Google’s Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. In its quest for ever-greater profits, the tech giant has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source capacity over the last decade.

Google’s Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. In its quest for ever-greater profits, the tech giant has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source nature over the last decade.

Originally published on The Lever, but that one asks you to sign up.

  • youmaynotknowEnglish
    2•11 days ago

    2 days ago I moved from GrapheneOS back to Stock Pixel in my 8 Pro, just to see what all the hype about the new android 16 in Pixel is about. Jesus, this is way worse than I remember. i tried it for 2 whole days, and that shit just won’t allow me to have ANY control over my phone. It’s fucking ridiculous. On Android 15 I was able to uninstall Google Drive, Meet, Youtube, and many other Google apps, this time around all it would allow was “disable”. What’s next, removing the ability to disable (which I don’t trust anyway)?

    Fast forward to today, I’m back on GOS, and my anxiety levels are down again. This shit is insane, and I honestly can’t understand why anyone would put up with this crap.

    • @redhat421@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0•11 days ago

      Those apps are installed in the squashfs image. Such images are write once, read many and thus they can’t be mutated at runtime.

      • youmaynotknowEnglish
        1•10 days ago

        I know, and that’s exactly my point. They used to be in the user space, now they are in the system partition. They CHOSE to do this.

        • @redhat421@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2•9 days ago

          Yeah. That’s a good point. I don’t know why anyone would put any frequently updated app in squashfs.

          I guess you can use the app right after you factory reset even if you don’t have much data which might be something? Are updates smaller since they’re just deltas?

          • youmaynotknowEnglish
            1•9 days ago

            In all honesty, I have no idea. I didn’t give the stock firmware enough time on my phone to check on anything other than the amount of tracking and the move to the system partition.

            As for the reason for putting them in this partition, I’m sold on the idea that it’s to keep the levels of invasion as high as possible while removing the user’s options to get rid of them.