I’m a technophile, been in IT 30+ years now, wrote my first programs in Fortran on punched cards.

I had these same questions, and had to search the web for them, as none of the instances I found had this info up front. Just a generic “create an account page”.

Lemmy suffers from the same issue lots if tech does - it’s driven by tech people, and we are notorious for assuming other people know what we know, plus, we’ll be damned if we’re gonna write any more effing documentation.

Ya want more people, gotta at least explain this stuff on the sign up page, hell, explain it everywhere…always have a link to “What in the world is this Lemmy thing?”

Use something like NoScript, Ublock Origin, or an Adblocker and simply block the Google domain (could do it with hosts file too).

There’s another, less sledgehammer way to do it, I just forget at the moment.

If you do a web search for it, there are numerous published ways.

https://techpp.com/2024/05/28/disable-sign-in-with-google-on-websites/

Self hosting an encrypted app (e.g. XMPP) on a VPS outside jurisdiction, in a country that just doesn’t comply.

Also add a VPN to all devices to make discovery of such things that much more difficult.

It’s on by default for newly installed apps.

It’s one of the things I manually disable for pretty much all apps.

I also use Greenify and disable Shallow Hibernation/Background Free, because those don’t make apps restore any faster (because current phones have sufficiently fast ram/cpu), but it does eventually slow my phone down because I switch apps heavily (I’ve done a LOT of testing with this) and it takes references in memory for page swapping type activities.

Buddy/part of, etc.

It’s all the same bucket of power-hungry people, they’ll accept any mechanism to increase their power/control.

I haven’t used Keep for at least ten years. So many better solutions out there that don’t require Google services.

Mailbox.org.

It’s worth paying for a service rather than trust an org that’s been less than direct with us.

(Mailbox has a free tier that’s limited).

Mozilla needs to fix their poor image before trying email.

Frankly, after the last few years I don’t trust them with a browser, let alone email.

Not happening. I already pay for an email service that has been privacy centric from the start, and has none of the bad news Mozilla does.

Mozilla has flat out lied to us about changes in Firefox with “No, you just misunderstood what we’re doing” . Why should anyone trust them with email?

Pound sand Mozilla.

Well, they’d be perfectly average then, right? 😁

Lol, Play is an exploit.

After 30 years in IT, I’ve seen 100x more systems taken down by updates than by exploits.

Actually, I’ve never had a system taken down by an exploit, 100% of outages have been caused by borked updates or changes.

I’ve had friends who’s clients have been taken hostage by exploits, and 100% of those have been because of poor security practices and phishing - neither of which is preventable by updates.

Here’s a question, if almost no-one sideloads or uses FDroid, where do people get the millions of malicious apps from? Play Store.

So where’s the problem again? Oh, yea, Play Store.

Why does Play need Play Protect if practically all apps come from Play Store?

Nah, then stuff breaks.

Wouldn’t it be Normasota or Averagesota then? 😁

Divide what?

Lemmy isn’t a monolithic thing, how would that be divided?

I’d rather have bezels - they make holding a phone easier.

So, they’re smaller, right? Or is that not how measurements work?

This whole argument is nonsense, and doesn’t change the pint that 6.3 is not “compact”.

That we can find any phone smaller given the market today, means it isn’t compact.

The Samsung S4 Mini was compact compared to the S4, by design.

Plenty.

And that’s an irrelevant strawman and goalpost move all rolled into one anyway. I’m currently running a Pixel 5,which is noticeably smaller.

6.3 is not compact.

Android isn’t Linux, Android is a Java implementation using a Linux kernel (IIRC) - the Linux part isn’t even “complete” - when you root you find there are tools you need to add to get typical Linux capability (busybox, init-d, etc). .

So you’re not going to install an Android APK on Linux or anything else, unless it emulates Android.

The language used doesn’t mean much - lots of stuff for Windows was written using C languages, and those would never run on Linux or Unix.

I guess we’re making up our own definitions these days… 6.3 is now compact?

Their claim that they dropped sms support because engineering costs causes me to question them.

There are free sms apps. Android handles SMS, an app just reads/writes the SMS database via an API.