Yes, absolutely there is hope.

Phones that don't support Google play services (AKA any hardcore privacy phone) will not be directly effected by Google restricting sideloading. The restriction is only for phones that use the Google suite. (source: https://9to5google.com/2025/08/25/android-apps-developer-verification/ "This requirement applies to 'certified Android devices' that have Play Protect and are preloaded with Google apps.") Graphene OS isn't going anywhere, AOSP is open source, even if Google tried to make that change in the OS, the community would hard-fork AOSP instantly and continue like nothing ever happened.

Realistically this is going to squeeze people "in the middle" towards fully-google controlled Android (one exteme) and towards fully-de-googled Android (the other extreme). Its just elminating the middle. Which is bad for people trying to gradually de-google their life, but not as dire as it might seem.

On the bright side, this is an opportunity for play-services spoofing to become commonplace and easy, and could cause more apps to avoid google play services. The EU also has a shot at forcing google to allow sideloading, since they've recently been forcing Apple to move in that direction.

So, while not a bright future, its far from hopeless for privacy respecting Android phones.

I actually talked with her recently! She didn't know about Lemmy! So of course I told her last week.

She also said there wasn't a group chat for sci-hub because of scammers trying to bring the project down from the inside. Which I thought was really sad. If someone creates a group chat and posts it on Lemmy though I feel like it would do really well.

I had some questions about scraping the data and I felt bad having to ask her directly for every little problem I had.

Yeah I think scribbling out the 30% with a 100% and saying "roundabouts" would make for a pretty good punchline. I figured I'd get complaints about AI being quick and low cost compared to road construction, which is why I ended up going with the "bikes" punchline instead.

Additionally (I still love roundabouts) there can be a max-wait-time problem when there is heavy traffic in one direction.

If a basketball game ends there can be 20,000 cars bumper-to-bumper trying to leave. Let's say (looking at a map) they're going left-to-right through an intersection.

If there's 1 car trying to go top-to-bottom...

• If the intersection is a stoplight it doesn't matter. Even if there were 20 million left-to-right cars; it's still a 5 or 10min wait for the top-to-bottom car.
• If the intersection was a stop sign it also doesn't matter; it'll be the left-to-right cars turn then the top-to-bottom cars turn
• At a roundabout though (at least in the US), vehicles entering on the left always take priority over vehicles entering from the bottom. So the top-to-bottom guy could be there all night

Game days on my campus can cause a 2 hour wait on a 1 mile road. My campus is unusual, but just FYI absolutely insane wait times do happen regularly in some cities.