I am using duckduckgo for a decade. But especially, I am using Firefox Saved searches a lot. I type mdn in the bar, and it searches in the Mozilla developer network. osm is openstreetmap, so is stackoverflow, w is Wikipedia, yt is YouTube... I often know on which website I will find the info anyway, so I use less a generic search

Ubuntu Touch is not dead though, I use it happily on my primary device for 8 years. It's working like a charm. And waydroid allows you to run APKs, even if some bank apps may not work.

Could anyone provide me some clarifications?

If I understood correctly, to "protect" users, Google wants to control what is installed on Android phones. I guess it means the Play store will be the only way to install an app, which in turn means: - That users won't be able to install what they want and that they would need a google account to install apps - That app developers have to go through google to distribute their apps, with identity verification etc. Obviously this is awful and would mean the end of F-droid and Aurora store etc. However, I'm also reading here and there that it is a threat to alternative ROMs. To me it sounds at the contrary as an amazing opportunity, as they can strip this verification and be the only truly open Android, or am I missing something? Why do people link this app verification thing with a possible closing of AOSP?

Also, Mozilla was already saying it 10years ago with Firefox OS but... The web is the platform. 90% of the apps out there could be websites. We have all technologies needed for this including offline with service workers. And it works on every damn platform, even the most obscure OS has a web browser. Don't want to be locked to an ecosystem? Just target the web!

90% of apps are just websites with a wrapper UI.

There's a lot of misinformation here.

> I guess it means the Play store will be the only way to install an app

No, non-Play stores will still work, but developers will need to register a developer account with Google that is tied to some real identity. They already need to do this to distribute through the Play store, but now it'll apply regardless.

This is to make it harder for scam apps to churn app signatures. Kind of like requiring code-signing, but with only one CA.

> That users won't be able to install what they want

No, sideloading will still work, but it won't work if the APK isn't signed by someone in the Google developer registry.

> and that they would need a google account to install apps

Nope.

> That app developers have to go through google to distribute their apps, with identity verification etc.

They don't need to distribute through Google, but they will need to be involved with Google and do identity verification.

> However, I'm also reading here and there that it is a threat to alternative ROMs. To me it sounds at the contrary as an amazing opportunity, as they can strip this verification and be the only truly open Android, or am I missing something?

You're being misinformed. They won't even need to strip the verification. The verification is only for certified Android -- OEMs that partner with Google. Custom ROMs and the OEMs that aren't certified (Amazon, some Chinese manufacturers) won't have verification.

The target audience for verification and who would ever use a custom ROM has basically zero overlap.

I mostly agree with your points.

> > That users won't be able to install what they want

> No, sideloading will still work, but it won't work if the APK isn't signed by someone in the Google developer registry.

So the user can't install what they want. They can only install stuff signed by developers Google has "approved".

Yes, in the happy situation this is everything except for developers that Google has revoked. But technically it is only approved developers.

That's pedantically fair. I broke up a longer statement:

> That users won't be able to install what they want and that they would need a google account to install apps

It was split up because "need a Google account to install apps" is strictly untrue, but "won't be able to install what they want" is more nuanced.

I did clearly say, "it won't work if the APK isn't signed by someone in the Google developer registry".

So, it depends on what the user wants.

If they're running certified Android; otherwise it doesn't matter.

It is only for registered developers, so of course that very much depends on the registration system.

Yeah, I get you. I think the main misunderstanding from the original comment is that the *user* won't need a Google account, only the *developer* (signer to be technical) will.

>The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using). If installing a basic APK eventually requires a Google-verified developer ID, maintaining a truly de-Googled mobile OS becomes nearly impossible.

I have trouble understanding why this is a threat to AOSP distribution. I would have said quite the opposite actually, I don't see why they would not remove the verification and that's an incentive for people to use their project instead of Google Android.

How do you install the bank app if google does not allow you to install APKs manually / with a 3rd party store? You have to go with Google Play. Which requires a Google account. So I can't do it. That's the whole point of this thread: it would not be possible to use Android without a Google account.

Sure, but at some point the idea is to train an LLM on these downloaded files no? I mean what is the point of getting them if you don't use them. So sure, this won't be interpreted during the crawling but it will become part of the knowledge of the LLM

Training is not inference, there is no reasoning happening then either.

Even if it did have some effect down the line it wouldn't help sites like AA with their scraping problem, which is the issue at hand.

It looks cool, but to have to navigate from one side of the screen to the opposite one is quite suboptimal

You don't have to optimize the fun out of every single thing in life.

The problem is when the engineer's fun starts being user's daily life. Then it's not fun anymore.

This is the portfolio website of an event agency, not the Gmail website.

Fortunately.

On mobile, (my) thumbs are already at the locations where iventions places the toggle and the menu.

I had the same story but 15 years ago. I was so happy with XP, but Vista was terrible, so I put Ubuntu on my laptop. When 7 came, it became my OS on my desktop. But then it was 8 time. Couldn't bare it. Now it's Linux everywhere, including my sister, parents, grand parents, girlfriend, brother. Linux Mint is perfect for non technical people BTW. I heard good things about Zorin OS as well.

I might be starting down the path of introducing Linux to family members soon. I need to make sure I have enough spare time for the initial 'speed hump' of transition questions...

> I might be starting down the path of introducing Linux to family members soon. I need to make sure I have enough spare time for the initial 'speed hump' of transition questions...

The first couple of months are high touch after the switch. After that it's usually just smooth sailing for years. Much less work support-wise.

Been that way for my family and friends.

Either the projects he's working on are side projects, and in that case I don't see why he would need to use the complex pipelines, just Vanilla JS and PHP still work super fine, even better nowadays actually, or the projects are professional ones and then to ship code written by AI is extremely dangerous and he should have resources (time and people) to do things properly without AI. So, I'm clearly not convinced.

Maybe it is „very” professional, so he is part of one of hundreds of teams and he is creating micro parts of big system and with such setup he is easily hiding in ocean of very low performing people. In many big setups there are so-called microservices that in reality are picoservices doing function of 1-2 method and 1-2 tables in db.

Either way - the setup looks nice and is one of very few that really shows how to make things work. A lot of people say about 5-10x improvements not showing even the prompts, because probably they made some 2 model CRUD that probably can be already made with 20 lines of code in Django.

I use it as my primary phone for 2 years, first with the Flame, then with a Z3C. For me Firefox OS was the finale move of Mozilla, either it successes and Mozilla becomes a major actor again or it fails and they slowly die. And thebmy decided to kill it right when it was becoming stable enough.

It's another damned if you do, damned if you don't. FirefoxOS is regularly listed by commenters as an example of a wasteful side bet, whereas my feeling is more along the lines of yours, that it was striding greatly, as the saying goes, and attempting to be a major actor.

A big part of the market share loss was due to monopoly and distribution lockdown of a controlled platform tightly tied to hardware, so I can certainly see the strategic wisdom of the attempt. I suspect they didn't have the resources to press forward, they had a lot less money then than they do now. Which makes it all the more maddening that Yahoo's role as a partner was so muted; it could have made the difference for both of them.