Do you think these devices will continue to function?
Will the handheld market need to degoogle and adopt Linux as the OS?
Would it be smart to even consider purchasing any of them right now with the chance of them not functioning as expected in the near future?
The Odin line can already run Linux, so I feel relatively safe with mine.
good news, ty
Retro handhelds should be perfectly good to use without Google play protect and Google play services. Retro handhelds play emulators. Should be good with something like Graphene and ideally go to regular Linux instead. Maybe with KDE Plasma Bigscreen
i really worry about this…
similar with fdroid & Foss app store developers. also, different but similar worries, 3rd party android roms like Graphene OS…
i really hope a fully open source mobile device hardware & software stack’s supply chain & ecosystem can evolve to fill our needs… (where the community efforts are unified enough to self sustain, and where novice users can have confidence in a default choice before being forced diving deeper into niche projects)
pie in the sky… hopefully not a pipe dream… not forever at least
Last I checked, most didn’t even ship with the Play store. Outside of smartphones, and , feature phones in particular, which are all wrapped-up-in/drowning-in mobile provider slop, embedded/closed-source blobs and tracking anyways, there’s little to worry about.
That said, I’ve probably bought my last Samsung phone, what with the SMS messenger on a three-year-old phone constantly reminding me its about to sunset/EoL, and recommending I switch to Google SMS … 🙄 … so yeah, at this point I’ve come full circle, switched to Google Voice, then Hangouts, then back to Samsung’s built-in SMS app when those shut-down or became effectively useless to me(at least for SMS…). I mean, I’ve also had other phone brands, and facebook MessengerWithSMS, but…
… hey, that reminds me, back in December, facebook forced me to encrypt my private chats, and threw a PIN at me which I somehow lost(in spite of compulsively saving every such thing in bitwarden), so in March when I had to reinstall the app poof to over two months of messages, in chats I’ve had going over ten years. Then, over the last few days, its tried to convince me that I enabled “disappearing messages”(NOPE!), again, in chats I’ve had going with my wife and kids and others for over ten years. I’m basically done with this shit, ya feel me?
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