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Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

Well as an iOS user, the last iOS release fucked me up pretty badly. Ergo, I would assume the same is possible from Google.

What I'd like is an exit route for my hardware aka LineageOS. But of course the core of Android is Google Play Services, not the OS so that's a painful situation if you want to retain some apps when you switch over.

I used a Pixel 6A for 3 months while I was travelling internationally and I liked most of it.

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Exactly. What I want is only security updates and no feature updates unless I explicitly consent. It's simply in vogue for designers to redesign the software interface every once a while and they invariably fuck up niche use cases.

The recent watchOS update from Apple is incredibly disappointing https://furbo.org/2023/09/28/the-timer-in-watchos-10/

Yeah I stopped wearing my watch almost instantly. It’s a shit show. It was terrible for activity tracking already. So many malfunctions and fuckups when doing hike tracking in the last year I went back to an ass end Garmin eTrex.

> What I'd like is an exit route for my hardware aka LineageOS. But of course the core of Android is Google Play Services, not the OS so that's a painful situation if you want to retain some apps when you switch over.

I'm not following; it's easy to install Google Play Services on lineage

It is but I don't want them and half the crap doesn't work without them. I use MSFT apps and OrganicMaps and that's about it.

Half, really? I don't run them and haven't had issues with apps not working in recent memory, though I try to stick to F-Droid stuff almost entirely. A lot of the time you can use your mobile browser instead of some company's app.

MicroG is an option, it's an open source implementation of a good portion of play services, though not everything "just works". But for the bare minimum like functional push notifications, location services, etc it's not half bad. There exists a fork[1] of lineage with MicroG installed from the get-go, otherwise installing it can be a little painful.

[1] - https://lineage.microg.org/

It's still a separate issue though; you can use Google Play Services on an old version of stock Android, an old major version of Lineage, or on a new version of Lineage, or you can decide to run an old major version of Lineage or a new version of Lineage without it. All of these except the first should fix the "vendor removing features from Android" problem.

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