I haven’t been able to update my cellphone anonymously with Aurora since January. Every time I try, Aurora errors out with “Oops, you are rate limited”.
This isn’t the first time Google plays at making non-normies’ lives difficult. So I tried the usual tricks, updated Aurora, tried the nightly build, waited, tried again… for months - to no avail: Google just won’t play ball this time.
Last week, Signal stopped working and demanded to be updated. Fortunately, Signal offers the APK as a normal download without having to get it from the hateful Google Play store.
Today, my home banking identificator app did the same thing and stopped working. I needed to make a payment right now, and I had no way to update the app: “Oops, you are rate limited”. And my bank sure doesn’t offer the APK outside of anything but the goddamn Google Play store.
So I relented and created a Google account. Which of course entailed giving Google a phone number. I sure didn’t give them mine, so I phoned a friend abroad who doesn’t care to ask him to receive the verification SMS on his phone and read out the code to me. Which worked long enough to set up 2FA and do away with phone numbers altogether. And finally, after an hour of fucking around, annoying other people and compromising their phone number, I could update my banking app and make my payment at last.
All that because Google has decided they want to control my phone.
Fuck Google.
Seriously, how they are allowed to hold the Android world hostage like this without getting their monopolistic ass Sherman’ed AT&T-style, I’ll never know. It’s long overdue.
Really seems to me that the only way to manage this consistently will be with a non-de-googled phone as back-up for downloading and exporting apks. Doesn’t need a phone number, and wouldn’t have to have a google account with any real information.
As Android becomes increasingly hostile to users who want to control their own device, and without Google bullshit, I’ve grown to accept that I’m basically just going to have to carry two phones.
Rooted/Lineage phone is main, if something refuses to work (which is rare for me), I kick on the hotspot and pull out the “clean” one.
Been doing it for a year or so now. It’s annoying but not that big a deal, honestly. I’ve gotten used to it.
I’d probably end up having two anyway for work stuff. This way Verkada and Microsoft’s garbage can stay on the “clean” phone too. I’m not about to tolerate Outlook wanting device admin privileges on my personal phone, but if it wants it on the “clean” one, go for it.