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The days of custom Android ROMs are numbered, and Google is to blame
(www.androidauthority.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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Nah… no matter what they do, people - especially Americans, are too lazy and apathetic to care. We all know about all the spying that has been publicly divulged and admitted to - by the phone company, by the NSA, by Facebook, the list goes on. And how many Americans made any change to their lifestyle? None. They still line up in droves to pour out their money for the latest spy device. How many times was Alexa demonstrated empirically to have uploaded conversations recorded without the owner’s awareness or consent? The sheep still BUY such devices.
Please don’t delude yourself that people have any reluctance whatsoever. Open arms indeed.
Apathetic is the key word there. And can you really blame Americans for being apathetic? In 2008, Democrats promised to give us socialized healthcare and the people showed up in record numbers. We gave Democrats complete control over the House, Senate, and Executive branch. And what happened? Nothing. They made up countless excuses on why they couldn't help us so our healthcare system stayed as broken as ever.
Last year, what did Harris promise to do to help us if she won? Nothing. She wouldn't endorse socialized healthcare for all, she wouldn't support free college for all, she wouldn't promise to connect all the major US cities by high speed rail, or to mandate that all working Americans have a minimum of 2 weeks of paid vacation each year + paid sick days, etc.
US politicians don't give a shit what the American people want. They don't even try to pretend anymore like they will help us. Instead, all they do is claim the other party will be more damaging. So yes, we are apathetic but that is because we live under a corporate dictatorship.
We chould be fighting back. We could pick one huge company that has done a lot of bad, one that relies on willing patronage, rather than a utility or the like, and we could collectively boycott them to death. Overnight the worst offenders could be shut down. But try to get anyone to give enough of a shit to sacrifice so much as a fart.
Sadly its too easy to claim a lack of understanding and continue on with life as usual. At this point, we should be working together to buy NOTHING from these corporations until our rights are firmly guaranteed. (exceptions for meds and similar essentials). I've cut back significantly, but I still made an Amazon purchase recently. A strengthening of secondhand marketplaces could take away another excuse for this. If they saw even a 25% drop in revenue it might be enough. We have to starve the beast.
I think you overestimate the average American's aptitude for both understanding the ramifications of such spying, and to understand how to go about seeking out alternatives. Joe/Susie Random doesn't have a clue about how what makes their phone screen work, only that it's a tool to do things. Social media especially is so ingrained in modern life that you can become ostracized for not using it (even jobs sometimes see not having SM as a red flag). And even SM aside, what options are there (aside from FOSS, which does require a certain technical aptitude to adapt)? It used to be that you could customize android via roms to get away from it, but with these latest changes happening, even that's becoming difficult to avoid big tech's dominance. But again, it takes a certain level of know-how to seek out and implement such an alternative. And for the layman that doesn't really have a clue about how this stuff work nor the bandwidth to learn it, i can't entirely place the blame on them. The focus should entirely be on Apple and Google for strangling the competition that renders the options limited. I'm all for placing the blame on the individual when warranted, but we need to remember that merely by being on Lemmy we have a bit more technical understanding than most, and that must be taken into account for how we view these things. Many of the people out there aren't inherently lazy or stupid, they just have different understandings and priorities in life, and we should be looking at these companies and also regulators for their failures of responsibility.
I’m not blaming individuals at all; the corp CEOs are the true evils. But they will never change, and we have minuscule to no power over them. Government regulation could have in the past, but the corporations are the government now; anyone who still thinks otherwise is just in denial.
So it’s up to the individual to choose not to give their money and information to these companies. It’s up to the individual to starve them of their lifeblood. Even then, they might double down - these gluttons are not known for their sense of humility. So one or two must be made into examples - and it would need to be companies that don’t have backing like the auto and banking industries, otherwise it would just be our tax dollars bailing them out like last timeS where the worst of them retired on multimillion dollar “golden parachutes.” All that would need to get slaughtered at the conceptual level.
I will refrain from sharing more of my perspective on what I expect because I really don’t wanna be that much of a bummer, but we are really approaching our very last moment before we would be labeled as terrorists for installing our own ROM. And if we don’t wake up average Joe/Sue, they’ll just go along and eat it up.
One of my favorite lesser-known sci-fi shows is Continuum. Their depiction of the future society was so spot on it’s scary. Everything down to how good people can actually believe that individuals who don’t want to be born into slavery should be considered aberrant, and those who fight back are terrorists… it’s uncanny how close to that we already are. You should watch it, because it’s pretty much a road map for where we are almost at.
On the positive side, lots of people are getting to the point where they are fed up enough that they just might be receptive if the ideas are presented in the right way.