I have one in a box somewhere, I should pull it out again, but I can’t get over how little storage it has

Don’t get me wrong. I love Aurora store. I love what they do and I donated a couple all the counts that I no longer use to them. But that does not mean I believe that this move is correct at all in any way.

Putting aside the extremely slippery slope of forcing Google to allow app stores on their store, You have actually rather significant security issues too because of the catalog.

This means any app store that is now can now download the apps, patch them with great features or malicious features and serve them as legitimate.

Security has already been such a massive headache because no matter what you do, you just can’t stop people from shooting themselves in the foot. But Android, that’s their target market and they need to do their best. And this is going to be such a massive issue. Now they did say individual apps can opt out but quite frankly I doubt many are going to unless their applications like banking apps which are almost definitely going to because attestation is extremely important for stuff like that.

Pardon me if I said anything that doesn’t make sense, I am using Speech to text.

I don’t agree with this. Anybody can send a link right to the APK or even a QR code. The Epic Game Store could have a nice button right there that says install it and boom, you’re installed and off to the races. And unless you’re doing that Samsung bullshit, it’ll just work on the vast majority of devices after you click one pop-up box.

I honestly don’t know anybody who couldn’t do that. Unless it is Samsung because Samsung does have that new bullshit.

It’s one thing because you have to know about fdroid. You have to go explicitly look for fdroid, someone and so forth. But if you’re epic and you’re trying to push people to your game store, you’re going to have it right on your front page.

Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually.

what the fuck. I don’t like google, I run fully Foss, and only recently installed microG, but I don’t agree with this garbage.

It’s easy enough to install any third party appstore. I don’t agree with this at all.

*code blocks are broken and have a fairly degraded UI *accounts and settings are hidden behind a show accounts that’s terrible to reach with one hand. *the new sidebar is also terrible to use with one hand *settings is also hidden behind show accounts.

these are the issues I remember off hand, I already deleted the app

Try it at the other day. Not gonna lie, it seems like a total downgrade versus K9. I’ll not be upgrading.

at the very least, you can easily install some TV oriented apps.

Finally, a phone I can actually read!

It has a LOT of issues still, it has potential, but things like subscriptions rarely actually work for me, and when it does, it takes ages for it to work. Portrait videos don’t work.

I do like how it syncs my watch history, allows me to watch membership content. I wish it allowed me to comment natively as well as like dislikes. However the page button allows you to open the webview for the video giving access to those, not superb, but for sure not bad.

I do absolutely agree that this sucks. However, most people don’t actually need this. Yes, it’s very convenient, but I found that pretty much all banking apps, at least for people I have helped support, offer a web client anyways that’s just as good. It’s only missing things like NFC tap payment.

Of course, don’t get me wrong. A lot of solutions don’t offer web UIs, and that sucks. But we can’t force everyone to be a not shitty developer Sadly.

I also do really miss tap payments with my phone. It’s really nice just taking my phone when I go shopping and maybe $20 in cash. Not needing to worry about my car or anything else.

I highly disagree with this assessment.

First, addressing your first point. Yes, they are stopping development of some core AOSP apps, but we are talking about apps which have had very good, oftentimes way better, alternative FOSS applications anyways. I really don’t see this being an issue at all.

For the second and third part. Google can sometimes do this with their core apps. Sometimes I suppose but GAPPs works on pretty much any custom ROM I’ve ever tried it on. Whether it be open gaps or microg. If you’re talking about things like Google Play Certification and safety net, I also disagree there. It’s a tool that Google provides if application devs don’t want to use it they don’t need to. Many devs DO want it. That’s not Google’s fault.

Application developers want, and sometimes need this level of security. Regardless of what anybody says, attestation is indeed a critical part of security.

ah I see, I personally don’t use more then two windows at the same time unless I’m on desktop mode (with free form windows) so the change for me was a welcome feature.I never thought it a problem, but I can see how it would be now for others. It would indeed be nice if they configured the behavior

what’s broken about multitasking? It’s working fine for me on Android 14. I use split view and desktop mode fairly often without issues, any specific applications that are broken?

can you give a few examples of the a11y issues that don’t have at least somewhat well known alternatives that work more or less the same way?

Personally I run android completely without gapps or even aurora store, the only proprietary apps I do actually use is discord my retarded router’s only method of accsessing the settings, eero app

why post it on an android post then? go to degoogled or something.

Out of all the people you could blame, you literally chose to blame the single least affected party here. Google has actually taken great strides to make custom ROMs as easy as humanly possible without stepping on the toes of vendors.

Google does a lot of stuff people should hate, but this is not one of them.

Do we really need to be so constantly cringy about it? Yes, custom ROMs are great. I run one. Lots of other people run one. They’re great. Don’t get me wrong. But you have to realize most people simply don’t care for one, Most vendors also don’t really support their phones well under GSI, so things like camera and stuff like that hardly ever work properly.

In a lot of cases, it is quite a bit of work to get a custom rom flashed and have it working well. The technological skill gap between most people who will run an Android phone and even enthusiasts who will so much as think about installing a custom ROM is so massive that you may as well be a hacker to them.

Yeah, for sure. The primary issues that Pixel phones do not have DisplayPort out over USB-C enabled. Well, I think the newest ones do.

You also have the option of using scrcpy for testing this. But it’s a bit of hassle.

it should, AOSP external desktop mode does work with 3rd party launchers, and you can even kinda get it working on samsung, but it was a massive hassle getting it to work for me.

in development options I believe you can enable desktop mode one external display, it’s been around since like A10, and with A12L they really fleshed it out. but A14 was another decent improvement.