hate apple's ui and several other things but now I can see myself being convinced to get an iPhone. There was zero chance before this decision. If apple ever allows real third party launchers and browsers that aren't just safari skins (or if android ever disallows launchers and makes all browsers chrome skins), I'd be pretty close to 50-50.

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