I'm generally OK with this, but the 24 hour hang time does seem a bit onerous.
Most of the apps on my phone are installed from F-Droid. I guess the next time I get a new phone I'll have to wait at least 24 hours for it to become useful.
I'm seriously considering Graphene for a next personal device and whatever the cheapest iOS device is for work.
The apps might not be available though. Many developers are simply stopping in the face of Google's invasive policies. I don't blame them. Say goodbye to useful apps like Newpipe.
I'd say some od those apps starting with N and ending with E might... but I'm saying that only because of my intuition... might be the exact reason why Google introduces this policy
A few apps have been showing pop-ups warning users in advance that they are not going to do the verification. Obtanium is definitely on of them. I think I saw something similar on NewPipe.
It says they will not comply with whatever registration is required. It does not say specifically what they will do, in part I assume because they had not been given enough specifics (for example if it remains possible to sideload but not to be in a third party app store, would they continue to develop with that diminished accessibility?). Additionally YouTube itself has been making some system changes that, outside NewPipe's control, may make it functionally impossible to use the service without being logged into a Google account, so they may be suggesting that they think the writing is on the wall for them.
Sure, they have no obligation but the way you describe Newpipe to paint it as "obstructive" feels off to me.
When you offer a free service, by definition of it being free, you can't hold consumers of that service accountable for not furthering your revenue. They are impeding revenue only if it's not actually free (or only under false pretenses) which dismantles your first sentence here.
This is hopefully an exciting time to consider a Motorola device, since they are partnering with GrapheneOS, but I worry that Google will block Google Play Services on any device that doesn't comply, so this might actually be a demoralizing time to be a GrapheneOS fan, when we watch them worm their stupid walled garden nonsense into the Motorola version of it.
You don't need Google Play at all on GrapheneOS. You have to option of installing a sandboxed version of Google Play, but it isn't installed by default. Google's verification shenanigans are otherwise irrelevant to Graphene, it only applies to apps distributed through the Google store.
The vast majority of apks work just fine without Google libraries. In some rare cases, things such as notifications that depend on Google's servers may not work if the developers haven't not implemented an alternative backend such as a direct connection.
I hadn't read that Paul Graham article before, but it was extremely accurate at the time.
My degree is in Public Relations and I worked in political PR for a bit before moving to newspapers. The PR office worked so hard to word things in a way where news editors could lift our copy directly into print. It was a delicate balance to sell a point of view without sounding like a sales pitch.
Later, at the newspapers, I was shocked to learn how desperately editors would snag any text to fill the space between paid-for ads on a page. A minimal amount of actual journalism occurred above the fold. Past that we would publish absolutely anything in the English language without filtering.
This was all 20+ years ago. Now we've cut out the middle man, automatically publishing AI generated slop directly as if it were human-produced news. It's all very discouraging.
@focusedone I tried reader mode in several browsers it was such a hit or miss, it just did not work for me, and honestly I wanted to convert to markdown not just plain text
I tried several reader modes, there were several issues including
* several potions of the main content was missing
* the navigation bits get caught when in reader mode
* the comments and other un-related sections come in play
I really tried these before invesitng time in this
@focusedone if you see the code link here https://github.com/subranag/declutter/blob/main/src/page.ts there are some specific techniques recommended to simulate normal browsing behaviour, but it does not work 100% percent of the times, but works on most of the sites
for example
* simulate scrolling after page loads
* simulate plugins
* simulate location
etc
once all of this is done hopefully the HTML content becomes readable
You could be right. But plenty of websites with useful information intentionally obfuscate their pages to trick the browser into disabling reader mode.
All of these items appear to have received the HN hug of death. They're all showing as unavailable for me, who just wanted to drop a friendly lime hello to a friend across town.
Most of the apps on my phone are installed from F-Droid. I guess the next time I get a new phone I'll have to wait at least 24 hours for it to become useful.
I'm seriously considering Graphene for a next personal device and whatever the cheapest iOS device is for work.
reply