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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 2nd, 2025

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  • I live in a country where the government is now weaponizing the mobile data on our phones to track us, and assault us. They have begun kidnapping citizens without due process and incarcerating people with legal status, without even filling charges.

    These state agencies are buying tech that let’s them follow people around by their phones, and the leading mobile platform companies are openly complicit with governments that assault their people.

    When you ask if I’m living in the developing world, I travel international a lot but my home country is experiencing rapid decline, and they have banned several categories of phone manufacturers, most famously Huawei consumer products. Ironically, because that company is suspected of doing the same things that Google is doing (granting access to back-end services and data to government entities).

    So it’s really not about any one device.

    The people affected by this state violence (a ) deserve privacy just like anyone else, and (b ) depend on their mobile devices for every part of their daily life just like everybody else.

    How are you going to help them, when you can’t even help yourself?

    Nobody can “help themselves” with a technology platform. It taken cooperation with others, to make systemic changes.

    Again, I personally will be fine. I can buy a Chinaphone. Or I can fund a Linux project phone for myself. Or, gods help me, I could buy an iPhone.

    But what about the people on the other end of the line? What good is one secure walkie talkie?


  • ROMs rarely work as one-size-fits-all-devices, yeah?

    I only know of four smartphone categories of phones that are really available in the markets around the world today, en masse.

    1. The big tentpole phones available from Samsung, Google, Moto, and maybe two other players.

    2. Boutique devices from vendors like Nothing and Fairphone with limited reach to global markets (like, being Euro only, or being only distributed in markets that can buy into they ideology, etc). Nearly all of them prices or is MOST humans’ reach.

    3. Chinaphones. A mix of fly-by-night brands with ghost shifts in factories that make many varieties of phones with other people’s designs, but have extremely limited first party support and probably zero ROM support from the global community … And then the handful of tech markings like Xiami, HTC, Huawei, and anyone else that bends the knee to the CCP. Virtually no NA market penetration in this decade, and tremendous barrier for entry, for most of the Western world. Also, security issues galore.

    4. iPhones.

    All that to say, I don’t think a more featured OS existed it’s the way forward, with people all jockeying to make new ROM’s for everyone to NOT be able to run on their phones.

    I’m hopeful folks smarter than I will be able to come in about the potential for sandboxes in it phones with their own capacity for running unsigned apps, like a virtualization platform.



  • I carry an S22 (with no Google services allowed on it) and an S25. I could buy any flagship phone in cash and not blink. Most folks around you and me don’t have this kind of privilege.

    I’m fine.

    I’m saying that we can’t ask or expect everyone to have the means to do so, AND that tellibg all of them to buy Pixels to fund the very company that is fucking everyone over, in hopes they leave the bootloader for those phones unlocked indefinitely, is basically just complying in advance.

    While you’re busy insulting me and others, I seriously think we need a campaign to empower devs because the solutions are going to have to come from software, and that takes real people’s labor, talent and time. That is solely what I’m advocating for.

    This is your community. It rises or falls with how we treat each other. How can you and I encourage each other, today?


    1. It’s not a “solution” if it doesn’t solve for most of us. Likely you and I both need to federate with others for results because I’m honestly not a qualified software developer but …

    2. Modern flagship phones have more than enough resources to run non-gaming app’s within some other container or even with full virtualization or, worst case scenario, emulation. We desperately need folks to figure out porting Dockerlike platform tools and making them accessible for normies like me.

    If we can run an entire Windows environment and, separately, if we can run Hades II on a yesteryear Samsung, we should be able to get a sufficiently sandboxed environment together that’s qualified to run the weather apps and calculator apps I run on FDroid.

    Because I’ll be god-damned if I’m going to entrust Google’s calculator app with my contacts and phone status permissions.

    Not to say I’m entitled to any of their labor but I would join a crowdfunding program in a heartbeat.