this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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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.

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[–] whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (2 children)

It's almost like the organization itself is designed to make things worse if it means short term profits, useful and appreciated apps sacrificed at the altar of line must go up

My pixel 5 recently broke and the only reason I went with a pixel 9a was to install grapheneOS on it as soon as I got it. The process has become way easier than it used to be. After setting up/skipping all the first run screens I plugged it into another Android device and used the grapheneOS site to run the install, took like 15 min.

[–] mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world 5 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

hows your experience with graphene? Better than stock? I heard they have a sandboxed Google Play store now, so getting apps is even easier.

[–] whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

So far it's been good for about a week. Highlights have been the easy install, secure by default but lets me override when I want (block app network access on install is awesome), and getting access to the other app repos than Google's I haven't seen since I installed dirty unicorns years ago. I setup multiple users so I can keep my primary like a root which was also simple to do.

Only complaints I have are when I get messages on another user than primary I can see the messages in the app but not the message content in the notification, its just a generic alert message like new messages received. Nice to have but not going to make me switch back. And the keyboard doesn't have swipe typing so I use gboard with network access turned off.

Also I did install the Google app store to get a couple paid apps and calendar/contacts I need to move out of Google. It does sandbox by default which is really cool and i think should be required for phone manufacturers. I just disabled services/store/calendar access to the network after I let it download everything.

Edit: also not a OS thing but I tried switching VPN to orbot/tor at the same time and it is still really unreliable for that use with the way so many sites try to sniff out your location