It's not stockholm syndrome for a lot of people. Microsoft is so firmly entrenched in so much of the corporate world that you can't get away from them. My mom was in the market for a new laptop recently, and I so badly wanted to get her setup with a MacBook Air, but it's not an option because the Sage accounting software she uses for my dad's business is Windows only. And furthermore, the business itself (a small pawn shop) is forced to use some specific software to manage inventory (I believe it allows police to access the database to track serial numbers in finding stolen goods or something), which is a webapp using some antiquated decades-old technology that only runs in Microsoft Edge's IE-compatibility mode (which has become a more and more difficult incantation to enable over the years) and I believe that can only be used on the Windows version of Edge.
For me it's currently the minimal-hassle way to make my Steam library runnable. But it feels like we're moving in a good direction thanks to Valve's efforts where one day I may be able to never boot into Windows on my PC.
You make it sound like a noble act of sacrifice but the employees are all still getting paid. The real people who will be hurt are the citizens relying on their government to function, and telling a bunch of government employees of varying competence levels to "suck it up and adapt to your workflow being broken" will throw a real wrench in that.
> telling a bunch of government employees of varying competence levels to "suck it up and adapt to your workflow being broken" will throw a real wrench in that.
I will weep on the day when the great Europe is defeated by people being unable to use a slightly different spreadsheet program, word processor, or a file sharing solution.
But yeah, the argument about "adapt or die" is also way off base. Ideally it'd be a gradual migration, all low hanging fruit first, seeing what works and what doesn't.
You can add 5 layers of "are you sure you want to do this unsafe thing" and it just adds 5 easy steps to the scam where they say "agree to the annoying popup"
You could even make this an installation-time option. If you want to enable the switch afterwards, you have to do a factory reset. Then, the attackers convincing the victims would get nothing.
Or make sideloading available only after 24 hours since enabling it. I would enable it on my new devices and wait 24 hours before installing F-Droid and other apps. Not a problem. Scammers might wait one day too but it decreases the chances of success because friends and family members can interfere.
But I'm afraid that this is security theater and the true goal is to protect revenues by making it hard or impossible to install apps that impact Alfabet bottom line (eg third party YouTube clients.)
> But I'm afraid that this is security theater and the true goal is to protect revenues by making it hard or impossible to install apps that impact Alfabet bottom line (eg third party YouTube clients.)
It's not just them. Every other SaaS, from banks to media providers to E2EE[0] chat clients to random apps whose makers feel insecure, or are obsessed with security [theater] best practices, just salivate at the thought of being able to check if you're a deviant running with root or debugging privileges, all because ${complex web of excuses that often sound plausible if you don't look too closely}. There's a huge demand for device attestation, remote or otherwise.
In the case of most of those business it's only because they must mark checkboxes on a regulation compliance sheet and/or deflect blame on someone else. The problem is that this is a never ending spiral of regulation after regulation and new ways to deflect blame so after device attestation will fail to solve all of their problems they'll end up pushing something else.
That's... brilliant. Enough work to not be able to talk it though over the phone to someone not technical. A sane default for people who don't know about security. And a simple enough procedure for the technically minded and brave.
It solves the 'smartest bear / dumbest human' overlap design concern in this situation.
They are already buying a locked down phone most of the time. And they already want this! (Unfortunately the bootloaders are locked, as far as I know.)
Developers want developer phones, non-developers want safe phones that are resistant to their and their shitty bank's goddamn fucking stupidity. (Because banks UX is so so so so bad that most of the time the phishing attack seems like just a normal part of the bank's UX.)
But it's hard to separate people on a webshop, if a shop runs out of non-developer phones they'll happily sell the developer phones to non-developers.
Who could Android be possibly recommended to at this point?
I know iPhones aren't affordable for the layman in many countries. But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android? All the "customization" things I cared about when I was on Android are either doable on an iPhone now with better implementation, or something I don't care about.
I was a die-hard until I went through enough cycles of Google deprecating and reinventing their apps and services every year, breaking my workflow/habits, that I got sick of them and moved to Apple everything. And all the changes I've seen since then are only making me happier I got out of the ecosystem when I did. Unlimited Google Photos backups with Pixels are gone, Google Play Music is gone, the free development/distribution environment is gone, etc.
If people can't even develop for the thing without going through the Google process, they're really just a shitty iOS knockoff.
But this thread is about the option to install apps on your device regardless of OS vendor approval, and that's not possible either with iOS nor is iOS open source. And that's what this is all about. If you don't care about open-source and user freedom, then this change wouldn't matter to you anyway.
I switched back to Android in large part for KDE Connect. You can get continuity esque features that work with any desktop operating system. I also get to use real Firefox instead of a Safari wrapper. I still use as few Google services as possible, pretty much just Maps.
It "works" but it is significantly less useful. Notification mirroring doesn't work, you can't read/respond to text messages, it can't reliably run in the background.
These are all due to limitations imposed by Apple.
Regarding notifications, both iOS and android doesn't support reading and responding to text messages. The feature works on android because of a workaround: apps create a global notification listener and they can also interact with notification - read UI contents and respond.
I know it's still better than not having a workaround at all like in iOS. But just pointing out that Google probably never meant to let others access notification mirroring.
As someone who hates both android and iOS but currently has to use iOS, I definitely hate it more. It lacks so many things one can take for granted on android. Even a usable keyboard is missing from iOS.
I love the Java/Kotlin userspace, even if it is Android Java flavour, and the our way or the highway attitude to C and C++ code, instead of yet another UNIX clone with some kind of X Windows into the phone.
In the past I was also on Windows Phone, again great .NET based userspace, with some limited C++, moving into the future, not legacy OS design.
I can afford iPhones, but won't buy them for private use, as I am not sponsoring Apple tax when I think about how many people on this world hardly can afford a feature phone in first place.
However I also support their Swift/Objective-C userspace, without being yet another UNIX clone.
If the Linux phones are to be yet another OpenMoko with Gtk+, or Qt, I don't see it moving the needle in mainstream adoption.
They only share a brand and a subset of filter lists - the implementation and functionality of uBlock Origin Lite and uBlock Origin are entirely different.
When UBOL was released for Safari I switched to it from 1Blocker in hopes of getting a closer experience to the full uBlock Origin, but actually switched back after a few weeks - the filter lists in UBOL were letting through more ads than 1Blocker - and both of them are notably deficient compared to uBlock Origin in Firefox.
At this point, I wouldn't recommend Android other than enjoying the much steeper discount with the headset. For me, the only thing that is keeping me on Android is easier access to commas on the keyboard.
That sounds like a pretty good way of organizing honestly. As long as you can remember where things are more-or-less within the individual screens, if you have a lot of apps installed and you have some that are only occasionally used, scrolling until you get to the color is a pretty easy way to narrow down where your target. I have some apps installed that I rarely use that I'd be more likely to remember what the icon looks like than the name of the app to search for it by text.
I heard that The Simpsons were made yellow because it stands out the most when quickly flipping through channels.
My PC is unfortunately on Windows 11, but I recently purchased StartAllBack which lets you replace the start menu with a Windows 7-era sensible one, and you can even change the Start icon and various chrome in the OS (the task bar, file explorer, etc) to revert back to Windows 7 style. Maybe I'm just nostalgic but it's made Windows 11 so much better.
Cmd-L Cmd-V Cmd-A Cmd-C
(swap for Cmd for Ctrl on non-Mac)
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