It’s a problem if you need a fucking banking app for example, and the bank won’t let you sideload it and you’re running a deGoogled OS. Then you suddenly need a backup phone with the full surveillance Android just to do banking.

I trust my kids to mostly only use the devices how I say. The security is mainly to keep their mum happy

It sounds like you should simply trust your kids and convince your better half that she should do the same.

If there’s one thing I learned both as a kid and as a father, it’s that restricting kids’ access to computers - or anything really - just doesn’t work: software solutions that exist for that purpose are almost always defeated by kids, who are reliably more clever than the adults who try to restrict them, and only exist to falsely reassure their parents.

If you’re serious about controlling your children’s cellphones, I’d suggest buying them Linux phones, or phones that you can install a mobile Linux distro on: nobody makes Linux apps, so good luck getting malware or shitty social media apps on them. And of course, you can keep the root password to yourself and set up your kids as non-privileged users.

Either that or feature phones - if you truly hate your children.

Pray tell, what possible benefit can Lemmy communities gain from Facebook users?

You do realize most people who joined the Fediverse did so because Facebook and the likes are a steaming pile of shit, right?

What possible benefit is there to the pile of shit coming to splatter itself here uninvited?

It’s not just a matter of blocking Threads users.

Facebook is coming on here to slurp up data I don’t want them to have, and enriching their own Threads ecosystem with Fediverse content they haven’t lifted a finger to create.

Not to mention, when Threads users are able to fully interact in the Fediverse, do you really want that particular bunch to create noise in your communities? I don’t. There’s a reason why I avoid Facebook in all its forms.

Great.
I joined the Fediverse to escape Facebook’s toxic interpretation of communities, so Facebook is coming to the Fediverse instead.
Just great…

If the service is worth it and subscribing isn’t yet another opportunity to put me under surveillance - which is the main reason why, although I consume a lot of YouTube videos and I would genuinely pay Google for the service, I won’t - yes.

Hint: Facebook and Reddit aren’t worth it. If they want to exit the ad-supported business model and disappear behind a paywall, I won’t miss anything in my life.

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F-Droid is also considering ads that contain no tracking, which removes that moral dillema, IMO:

You assume everybody is okay with ads.

I’m not. My brainspace has been highjacked since I was a little kid by stupid advertisers. To this day, I remember ads for products that have disappeared decades ago and that I never gave a shit about at any point in my life.

Why are advertisers allowed to force their shit into my head?

I hate ads. I’m utterly intolerant of advertising. I hate the tracking and the malware that come with ads, but I hate ads even more. There are no moral ads. The advertisement industry is a despicable leech that needs to die.

If F-Droid springs this shit on me, I swear to god I’m gonna start having murderous thoughts…

Paid apps: no problem. If it’s good, I’ll pay.

Subscription: maybe, if it’s worth it.

Ads: F-Droid can fuck right off. If they do that, they’d be a miserable bunch of sellouts.

It’s not technical news, It’s newsworthy because of the context.

Kind of like when people in the Soviet Union were allowed to grow vegetables in their own tiny plot of land for personal consumption: it was important because the Soviet Union denied people private ownership, but simply because everybody in the USSR was on the verge of dying of starvation any minute, the Soviets carved out a teeny tiny exception to the rule.

Everybody in the free world was completely nonplussed by the ability to grow your own veggies. But it made the news because it was the Soviet Union.

In this case, the stifling Google mothership implemented a teeny tiny something trivial on their platform, and it’s newsworthy because Google is the Soviet Union of the internet in more ways than one.

Of course, people with any sense of freedom and sanity consume Youtube videos with FreeTube, Grayjay, NewPipe, LibreTube, Piped, Invidious or whatever else and look at this thinking “So…?” But it’s newsworthy because it comes out of Google.

I didn’t know anybody still used the official Youtube client. Or cared about it.

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The fastest touchscreen keyboard I’ve ever found is OpenBoard with Gesture Typing: it’s both a regular keyboard and a super-fast Swype-like keyboard. It’s open-source and it doesn’t connect to the internet, so you don’t need to freak out because the APK is 2 years old.

I look forward to Australians answering that one…

I’d rather have a camera with complete lines, not just the top.

There’s plenty of good reasons to transfer update ownership to the Play Store, too

Aside from self-hate or suicidal tendencies, I fail to see which.

What’s Play Store?

Oh yeah, that stuff I access with Aurora because it can’t run on my deGoogled cellphone…

AOSP was never about consumers. Google used it as a trojan horse to gain massive marketshare and use it as a platform to run their surveillance software on the biggest possible scale.

The fact that it’s open source helped AOSP succeed at first and gave Google a good corporate image. Then, slowly over the years, Google moved more and more open-source features behind their proprietary stack, and now AOSP is only nominally open source: look at the state of the dialer, the contact list… in a vanilla AOSP installation, like on most deGoogle phones: it’s quite pathetic compared to modern, privacy-invading phones.

So yes: AOSP has failed consumers because it was designed to serve Google and nobody else from the get-go.