I want a platform with as little single entity control as possible. If that is to succeed, there needs to be relevant apps available. That effectively means Android, because the only other platform with enough app support is ios and I don’t think apple would be too keen on anybody attempting to fork that.
So Android it is, just kick out google and their services.
Sorry, didn’t mean to become that aggressive. It’s just the Graphene situation is bizarre. I mean get away from Google, by buying Google products.
GrapheneOS is great.
Sure, if you want to spend twice or thrice the money for a phone. I can get a perfectly acceptable 8GB RAM 256GB storage Motorola G75 for 90€ https://www.cbb.dk/shop/mobiltelefoner/motorola/motorola-moto-g75/?variant=Motorola-Moto-G75-256-GB-Gra_1
Cheapest Pixel available to me is the first gen Pixel XL with 4GB RAM and 32GB storage, which is listed at 240 USD, and that’s a 10 year old phone with shitty specs even for 2016.https://inphone.dk/shop/485-google/1466-google-pixel-xl---sort---32gb/
We need graphene for more phones than Google’s.
Also, have you seen the ticket prices? Cat 4 tickets, the cheapest tickets, are generally 10x the 2022 prices https://www.sportingnews.com/us/soccer/news/world-cup-2026-tickets-cheapest-expensive/d3fd676c4f35b53961e35c38
The cheapest tickets for the opening match has gone from 55USD to 560USD.
So on top of the threat of ICE, and before them CBP at the airport, where you can be required to unlock your phone for inspection, you also get to pay like 2 days wages, to sit furthest from the field with a light pole in the way. GTFO, but there’s enough suckers to make it work.
In a blatant money grab FIFA has even expanded the cup to 48 teams.
Not that I’d discard the idea, but it just seems more likely to succeed with more phones, if we stuck with android, just in another flavor.
The desktop app argument may sound cool on the surface, but to me it’s almost a counter argument. But that’s because I used windows ce pocket (or whatever it was called) before smartphones became a thing. It was really just a PDA with a GSM modem, that could make calls. Anyway, at the time people hadn’t figured out the smartphone UI, and everything required a stylus. I mean, even the keyboard required a stylus, because the interactable objects were too small to reliably hit with your fingers. Running desktop programs on your phone requires some tweaking to work.
Yeah, I tried non-google forks, and I couldn’t find my food badda-bam-bam-tisch /s there’s a joke in there about AI ruining dining as well but I digress.
I have actually dabbled in 3rd party ROMs, but the trouble is that, at least in Denmark, I need my phone to be trusted. And unlocking the bootloader breaks the trust. All of a sudden I couldn’t use my phone to sign with the national ID app (mitID), I couldn’t use MobilePay (a ubiquitous Danish venmo-like app) or my banking app, and Netflix started to bitch.
The ID app is especially bad. I use Firefox as my default browser on my android phone. But most implementations of the ID app doesn’t work unless you have chrome as the default. And forget about not having google services running, that breaks all sort of official apps.
What we need is an EU founded android clone, that all government apps must support. Something that doesn’t require an overpriced Pixel phone(I’m looking at you Graphene). No google services, and the user must have admin rights.
An EU regulation, requiring that all phones, tablets and PCs, must make available methods to install an OS of your choice. That’s what we need. That would be a great way to fuck over both Apple, Google, and the US dominance on tech in general.
I suppose it doesn‘t take much to dominate Danish download charts.
I’ll have you know that tens of Danes have smartphones! Even Børge has one, and he still wears clogs to church.
Jokes aside, while it wouldn’t seem impressive numerically, charts are relative. Eg if a population is only 100, having your app downloaded 50 times still means 50% reach.
So it may be insignificant from the app developers POV, but it speaks volumes about the general state of the Danish people’s mind.
We’re talking about a country that were front and center, ruining a lot of men in my generation, when GWB sounded the article 5 bugle after 9/11, went looking for WMD in Iraq, where “made in the USA” was seen as a quality stamp, and where we throughout my childhood have had live TV transmissions from a Danish 4th of July party. It’s in this country, that one of the most downloaded apps is the “fuck America and their stupid brands” app.
FFS we were still buying F35s and negotiating Patriot missile systems after Trump was re-elected and started looking at Greenland like it was a 12 year old girl.
What allies? The US have none left… Well except for Russia and Hungary
It’s not Denmark, it’s our PM. She’s a power hungry a-hole who can’t keep power without inciting fear in people. She milked covid for all she could. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and we started donating a lot. I fully support donating military equipment to Ukraine, but I can tell from Danish news media that some of my fellow Danes are starting to drink the Russian “we can’t afford to help Ukraine when our butter is so expensive”-gatorade. So she needs something else now, with parliamentary elections less than a year away, our dear leader has decided to go all in on “won’t somebody think of the children”, “immigration is bad, and all foreigners are immigrants”, and “justice, both in social benefits and crime”
So the tldr on why Denmark is being a totalitarian prick at the moment is, that our PM is a fading star desperately trying to get reelected.
Which just underlines my point even further. A phone with an acceptable level of hardware can be had for 90€, but if you want a phone that you can coerce into running some acceptable software, then you’ll need to spend 3.5 times as much (the cheapest pixel 6 I’ve been able to find is 320€)
Reasonable hardware, running reasonable software, at a reasonable price. Pick two from the list because apparently we can’t have all three.