this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
1289 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
59578 readers
3208 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It doesn't really seem to be growing much, to be honest.
It's dominating the smartphone market via Android, though.
As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I'd hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.
Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.
Lineage and GrapheneOS don't rely on Google Play services. It's your apps that depend on this proprietary bullshit. That's exactly why we need to grow the Android FOSS app ecosystem. We already have FOSS app marketplaces like F-Droid and Accrescent, and Obtainium allows us to download APKs from GitHub releases, as well as many other sources. There are many great FOSS apps that work just as well or even better than their proprietary counterparts. Some of my personal favorites are Breezy Weather, AntennaPod, Thunder for Lemmy, Aegis for 2FA, Standard Notes, LibreTube for YouTube, Xtra for Twitch and Translate You. There are alternatives for basically any Google service. We have UnifiedPush for notifications, OpenStreetMaps for maps and navigation, various serach engines like DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Mojeek and others (Android now even asks the user what search engine to use, instead of selecting Google as the default). There's an improved fork of Signal called Molly, which has a FOSS variant that doesn't use any proprietary Google libraries, it supports notifications through WebSockets instead of relying on Google's FCM and they even have an option for UnifiedPush.
Came here cos of the mention of Mojeek; will be coming back for this long quality list of things I can put on my phone 👏👏👏