alt Hacker NewsI don't see a way out of this except government regulation. The EU has the most motivation to do it, as a huge economic bloc with a lot of motivation right now to become as independent from the US as possible.
I guess I can sort of manage to keep my head above water and keep buying secondhand phones which I unlock and install a supported version of LineageOS. But it's cumbersome, it gets more difficult and more restrictive every time. And I literally have a doctorate in computers for crying out loud! Is there any hope for Granny? For a kid? For >99% of people? Of course not.
This is so clearly a matter for government oversight: prevent abuse, monopolies, protect the citizen's safety, rights, welfare, etc. It's not reasonable to expect consumers to figure out if the meat they buy is tainted, just as it's not to figure out if their phone spies on them, manipulates information, or sells their data (especially when there's a duopoly). That's why we have laws and food inspectors, paid for by the public, working for the public. Same thing with digital rights.
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But what motivation has the EU to promulgate these regulations?
* Chat control is toothless if users can simply side-load an app without snooping.
* The EU companies who successfully lobbied for regulations against Apple now see that the 15% tax is worth it when they can A/B test the counterfactual. So those companies no longer care if Google will do the same thing.
* The EU is now in an awkward position that it is ok for a newspaper to sell your personal info via pay-or-consent, but not for a social network to do it. Some will keep yammering on about "gatekeepers", but it's sort of an emperor has no clothes moment.
* Declaring that iPadOs is a gatekeeper (after it failed to meet the quantitative criteria for such) was another such emperor has not clothes moment. The whole "gatekeeper" narrative has turned into a farce.
* The people commenting on this forum are not even a rounding error in the EU electorate.
> It's not reasonable to expect consumers to figure out if the meat they buy is tainted, just as it's not to figure out if their phone spies on them, manipulates information, or sells their data (especially when there's a duopoly).
Indeed! Neither would it be reasonable for the sellers of meat to demand anonymity! If one sells tainted meat, he should be held accountable! We should identify him!
Yet, the creators and sellers of software for a General Purpose Computer (remember, that is the argument why phones should be regulated) demand that they should be above the law, anonymous and unaccountable!
Schrodinger's computing device: The one which is so vital to everyday life that we must not prohibit the user to run whatever software he likes, yet so unimportant that we have not a care in the world to identify any fraudster who might wish to distribute software.
"This is so clearly a matter for government oversight: prevent abuse, protect the citizen's safety, rights, welfare, etc. It's not reasonable to expect consumers to figure out if the meat they buy is tainted, just as it's not to figure out if the APPS THEY INSTALL spies on them, manipulates information, or sells their data"
Do you see how quickly that argument can be flipped to support what google is doing here? Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if half the reason to to lock down phones is because governments keep pressuring them to do so.
I'm wondering if the EU is complicit in this somehow, despite claiming that they want to fight back against tech companies.
The EU Commission is currently pushing the shitty EU Identity Wallet for mandatory age verification, and it requires GooglePlay Services to be installed for "anti-tampering". That also means a ban on non official versions of Android like LineageOS and GrapheneOS.
You'd think in 2026 regulators would finally step up their game to break up the mobile app distribution duopoly.
And Google thinks it can pull this ridiculous stunt.
The thing is, the EU needs to be able to not only sell that the regulation they propose is good to the public, but also not piss off the US administration.
Most people are too non-technical to understand why this is a bad thing even when it's explained to them. Plus, whatever administration is in power in the US has a lot of influence.
Trump has already said that he wouldn't tolerate regulation that affects American companies [1], painting regulation that happens in another country as something that will affect US citizens. (I mean if you use the GDPR as an example, it's not wrong. Think of cookie pop ups while browsing the web in the US)
I would like the the EU would go harder with their regulations, because it usually results in other countries or states following their lead, but I dont see that happening. Regulation has been painted as "bad", and we have at least 3 more years until that changes.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/12/tech/us-eu-tech-regulation-fi...
> I don't see a way out of this except government regulation.
IMHO governments are partially behind those initiatives so they are unlikely to regulate themself- reason in last few years they intensified work on Digital ID, Age Verification, Chat control, KYC, etc.