For those who haven’t seen this excellent video:
It’s not that “excellent.” It’s just ‘for the evulz’ mustache-twirling comical villainy, which ends up downplaying what’s actually important to know about enshittification, which is how self-serving and abusive it is. When companies enshittify products and services, they’re not just making them worse; they’re specifically making them more exploitative.
A lot of the examples shown in the video – cutting holes in socks, sawing off a chair leg so it wobbles, drying out a marker, etc. – are not enshittification. Enshittification is stuff like putting spyware in devices so that you double-dip on the purchase price and the value of the data, or turning products (as opposed to services) into a subscription. Stuff that extracts unearned value from the customer.
It touches on it in the latter part of the video, but for the most part misses the mark.
̶S̶̶i̶̶d̶̶e̶̶l̶̶o̶̶a̶̶d̶̶i̶̶n̶̶g̶ Installing
Yeah, but installing from the Play Store is also installing, and “sideloading” is shorter than “installing from outside the Play store”, so I’m not sure this is a winnable fight.
“I installed from apt get, and then I sideloaded from flatpak, and sideloaded from a .deb file”? Or “installed from the windows store but sideloaded from an .exe file” (literally everything I ever installed was through .exe/.msi on windows)
?!?!?
all of which is entirely possible on a phone (Linux containers and WINE), which makes the term “sideloading” even dumber
I’d just call all of that “installing”, “sideloading” doesn’t really make sense here. Importantly you already specified how you installed in each case, so it’s perfectly understandable whatever verb you use.
There’s a lot of other cool terms we could use. Indy apps, homebrews, anything that makes you think of a farmer’s market…
Also, we might just push for the narrative that anthing not sideloaded is wrong… Why are people using spoonfed apps anyways? Aren’t we grownups?
Edit: auto-complete typos
I like your ideas, they would be a better replacement than just “installing”.
And that’s why I’m installing /e/OS in my Fairphone 6, and shifting to Linux based phones.
Even now Google is removing everything that is a choice to avoid their massive surveillance machine, apps started complaining about removal of UnifiedPush:
Fuck Google.
Welcome friend! I’ve been having a great time with e/os on my FP6.
I recommend the lawnchair launcher if you don’t like the stock one.
Don’t forget their ongoing war on ad blocking. I’ll miss NewPipe so much.
NewPipe, PipePipe, Grayjay, brave mobile
One of them generally works.
The latest NewPipe is working for me right now. It only ever dies for a few days.
It’s working, yeah, but it’s
sideloadedinstalled outside of a washed garden, so it’ll soon be uninstallable.The inevitable end is when they bake the commercials into the stream, take away the skip buttons and ban accounts for timeskipping over commercials through other detectable means.
The inevitable counter is we screencap youtubers, feed it through comskip, and produce commercial-free content and torrent it.
Pipepipe works fine
You can try Futo’s Grayjay. Always updating its YT plugin when Google breaks it.
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Some people value freedom more than convenience
I have a Jolla C2 with SailfishOS, it has Android app support based on AlienDalvik, and my banking app runs just fine there. I can use Nextcloud, etc. For my needs it runs great.
Alternatives
Fairphone https://shop.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-system
GrapheneOS https://grapheneos.org/
Sailfish OS https://sailfishos.org/
LibrePhone from GNU/Linux https://librephone.fsf.org/
Do we stand any chance? And how fucking dare these fucking outlets continue to normalize this shit.
The weirdest part to me: this comes after the EU determined that Apple’s locked store is too restrictive, and Apple agreed to allow 3rd party stores. Why the hell would Android go in the opposite direction? Will this put them in violation of the same EU regulation?
Presumably, they’ll get a 100 000 dollar fine, and that’ll be it.
Oh they allow alternative stores now, too; you can install Epic for example. I wonder if that’ll be subject to these new rules as well?
Just bought a second hand pixel 6 to test Graphene. Let’s see what Motorola does and how Linux phones do in the future.
Motorola is making a graphene OS phone soon.
I really wish I wasn’t so dependent on certain financial apps. How much happier I would be to just give Google the finger and switch to Lineage, Graphene, or something like that. Unfortunately, a lot of must-have apps for me to even be able to live in my country, practically speaking, are incompatible with anything other than official iOS and Android.
@Logical @throws_lemy can’t u buy cheap 1+6t phone and install custom lineageos and use banking app? Or just use 2 phone’s. One for only banking apps & personal stuff and other for social media or anything… Old blackberry for social call msg and everything. & old 1+6t (with lineageos) for banking apps
I’ve been saving all the .apk files for apps I find valuable, just in case this ends up impacting future GrapheneOS builds.
Worst case scenario, at least I’d be able to use a saved Pixel for the apps I want, without needing a Google account.
I have the new Jolla Phone preordered and I’m excited to see how it plays out. Maybe 2026 is the year of the Linux Phone
They’ve been saying “maybe it’s the year of the Linux desktop” for years, mobile Linux only reliably works on a handful of specific modern devices and some fairly old ones
I wouldn’t hold my breath for it
I know that the year of the Linux desktop is a bit of a meme but that’s why I was referencing it. That said, the year of the Linux desktop has long come for me personally and only my desktop PC still has a Windows partition but I don’t know when I last booted into it. I won’t immediately ditch my Android phone, but I’m excited to test the viability of a Linux phone for me personally
As much as I love Linux I’ll be the first to admit that it probably won’t catch on with average users for a long time. Most people really don’t want to have to troubleshoot anything and just want something that works out of the box, and Linux isn’t really able to deliver that consistently.
I’m curious to try a Linux phone myself, but being in Canada importing new hardware is expensive and the other phone models that are compatible are ancient, and often without VoLTE support which is gonna be mandatory pretty soon here
We will get that reality with SteamOS supporting mobile devices whether gov likes it or not. These laws are SO god damn stupid.
Reckon we are gonna need to see some how to guides for adb. I presume its like the linux terminal?
It’s pretty easy to use, you just need a USB cable. But it is a cli like terminal so you do want to search for how to use it and not just guess because you can delete files accidentally easier. But you always just start with ‘adb devices’ and that just lets you know if it’s working.
It’s software that runs in the terminal. It just lets you pass on commands to your device that go beyond what the graphical interface can do (or allows you to do, really).
What if I disabled Play store and use Aurora and Fdroid for everything? Am I safe until I can afford to replace?
I think it’s on Google Play services so you need a rom with microG services.
I hate Google. They need to be broken down.
The term sideloading default google walldom software by making software outside seem more excotic and less safe.
We can combat this by reframing the terms and making them reflect reality. Calling to engage with google walldom as bloodletting as we are giving up some of our willforce to google, where blood is a symbol of willforce. We can frame to use software outside the google walldom as bearing, as in bearing the blood instead of letting it go.
Bloodletting is to install software by using a walled software store. Bearing is to install software by using unwalled software stores.
