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How Google Tracks and Scans Everything on Your Android Device (www.howtogeek.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml
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[–] 30 points 1 year ago (30 children)

The irony of having to buy a Google phone to get rid of Google services will never cease to amaze me. :/

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

    Graphene is working with a different OEM, so, we may not need Google's devices to run GrapheneOS soon.

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  • [–] -5 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    We don't know the OEM and chances are, it's one whose hardware won't work in the west, where the personal information Google harvests is worth more.

    To Google, this move from Graphene is the trash taking itself out.

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

    The main demographic of GrapheneOS users are in the west and the GrapheneOS team are a meticulous bunch. Why would they partner with an OEM whose hardware does not work with western cellular networks?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I guess we'll find out when they announce their mystery partner.

    I just hope it isn't HTC or Motorola. Neither of them have done anything good in the last 10 years. And Google bought the HTC hardware team that made the Pixel 1.

    Samsung is my hope. I think Samsung is big enough that they can sell certified Android phones and also open ones. I don't think they will though. I would imagine it would be a smaller OEM. Or a shittier one.

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

    if its a Chinese OEM im going to lol

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

    You can buy second hand phones and then Google doesn't get any more money. Easy solution.

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

    buying second hand phones is like buying clothes with a hole in it. your going to have to replace the battery or the phone alot sooner than buying it new

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Batteries are good now though. I buy almost all used tech where possible. No complaints. If you get a sufficiently new used phone, it's not physically possible for the battery to have undergone enough cycles to degrade noticably. Very good value early on I'd say.

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

    The real irony is paying Google what you'd pay for an iPhone 16 and getting iPhone 11 performance and they're spying on you and selling your personal information to who knows who. Okay but you wiped the phone and installed custom firmware that doesn't track you... but you still paid Google the price of current-gen iPhone and got a phone with the performance of one from 5 years ago. Google still won.

    The personal information is the point, that's the real gold mine, and they'll get it from enough people to not care about the less than 1% of Pixel owners flashing Graphene. For those users, they're happy to sell generations-old tech at a premium. And they call you a sucker behind your back. And then tell you Apple is the big corporate overlord you're running from and make it sound like Apple is the enemy. (I'm not saying they're not, but that's a convenient story among fandroids. And it may not even be accurate. Because iOS has no open source component though... we don't know.)

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    As a GrapheneOS user, having the fastest hardware is not the goal. Pixels can be purchased for a very reasonable price second-hand or from discount resellers. Apple's hardware is indeed remarkable and iOS being closed-source is not the root of the issue - it's that they insist on a heavily locked down bootloader, so I will not for a moment consider Apple unless by some miracle they open up their phones to third-party OSes.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I can agree with most of that. I like the Mac a lot more than I like the iPhone. But a Mac can install Linux. They also used to run Windows, and I think they can run Windows ARM but I'm not sure. I've also heard Windows ARM is not very good anyway.

    Fortunately, Macs don't require iPhones. My wife has an Android phone and has no problem with using Mac. She just doesn't get Universal Clipboard, which is nice, but not a deal breaker to lose if you have other reasons to prefer Android.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    wait....you think....having an iphone spares you from all of that? oh you sweet summer child.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    No, probably not. I'm just saying Google absolutely does sell your personal information. Apple says they don't. What I said was that because it's closed source, we don't actually know.

    We do know that Apple does track certain things. Telemetry, they all do it. What we don't know is if they sell personally identifiable information. I think if it could be proven that they do, someone could sue over their "Privacy. That's iPhone" campaign. They certainly wouldn't be able to use it in any country where false advertising is not legal.

    The difference between a computer company and an advertising agency, I suppose.

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

    Moreover GrapheneOS requires Google Play Services to use most apps, so you're not only using a Google device but also Google Play services! There are much better truly deGoogled alternatives around

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    This is patently false. I run GrapheneOS with no Google play services installed. The only issue I have is no paid app updates and some apps won't send notifications since they ran through Google. I use my phone though mostly as a phone. I have almost no social media and I do not use banking apps on my phone. I choose to use website versions of anything on my phone so long as I can.

    Not to mention, the replacement OSes like /e/os and the others don't have the hardening of GrapheneOS. Cellibrite recently was leaked they still can't crack open GrapheneOS.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    But you're saying it yourself, notifications won't work, banking apps won't work, and I know there are other examples like the Google location API, so probably maps apps, and I'm sure I'm forgetting many others

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

    That's a lie, you can totally avoid Play Services if you truly want to with GrapheneOS, as it literally isn't installed by default. If you only use Fdroid apps and have no need for push notifs, then you can truly use GOS with no Google.

    But the average person probably needs those things mentioned, so you can download a sandboxed version of Play Store and Services instead.

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

    So it is true, and not a lie, because as you say yourself "the average person probably needs those things mentioned" Quite a thing to call someone a liar and to then literally agree with them

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I mean, that's the reality of using an Android phone. 95% of apps are built to use play services in some way, and while most of that can be ignored, apps using push notifs are almost always going to be play instead of unified push. Make the choice of either living with no push notifs, or having push notifs.

    You can use GrapheneOS without push notifs, it's just inconvenient, and the average person wants convenience. This isn't a Graphene problem, it's a big tech influencing Android problem. The original comment makes it seem like Graphene is the issue, but other ROMs are going to encounter that same issue anyway (as I said, Android problem). So therefore I didn't lie, asshole.

    Maybe you can use microG to get around notif issues, but that does require logging in. Use a Linux phone at that rate if you're not gonna use push notifs and don't need Android.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    OK it sounds like we agree. But I do prefer custom roms that use microG, it is a great opensource alternative to Play Services. This is precisely what is needed to break open the Android market: alternatives to Google's monopolistic software

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