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- android@lemdro.id
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- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
- europe@feddit.org
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I’m not defending Google, but who should it pay? Its rivals? If not, then this is just extortion.
Fines are usually paid to a government whose citizens have suffered. The government can then use the money for the benefit of citizens… Given of course that the government is generally inclined to such a thing.
Wait, Google is actually facing consequences. Am I dreaming?
They’ll probably appeal and do bullshit to negotiate it down and defer the payment.
So, a consequence, but one absolutely built into the budget of the things they’re being fined for.
Edit: oh wait i misread. This is actually something they already appealed and negotiated down already. The original judgement was years ago.
I farted a few minutes ago. Google knows this and was able to monetize the sale of that data. My flatulence paid that fine.
These are not consequences. This is zero-calorie consequences.
Not zero calorie. They made more off your data and that shitty fine was a small cost of doing business.
Fun fact: I haven’t farted in hours. The misdirect both proves my point and devalues their product. Hilarious blip in the data.
Also, excuse to increase Taco Bell intake.
Not really. They’ve made probably a few hundred billion from what they’ve done to be fined $5bil. Just a cost of business expense at this level.
And once again, Apple gets a pass for doing the same thing, only worse.
Apple don’t do anything remotely similar. Apple don’t let other manufacturers use iOS. What are you even talking about?
Right. Google gives away AOSP to any manufacturer. Apple doesn’t let ANYONE else use their OS. Yet Google is the one who gets in trouble for being “restrictive”.
I’m not upset that Google is getting called it for this, they are not innocent. I just want Apple to be held to the same standard.
Apple is not required to share their OS with anyone. Nor is Google.
The problem is: Google shared it voluntarily, because they knew a lot of people and companies would contribute to its development for free. It was a calculated business move that happened to create an open mobile OS.
Now that Android has been polished by the community and has a gigantic market share, Google is trying to use that to eliminate any competition, and to close the OS down. It’s trying to rewrite the entire agreement, while keeping all of the benefits it received over the years, and giving nothing back. Essentially a bait and switch scheme.
If Android was never open to begin with - this wouldn’t be an issue. But then Android would still be stuck in 2016, and nobody would be using it.
iOS uses freeBSD and OpenBSD components. Isn’t that the same thing?
AOSP has become unusable over the years because Google bundles more and more core functions with its proprietary Google Play Services.
Source: I’ve been around long enough to remember independent devs making versions such as Gingerbread or Marshmallow usable.
Lineage, graphene, calyx are pretty good tho. Much better than the android that comes with today’s stock phones.
In Apple products it’s a feature tho. Like it’s literally why people buy into it. Why would anyone fine them for that?
significant investment to ensure Android remains open.
Unless you want to install apps not from the google app store. Or develop apps not for the google app store. Or use a Captcha without having google services. Or use your bank website without google services. or use the internet without chrome. or… shit, sorry, I don’t have time to list all the ways google wants the exact opposite of anything anywhere remaining “open” unless by “open” they mean “open to google’s exploitation”.
Using the internet without Chrome is basically the only thing you CAN do on Android out of this list.
…for now.
And google definitely doesn’t like that. lol
Now lets use part of that money, to fund the development of open alternatives and interoperable protocols / standards. We cannot break a duopoly, if there aren’t any alternatives, otherwise it will keep being a duopoly.
i can’t stand microshaft, but at least windows phone was competition.
Get on with the times, it’s microslop now.
I got a Nokia Lumia at the time and the OS quality was surprisingly good. It felt much more well thought end to end than my Android is currently. But it was a mistake to force a convergence with the desktop OS.
they were around when i was in IT, and I had to support them. they seemed pretty good, apart from the microslop.
My favourite MS thing was having a funeral for the iphone. Within a couple of years, they were having a funeral for the windows phone.
4 billion can go a very long way.
Not in government it doesn’t.
Believe it or not, straight to data centers
Datacenters are not inherently bad…
They aren’t inherently bad, but they are bad when not used and built in the public interest on a planet with runaway greenhouse gas emissions and collapsing ecology.
If someone ever brings up one of those data centers, we can talk about their good aspects. There definitely are plenty, but I don’t think the poster was talking about those.
We are talking about developing alternatives to US services, which, surprise, will need datacenters to run. You don’t provide email to 700 million people from an old laptop in a basement.
Those are among the plenty that are in the public interest. The whole Information Age would be practically impossible without them. In fact, distributing them would probably make them less efficient.
LLM data centers are the ones that are all the rage lately, and the ones most often being designed using environmentally irresponsible and wasteful technologies, then lobbying for extremely favorable utility rates, foisting the costs on the locals. They’re so far at the forefront of the media that many people think these are the only kind there are.
100% agree
So what you’re saying is… they’re inherently bad.
about 0.11% of Google (Alphabet)'s total worth.
the price of doing business
Total Worth doesn’t matter. What matters is revenue and profit and that is the basis for the fine.
When it comes to something punitive like a fine, fine versus worth is literally the only thing that matters. If the fine isn’t big enough, it’s more like a fee for doing business. They just added to the bottom line and keep rolling.
It really is not. Companies operate on creating profit. Activities are judged on their ROI. Worth is not relevant for the ROI.
I think worth and cash flow are too loosely correlated for that to work how youre intending. I’m all for punitive fines for corporate malfeasance, but if they’re based on worth only, a company could easily become insolvent even from fines that aren’t intended to be fatal to them.
If it is based off their cash flow instead and potentially distributed over a period of time, it can do multiple good things at once: force the company to literally pay for the harms it caused, damage their operations enough to financially discourage the behavior, and keep corporate behavior in line through examples without frequently disrupting markets by unduly bankrupting companies.
If a company does end up doing something so bad that it is unforgivable and irreparable, and it’s deemed worthy of destroying them or punishing those responsible directly, I can see the reasoning for that, too. But, I think it would work best if the punishments are dialed in to have the desired result as often as possible. Allowing the possibility of offenders correcting course seems better for everyone while still allowing any victims to get justice.
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The question is how much money did they make by using Android to block rivals. If using Android helped them make 1bn extra then this fine costs them 3bn and it doesn’t make sense from them to keep doing it. If they made 100bn than obviously they will continue.
I mean, with it they’ve managed to build a walled garden that includes the majority of every phone in the world.
We can probably assume trillions.
It’s all hypothetical. You can’t know if any of the rivals had any chance at gaining significant share of the market. I was using Blackberry when it was still perfectly fine OS, supported by all the important apps (but before everything was an app) and I didn’t know anyone else using it. I think that yes, the deals they made stopped most of the phone manufactures from offering alternative OSes like Geko OS or Lineage OS (before it was called like that) but we can only guess if any of them had any chance of becoming anything else than niche curiosity like Graphene OS today. So you can only really compare this fine with what they are doing now to block Graphene or AOSP. I don’t know if this fine is big enough but I doubt they made trillions thanks to those practices.
pretty much. these fines are just cost of doing business. I’m sure they made MUCH more than the fine by doing what they did.
I was going to say “Finally, a fine with some substance!” but you took the wind out of my sails…
Need another one now for all the removal of side loading, that is another big antitrust issue. Best make the fine actually worth something this time.
The EU can spin that into a serious concern about safety and “won’t somebody please think of the children?”
The fine is not the largest ever imposed on Google, however.
In October 2024 a charge was brought against the firm by a Russian court for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube.
The fine was for two undecillion roubles - more than the world’s total GDP.
Do Google actually ever end up paying these fines? If so, over what period and how much have they paid so far?
Google’s behavior in this debacle has been utterly shameful. They got caught with their dick in the pie and have spent 8 fucking years arguing that it was for the good of society.
Just so I can do the calculations, approximately how long is a pie fucking year?
While continuing to thrust harder.
have spent 8 fucking years arguing
Part of the plan.
👍🏽great stuff. BTW, stop using google products, there are enough good alternatives.
Is there a good alternative for maps?
It depends on what you use Google Maps for. For straight-up navigation, CoMaps is good. And I mean it’s good at the navigation itself for the most part. Although sometimes when you enter in an address it thinks you’re referring to the entire street. But most of my favorite restaurants and a lot of locations that have been open for a while aren’t on it, which I’ve been happy to add. Locations that have been closed for a while are still on it, which I’ve been happy to delete.
But if you use Google Maps for discovering places or looking at pictures or seeing reviews of businesses, or if you do a lot of multi-stop trips, comaps doesn’t have those features even in the littlest, tiniest bit, and in that sense there is legitimately no (Foss) competitor. For instance, if you’re out and about on a vacation and you’re trying to find a restaurant, nope, comaps is useless for that. If you’re trying to plan a trip by seeing what’s around somewhere, nope, useless for that too.
It really just focuses on navigation itself, and it does a pretty good job of that. I use it to get around when I drive.
I really want CoMaps to be a valid choice. Its maps look are absolutely great, like Ordnance Survey Maps. But I don’t normally use it for the reason I experienced again just today. I use Android Auto in the car with my GrapheneOS phone, but my phone SIM reader failed the other day, so this phone has no internet. Google Maps refused to work without internet. So I just used CoMaps again today. This is in the UK, and lack of traffic info matters. It does routes down the little country roads that are technically 60mph, but you literally can not drive that fast down them. Even with a death wish. But it plans them in assuming that speed. This results in bad routes and inaccurate times. (Though I do enjoy country roads, when used well.)
Yeah, this is a misunderstanding of speed limits by the app developer. In the UK, as far as I remember, these national speed limit roads have just never had a speed limit put on them. Things like accidents, petitions, zoning etc. is how everywhere else has gradually added speed limits.
So although you could say “well, national speed limit on a single carriageway is 60mph” by default, that has almost nothing to do with how fast people are able drive on them. To work that out, you’d probably have to do some Waze-type stuff.
I’ve very sympathetic to the developers. It’s a stupidly hard problem to know what speed is likely, at what time of day, on these roads. Far far easier to just have the data of what people are actually doing on these roads. That’s what Google do.
Though if you can detect country road, you could safely assume half the speed advertised.
On the plus side, it worked without internet!
So you’re saying that you can’t drive this speed limit on those roads because of the amount of traffic, right? not because of some sort of geographic feature or shape of the roads?
Yeah…hard to imagine much of a way to get traffic updates in comaps, or any OSM project honestly. It seems like it would have to be a separately maintained service. And either way, I’m guessing the number of users that would buy into something like that just wouldn’t be enough to get meaningful data most of the time. Especially since it pretty much relies on tracking people’s locations, which I feel like is counter to the purpose of most people’s reason for getting into those services.
Oh it’s not traffic. They are often quite empty. British country roads are narrow and often stone wall lined, or tree lined, or embankment lined, or all three. They are winding and can be quite steep. Corners can be almost back on themselves. Often there are bits down to a single lane for both directions, with passing points for someone to wait for the other direction to pass. If you encounter someone who can’t reverse, you might have to reverse quite a way.
I think they do mean that the layout of the road means you can’t drive at the speed limit. In the UK we have quite a lot of rural roads that are technically legally 60mph limit roads, but they are in reality very narrow, windy roads that you couldn’t safely drive on at 60mph. I guess CoMaps goes by speed limit for estimates so it measures these roads as if they are 60mph but in reality you may only be able to go 20mph without dying
I’m pretty sure there are appropriate tags to mark that in osm. comaps should be using them if the roads are properly tagged
CoMaps fulfills most of my needs
HERE WeGo (aka HERE Maps) is not FOSS, but has traffic, satellite view, offline mode, etc. Some POI might be outdated (due to it being not Google)
Here is trash and not open
No, everything I have tried is worse in significant ways. Let me know if you find a genuine alternative.
Comaps is actually not bad. It’s limited in info to what’s on OSM, but good news is you can help by updating the spots you frequent!
Doesn’t have satellite view or bus/tram navigation
map apps solve the first by using outside satellite imagery services. but it has bus/tram line data, so if the app supports it then it should work. not comaps but osmand supports it
Osmand seems more promising but you can only search for public transport leaving right now, not in two hours or the next day
It also plans routes longer than Google maps, and 90% of the places you want to go don’t come up in search.
Yes.
I have only one of their services that I do not see replaced any time soon. YouTube. What they do there is impressive, and very, very hard to replicate.
Not a fan of YouTube, don’t get me wrong. But I see nothing comparable out there (maybe AWS, but they just run some infrastructure orchestration).
Google will kill YouTube long before anybody else is able to pull off the same stunt.
Or is there a service comparable for video streaming?
Nebula.tv is great, but won’t replace all of YouTube.
Been using Newpipe/Pipepipe for the longest time, but Google has been screwing with the Youtube API so the Newpipe Extractor hasn’t been working properly for the last two updates. Can’t keep a video playing in the background for long, can’t download OPUS audio files, playlist albums from YouTube Music are still iffy.
Genuinely about to switch to Nebula or Peertube. Fuck Google, I hope Pichai dies.
Those are just YouTube clients, though. The 1st-party YouTube client apps are pretty widely regarded as crappy, but they are far from the main problem. The YouTube content and its distribution are almost totally unmatched and almost certainly operate at a loss. Google is uniquely willing and able to operate it that way because it adds more value to their other business units than it costs them.
Such as iOS?
Lineage OS and Graphene OS.
If you can. The problem there is Play Integrity API, which is used as an anti-competition measure.
Revolut was the only app I had issues with on Graphene OS. I obviously closed Revolut account and continue using Graphene.
I use Revolut with no issue on GrapheneOS. Maybe things changed.
Interesting, looks like they fixed it last year: https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report/issues/90
For sure thanks to people like me who complained and closed their account :)
Sure, but I’m not interested in that ecosystem at all. My desktop and my tablet don’t run proprietary software. My phone runs a few apps which rely on sandboxed Play, but honestly, I don’t need them badly so I could stop tomorrow.
Both of those are soft forks of Android, meaning they still exist at the whim of Google.
The only real alternatives are Sailfish (proprietary userland, relies on Halium for its devices to run, which means the devices have a limited lifespan as they rely on a specific version of the Linux kernel that will eventually stop being supported), UBPorts, Droidian, etc. (also relies on Halium, but the userland is open sourcs), and mainline Linux distros like PostmarketOS (has one device that is fully functional, but is extremely slow, but device support is slowly improving over time).
All of those alternatives also support an Android compatibility layer, presuming you don’t rely on device attestation DRM like Play Integrity.
If I can’t have hardware that supports open source Android forks, then it means that I won’t buy it. I can work around with dumbphones, MiFi routers with tethered Linux or BSD portables. I will not use a proprietary system outside of work, full stop.
If i remember correctly, GNU is working on a Librephone, the progress is slow tho
Yeah don’t use android. Use android. And android but only for google’s phones. That’ll learn 'em.
Google makes a good, open, affordable phone with 7 years of support. They suck but their phone is not the problem here.
Use whatever nonproprietary open/libre systems that are out there. Right now, for mobile smartdevices that’s Lineage OS and Graphene OS. If you want GOS, that’s currently limited to Pixels. I’m not giving a shit about proprietary vendors, it’s a freedom thing. If I can buy open hardware, I will.
I think my next phone will be Graphene. I’m sick of iOS bullshit
What issues does iOS give you? I was a first-gen Android adopter and loved it, had the Dream (first Android phone that came out) right away, then had another Android phone after.
When phones went away from physical keyboards, I tried my partner’s iPhone and typing on a screen was much better then on Android phones at the time, so I picked one up. Lasted five years, and during that time, I dropped all Google products and services.
I haven’t run into any issues myself, and I find I can keep them for a long time without having to upgrade. I don’t tinker on my phone, though—I work on my full computers and other stuff, but I just want my phone to do internet things quickly, take sick pictures of cats, play music, and shitpost.
It’s hard to explain, it’s more an emotional thing than a logical thing. Death by a thousand cuts kind of thing.
- I don’t like Apple choking out in-app purchases like they tried to make it even on Safari if you use Amazon website they wanted 30% cut…
- I don’t barely use any of the lock-in ecosystem like iCloud, I don’t trust “automatic backups”, I don’t understand or see the mechanism of.
- I wish I could actually access the file system when plugging into my PC.
- It doesn’t support Linux at all.
- I can’t download my movies I purchased onto my devices for backup.
- As an intermediate photographer, the camera really pisses me off.
- They updated the default keyboard years ago so swipe to type is awful now and I had to install GBoard.
- I don’t really trust Google either.
- I wish I could install Firefox and add-ons but Firefox is just Safari with a trenchcoat.
- I can’t sync things to my iPhone properly.
- Apps don’t really work properly in the background, they keep going to sleep. Even just switching between 2 apps to copy paste by the time I come back it’s killed the first app to save memory or something. I have plenty of memory.
- Web apps suuuuuck and keep logging me out and losing state.
- I hate notifications and being “always online” and social media. It makes my head hurt and it’s so hard to curate your notifications. Like I want discord to tell me about messages but not about Nitro promotions at 9pm.
I’m probably forgetting things too, but really it’s just a combination of factors. I feel like I’m paying a lot for things I don’t want or use. Honestly give me a phone with no apps apart from phone and messages, and just great Firefox web app support, and I’d probably be happy. My phone is an iPhone 13 so it’s getting a bit old, but I’m not sure yet what I actually want… Just thinking about it for now. Thinking about maybe something wildly different.
A lot of those are extremely understandable. A lot of them are ubiquitous to all phones, however. Many of them are unique to you, which is precisely what I was curious about—thank you for taking the time to share! I don’t run into many of the same issues, but I’ll try to give my insight on them, whether you care or not ehehehe
- That’s totally way fair, but no cut is taken if you buy stuff through a browser. It’s ridiculous that if you support someone through the Patreon app, they take a cut. I don’t like that. But there is no cut through web browser, and better fuckin not ever be.
- I’ve been using iPhones since the… 5? And I have NEVER used iCloud for anything. I wouldn’t use Google’s online backup either, though. I don’t trust any of them, but I’d trust Apple more. Yet… still hell no. I use iTunes on my computer to make incremental encrypted backups, which it does very well. But I don’t want any of my sensitive stuff online anywhere. It stays on my own hard drives and servers.
- I also wish we could do that. I really would like to be able to use it as a standard device by plugging it into any of my computers.
- Fair, but I don’t want Linux on my iPhone personally. I want Linux on my Linux machines. Linux on any phone sucks ass right now. I’m psyched for it to be better, but for the stuff I personally want a phone to do, it would be a nightmare.
- I don’t know how to answer that one other than we have a separate set of morales, I haven’t purchased a movie since I got my first DVD player. Burners came out shortly after that and all of my movies and shows have been DRM free since.
- The camera takes some getting used to, but I’ve found it superior to any other phone camera. For photos, it’s kind of a wash between end Android and iPhones. For video, iPhones are leagues better. I don’t do video much, so that doesn’t super matter to me tho.
- i love the keyboard, but I haven’t used a google touchscreen keyboard since like 2009 or so. I’m sure they’ve improved since then hahaha. If I turn on Apple’s AI bullshit the keyboard and autocorrect become garbage, but with it disabled, it feels the same as it did to me when I used my first iPhone and I really like it. I do have to set all of the shortcuts to add special words I use to its dictionary every time I get a new phone. Maybe that changed? I’m not sure, but that’s a bit annoying… but only because I use words dumbly.
- I quit all google and Facebook products and services a decade ago so I gotta agree. Never used a Twitter or a TikTok.
- everything WebKit under the hood, I’m against. I’d love actual Firefox or forks. I am happy that there are now extensions like ublock origin, but full ass support for Firefox would be excellent.
- I’m not sure what kinds of things you sync, but I’ve had issues with this as well, with music. I have my music tagged very specifically because
I’m various types of neuroatypicalit’s good to have them like that and feels right. Songs are sorted fucking WACK if I don’t sync them a certain way, and that changed with one specific update—they used to work properly without me having to sync them a weird certain way. Nonmusic files work fine for me, though. - That’s my one gripe with my last phone. I had an XS MAXXX and it started closing like everything in the background. To be fair, I had the phone for five years. That’s pretty insane for a phone that overall works great without modifications; I had to CFW my HTC Dream after like a year.
- I’ve only used a Lemmy web app and it never did that, but once Voyager was released, I stopped using any web apps so I can’t give any opinion on that—it would be very annoying to be logged out often!
- This is the only one I’m gonna hard refute—that’s not an apple thing. That’s every phone. I get zero notifications unless it’s important. Everything allows you to set it as you want. Google is way worse for this. The only notifications I get are E-mails (with many folders set not to notify), all texts, all calls, and very specific apps.
It kinda sounds like you just hate smartphones which is TOTALLY fair—my good friend is looking to get a flip phone right now lawl. I can understand for a lot of fools including that friend, as they got caught up in the whole “dopamine app” shit like TikTok and Twitter and insta and whatever shit wants all of your time and attention and eww. I never touched that stuff; my phone has always been a little computer I use away from my big computer, and I only use it for texting, chatrooms, E-mail, media playing when needed, and taking photographs and videos.
For tinkering and playing around and doing deep stuff, I go to my heaps of computers hahaha. Not saying this is anyone else’s experience, but it is why I dig iOS. Well, that and it’s my only choice for a high end phone as I haven’t touched Google for a decade or more and never will.
Appreciate you taking the time to voice your feelings about this tho, lotta valid points.
Thanks for the detailed reply
:). Yeah I agree with you on most of it. A dumb phone actually sounds kind of appealing… Especially since it doubles as a fidget toy. Opening and closing it used to be like my favourite stim. I’ll seriously consider that.On the Linux thing, I meant more that ITunes doesn’t work on my Linux PC, so it’s extremely hard to do anything between my phone and PC since I don’t use Windows at all anymore. And I really don’t want to dual boot it just for that and have it fuck up my grub file and ext4 drives. I tried having multiple file types on one drive once… Never again…
The camera is really high quality but really annoying. Like I can’t edit exposure or focus or anything properly. Either it takes a great photo, or it takes a garbage photo, and I kind of just have to accept whatever the phone app decides lol. There’s alternative apps but they work really weirdly due to API restrictions.
I’m starting to think my ideal setup is multiple separate devices that does one thing well. Like: dumb phone, dslr camera, kindle (for reading books), desktop for games, laptop for life admin, etc. Decentralise my digital life lol
Snack money.
Pay who?
European Commission of course. They are the only ones left in the world trying to rein in the tech giants.
in the ideal world they would use the money and give it to open source phone projects.
I’d go further, I think in an ideal world all the countries of the world would be funding these projects and holding these huge tech companies to task.
