Everyone tried to use the same model, even MacOS reboot sold itself as Unix and the open-source portion of the platform used to be much larger. You could edit a config file and make it load text console only in the early years.

Annoying, really, as every one of them preach openness until they get so big, and then they seal the gates because they think they have their market locked down.

Not anymore.

Will be interesting to see how android dies. It will be slow, but it is a given.

And probably mostly a feel-good useless thing.

Most of the time they do spell things, yeah, then there are the weird legacy holdover ones. The *3001#12345#* iPhone code is an old Nokia engineering screen code that probably only had meaning to Nokia S40/S60 engineers.

Samsung phones include McAfee, oddly.

Use Signal note to self and send it to yourself. Strips all metadata. Does resize larger images though.

Google is a sellout hypocrite of the highest order and has been for…15, 18 years?

If you read the alleged protection dialog, Google’s only blocks against 2G networks. The same of which many carriers allow, enable, or enforce blocking, and if not *#*#info#*#* let’s you do it yourself.

“2G network protection - Avoids 2G networks, which are less secure”

They stopped coincidentally around the same time Google announced that no third party messaging apps would be allowed to use RCS.

Translation: These features were using too much compute in their “AI” datacenters and they’re cutting costs.

Bubble so close to popping!

There is a term for that. Duopoly.

It is nice if you prefer the original file with all the associated data/metadata instead of the stripped/transcoded copy that many messaging apps send. No need to cloud or message or nothing. Works without Internet. Just bulk-select 20 pics and tap on the person’s phone.

Probably will become more popular with so many leaving the cloud, as well.

So the way compute used to work, is you could install any program you want from anywhere. You could buy a program from a web site or copy a disk and install the program.

Smartphones have been around since the late 1990s in various forms, it used to be, you could just install whatever you want.

Then, in 2008, Apple released the iPhone app store, and it was a closed space, a “walled garden”. You can only install apps on their phone if they approve them.

Google decided to join the phone race and released a phone where one could still install applications from anywhere, not just their store. There are multiple stores like others have mentioned, or you can download an APK file from anywhere and install it on your phone.

Part of their behavior since is slightly open to interpretation, as the technology is now used by everyone, not just tech nerds. People could install “bad” programs, and they could lose money, cell networks could be compromised, etc.

It likely costs a lot of companies a lot of money to deal with dumb users doing stupid shit. So from one perspective, making it extremely hard to install unknown programs from anywhere will curb that expense.

It could be a defensive move, as LLMs now allow anyone to write computer software with very little knowledge of it, and it is just bad timing.

On the other hand, since the beginning of computers, the owner of the machine could run whatever software they wanted.

This move by Google is basically making it so there is NO mobile compute platform that the owner of the device actually owns, and is allowed to do with their hardware what they want. Apple or Google, that is it. Apple had always been closed, which should have been made illegal, but I digress.

It has been a slippery slope with Android for almost 2 decades, and this move is basically the end of the ability for free humans to install free software from anywhere on the hardware they own and paid anywhere up to $3000 for.

Basically a huge dive for personal freedom on a planetary scale, decided by one corporation.

The actual reason is control. VPN on the current Android stack makes it relatively easy for a non-technical user to sign up for a paid service that blocks telemetry-harvesting back to Google. Unlike Apple’s platform, Google’s historically heavily relies on a cloud connection for pseudo-real-time telemetry harvesting. If a person uses a VPN with ad/app/telemetry-blocking, Google gets cut off. That means things like, their Waymo cars not receiving real-time traffic updates, their WiFi geolocation database missing current information, their adtech arm not receiving user metadata.

Google’s software is quite tenacious at attempting to connect to Google too. If you ever want to see how much, install RethinkDNS and start blocking core Google services. Check the logs. You will see the app try Google in your country, then Google in neighboring countries, then other devices in your home running Google software. Any connection they can find to relay telemetry back to the big G-spot.

Google’s moves right now in lieu of any government taking action against them is to solidify their platform control and metadata harvesting pipelines. They’re cutting off alternate ROMs, cutting off open source hardware drivers for newer devices, partnering with Samsung to encourage Samsung to close their devices down, reducing security patch frequency on older devices, partnering more closely with Apple to ensure a stream of healthy metadata from Apple, closing the ability to install third-party apps, and also getting heavier into military contracting.

Google is an information vacuum, always has been. When their leadership was more “altruistic”, the trade-off was a contribution back to society. Now that they are in a late-stage profit phase, they’re just doubling down on that vacuum role hard.

They will likely end up doing something similar to how Apple’s network stack on iPhone works once they can figure out how to make the network stack work that way. Apple’s devices are configured so even when you have a full-tunnel VPN, some local traffic, and connections back to Apple corporate always circumvent the VPN. There is no way to truly full-tunnel on an Apple device.

If that bank does not have an alternate way to 2FA, see if another bank does. They just want you to have an app dependency so they can harvest everything you do, everywhere you go, and sell it.

Banks will have to adapt when they realize people won’t play their games anymore. At the end of the day, they like money, and will follow it.

Each year is a planned step towards further death of the platform. Just found out the other day with a potentially malfunctioning app on Android, that one can no longer see /data/data/ even from ADB. One used to be able to browse that directory structure in a file manager, but then it was only via ADB, and now not at all, apparently. That is just one of many aspects of the OS taken away from the owner of the device. (Not “user”.)

Android might be worse than iOS, in that they sold it as open, and then slowly took that away, the death by 1000 cuts approach. So more people feel comfortable using it, not realizing their freedoms are being removed with each new iteration. Apple at least said, “no it’s closed, so you have a choice whether you are ok with that or not” right up front.

Of course, as choices dwindle down to two American Corpo OSes, we all still lose in the end.

Printers of this range back in the day could use a print server of your choosing.

Another banking app thread, fun! Don’t use phones for banking. One just trades privacy for perceived convenience. For “safety” you give your bank:

• Unnecessary lower-level system access than normal apps, for SAFETY!
• Your location as often as they can harvest it
• What apps you have installed
• Any metadata they can exfiltrate through trackers in the app that can be mated with metadata from other app trackers
• Any personal information they can gather from your phone

Furthermore, if you use tap-to-pay, which some banks require their app be installed to use, you’re then giving every transaction you do, with or without tap-to-pay, to the operating system provider and any third parties along the way. Use your credit card at a store and the phone’s at home? That transaction still gets scooped up.

Finally, you have this object you always carry with you, that has access to all your financial information, that a bad guy just has to punch you in the face to get you to log into your bank and delete all your money. Bravo! With a card, it can be shut off afterwards, and the bank can mark any transactions happening afterwards as fraudulent. With a phone app, they can Zelle themselves your money and the forward it to some cryptocurrency and good luck. Then clean out your RobinHood, your DraftKings, your CoinBase, your 401k, and anything else they find along the way.

Use the bank webapp if one is desperate.

Banking. On. Phones. Is. Stupid.

You’re letting the bank know everything about you. What apps you have installed, how you use your phone, where you go, you’re just letting them have access to your entire life for mild convenience. Just use the web site and make an icon on the home screen to get to it.

And using tap or chip on a regular credit card does as well. Every tap rotates through a set of keys in the card. The periodic use of the chip refreshes the tap keys. It isn’t the first gen tap to pay on credit cards anymore, it is much more robust.

But beyond that, the retailer already saw your face when you walked in, already saw it at the point of sale, already tracked you as you traveled the store via WiFi, already saw the BT/WiFi profile of your rotating MAC address device as it only obfuscates, and in some cases, already had your phone join their WiFi network via EAP-SIM through your carrier, already scanned your license plate with Flock in the parking lot, and already saw your club/discount/points card number at the point of sale, so they already associated you with yourself.

Tap-to-pay also sets up so all your transactions, on-phone or not, are captured by the handset manufacturer for further resale of metadata.