You bought a Google phone and don't want to use Google services, but complain that the dialler can be provided by a third party? Isn't that a good thing?
Wileyfox make their own phones and Android rom. It's not really a Google phone (it may have Google Play Services, but that's different).
The third party dialler app in this case was not provided by the ROM maker, but by a third party who gathers tracking data from usage of the dialler app. The ROM maker disabled/removed the stock dialler app from their ROM.
If it was an opt in feature, then I believe OP would be happy with that.
Google phones have use a different launcher (Which might be a modified version of the AOSP launcher, haven't used AOSP in a while) that provides unknown number names, access to the voicemail-to-text feature of Project Fi (and probably Google Voice), and probably a couple more things.
BTW, from the little I know, seeing google contacts in the dialer doesn't mean that it's talking to google. Google services adds the contacts to the phone's centralized contact management and the dialer gets them from there.
The search feature should not be any more than an optional point of integration. Is nothing sacred anymore?
Running cyanogenmod here, stock dialer.
Open up the dialer. Go to settings. Oh, look: "phone number lookup". I wonder what that could be. Hmmm.
Click. What is that? "Forward lookup - Show nearby places when searching in the dialer". Ticked on by default.
"People lookup"? On by default.
Reverse lookup? On by default.
Default lookup provider? Google.
By default, it looms like the standard dialer app in android sends every call made or received to Google.
This keeps some of my information away from Google. No normal person will go through this process.
Also, none of those options appear on my phone in the dialer settings (Android 6, Motorola phone), so either they've been moved or we're looking at different software. (Per another comment, likely I'm using the AOSP dialer, which thankfully lacks those "features")
and no, i'm pretty sure there's nothing "sacred" about your phone.
The act of punching in a number should not require any outside services or assistance or requirements. If there are value-added components to add then they can manifest as modular extras or in another part of the device. This is a violation of user expectations and runs contrary to 75+ years of muscle memory. (And to add... dialing a phone should be a core, fundamental, and inviable aspect of smartPHONE and its OS, not something OEMs can swap out)
Watching technology companies supplant (erm, "disrupt") established and proven tech with their crap is extremely depressing. We had nice things, and then we threw them away because we are stupid and lazy. Why do "technologists" ruin everything?
"Smart" my ass.
A phone number is an identifier that you use once when obtaining a contact (or it gets shared by someone, so you don't enter it even that one time). If a phone actually required you to dial a number, for many people it wouldn't be usable as a phone to call their friends.
This means that integration with wherever users have stored their contracts (and right not it's generally one of the cloud services) is a key component of the dialer app, possibly the main one - a contact app without phone features can be used to communicate with everyone (using the multitude of VOIP services available, skype calls or whatever) but a dialer without contacts isn't sufficient for communication.
Lawyers, doctors, and bail-bondsmen still advertise via their phone number. Entire generations still go to phone numbers as their primary means of reaching someone remotely.
Like, thinking about this I understood that don't know the phone number of my wife. I (probably?) have it written down somewhere outside my phone, I had known it by heart many years ago, but life was different back then, and as far as I recall it may be that I have not used it in any meaningful way for more than full ten years.
I recall that I have given her phone number to others on some occasions, but it involved sending a contact - possibly the number was displayed at the screen during that process, but neither I nor the receiver really read it, and it that way even before smartphones were a thing and sharing a contact happened over SMS.
This is YOUR problem with the technology. Normal muggles care for none of this conversation. They want something that works, which is what modern smartphones do. They like that the dialer provides fancy stuff like visual voicemail, automatic transcription, phone-number-to-business-name mapping, etc.
Most people don't care about trying to avoid Google Services, in fact most people don't use smart phones as phones. In a way, luddites that hate techologists have it nice. You can use an old flip phone that is just a phone and that thing will last forever! It's use assholes who need to keep charging them every day.
If only because the same companies are training users to require all these extras, by effectively (and mostly inadvertently) erasing past knowledge. I'm sure Google would love it if their engineers could remove dialing entirely, what number could you possibly want to call that's not listed in Google somewhere?
A lot of those same muggles were/are fine before these services came along and many likely want it to stay the same.
> They want something that works, which is what modern smartphones do.
Ha! You're funny.
Look at one process I'm sure most of us are familiar with: getting a cute girl's (or guy's) phone number. With flip phones this was simple- pull up the dialer, punch in the number, hit save instead of dial, done (or just dial and save later). No waiting, no fuss. Now with my smartphone that same process is:
* key in my passcode / fingerprint / whatever
* wait for UI to animate, notifications to process, and for the OS to catch up (cause powersave is now off). 3-10 seconds on average of awkwardly staring at the screen and apologizing for the phone's slowness
* hit phone icon, wait another second for my touch to register than another 5-20 seconds for phone app to start
* enter number, hit Add To Contacts, meanwhile all inputs are lagging about a half second behind my actions. Wait for contact screen to appear (another 3-10 seconds)
* enter her name, maybe snap a photo (about the only real value-add in this process), hit Save, again waiting half a second or so for UI lag after each touch
If going out with a flip phone didn't make one such a large target socially you can be sure more would be rockin' it.
I have run all kinds of app loads, with stock and hacked operating systems, and things ALWAYS end up this way. The only way to avoid it seems to be to install barely anything.
People still get phone numbers? I just get LINE user names (which you exchange by scanning a QR code). I'm sure in other countries it's WhatsApp or Facebook accounts...
Look at John Deere.... we went from "software on tractors" to what is shaping up to look like a massive battle over intellectual property rights. Those new Deere tractors are superior in almost every appreciable way and yet we have another case of the OEM inserting themselves way too far into something that they do not belong in. Are farmers luddites for rejecting Deere's bullshit?
It's a long-held belief of mine that (what society considers) neurotypical people, enjoy making their lives more complicated. They pursue things that do so. (It's half the point of the societal encouragement to have kids the moment you get married: it keeps life challenging by adding complexity faster than the added stability of life-partnership can take complexity away.)
> Are farmers luddites for rejecting Deere's bullshit?
I'm not totally sure; don't know that much about this story. (Do you have a link? Maybe submit it as an article!)
My entirely-uninformed intuition is that agro-tech generally is such a different thing now than it was in the past, that legal precedents from the past won't serve us very well.
We don't just have fancier tractors now; we effectively have "a crop-growing+harvesting system in a box—just add ops staff." The modern large-scale farmer is now doing a job that bears less resemblance to the act of classical subsistence farming, than it does to the act of being a feudal lord with serfs. The serfs are robots made by John Deere. Does that give John Deere some different rights than they had when they just made tools for humans to operate? I'm not sure. I can be certain that it's not an "easy, obvious" question, though.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/07/25/farmers-fight-for-rig...
https://www.law360.com/articles/830803/farm-tool-dealer-can-...
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/08/17/432...
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/09/523...
This looks a lot like the relationship between Apple or Google and their customers.
More likely, I think driverless cars will just be rented to people. And most of them won't even be that; the manufacturers will just build pools of them and hire them out, in the mode of taxis. The owner and "driver" will be the manufacturer; the people benefitting will be purely passengers.
I don't see what invalidates that logic when translated over to agro-tech: there's no reason John Deere will end up selling tractors, when they could instead contract them out, just as a temp agency contracts out their employees. They'd be the owner and the operator, insofar as they programmed the things and they're mostly running on automatic. The control buttons on such robots would just be for making "requests", and the owner would be free to ignore them. ("Don't like it? Hire someone else!")
Of course, for now, they're trying to get the benefits of being in that hypothetical world, while still existing in our own, which seems a bit silly. :)
I go to great lengths to keep Google and the like out of my life, and I find it really strange how accepting, and even defensive, people are with these intrusive services. It's a Brave New World, and Stallman was right.
As it is, if I'm sitting at my desk with my iPhone and get a call from a number I don't recognize, I literally take a second to Google the numbers on my laptop before accepting the call on my phone. I wish iOS (or any VoIP app for iOS; I use Bria) had this integration, optional or not.
Whoscall is one example and is pretty popular in Asia.
And no. It's not "paranoid" to want to dial your phone without onerous terms of service.
And yes. There is something sacred about our phones and their privacy. It's 2017. Without privacy on your mobile device, you effectively have no privacy at all.
I'm not sure your comment could have a higher degree of wrongness. Every single part of it is wrong.
While WF's choice is perhaps sad, the plug gable architecture should allow the poster to switch --- but the dialer can't be switched!