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Buying an Android phone is no longer enough — Google wants you to subscribe too
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
213 points (98.2% liked)
Fuck AI
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I hope Google goes bankrupt,especially after the Android sideloading change.
What I hope is that they lose Android to the anti trust lawsuit they're currently in
It's in the US, they just buy Trump something nice and they'll be let to be a monopoly. What needs to happen is for the EU to grow balls and stand up to US monopolies, by stripping any copyright, patent, or trademark protections of the offending companies.
Wait they have lawsuit?
Yes, it's still ongoing: https://tech-insider.org/google-antitrust-appeal-doj-search-monopoly-2026/
Personally I don't think the side loading will kill them. It'll happen and nothing will change.
Perhaps the ai bubble burst could damage them enough, but they are way to big of a monopoly to fall. And android alternatives still scare people as unlike PC, you may brick your phone, or be locked out of apps due to play services
I'm hopeful for the Motorola grapheme OS phone breaking some of that hold. It's slated for release next year.
When my current phone ages out, my next phone has HarmonyOS.
I hope you speak Mandarin. App availability outside the PRC seems to be pretty close to zero. Unless you think it's time for round 3 of a webapp-based OS? iPhone OS couldn't do it in 2008 and webOS couldn't do it in 2010, but 5G exists now, so it should at least be better. I'm still not sure about good.
I live in China. My SO has a HarmonyOS phone already. Interestingly it has a setting to display everything in English (among a lot of other languages).
Sounds like that's one more viable option for ~15% of the world's population, then! The rest of us have to wait for something that can run Android (or I guess iOS somehow) apps.
Or, you know, wait until Huawei shakes out the big features and ensures they're bug-free before they start selling outside of the PRC.
You don't think that China is their end-game, do you?
Well they're literally illegal in the US, so I'm pretty SOL regardless, but even if they have designs on the rest of the world, Apple and Google have several million apps' worth of a head start. We'll see if Huawei can do what Samsung and Palm/HP couldn't.
Apple has priced itself way out of most of the world's market. And Google ... well, let's just say that its current trajectory will make leaving its ecosystem viable and desirable for most people within five years.
Yes, but I'd expect an Android fork that still runs APKs to be the next move. I think it'll take quite a while to get every random bank and streaming app on there.
It's possible ... but somehow I just don't have a lot of faith in the open source community to actually make things that appeal to the broader user world. The things that tech types value (summarizable, albeit very coarsely, as a single word: control) are not what the average end users value (summarizable, again very coarsely, as a single word: convenience).
For instance I run Linux at home now because I'm doing "elbows up" and I don't want Microsoft's crappy AI-jammed-into-my-every-orifice bullshit. But the only reason I can do that is because my SO is a techie so I have someone there for when, not if, Linux decides that it hates its users and does something incomprehensible. (So far chiefly around audio.)
If I had a non-technical SO I would not be able to make that switch from Microsoft ... because what I value ("getting my shit done instead of someone else's") is at loggerheads with what Linux offers ("know every little detail of every little nook and cranny of your system with text that bears an astonishing resemblance to old-timey modem text over noisy lines").
I want this but remember it is still Andriod.
Sucks so msny apps need play services and have no alternative like banking apps witch I have to use on the web browser.