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Comment by tomaytotomato | Hacker News Reader

The paranoia is completely warranted, but there is a solution.

Just root your Android phone and put a custom ROM like LineageOS etc

If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself, I have tried but failed twice now.

I recently spent twenty minutes sitting outside of an MLB stadium because MLB decided they needed the same level of play protection as a foreign banking app and it refused to work on my friend's LineageOS phone.

We only got in by installing the app on my Sony and him signing into his account. They charge a fee now to get paper tickets from the box office.

Brutal. I had a similarly annoying experience recently, where in order to enter my local big arena for a concert, the TicketMaster app was not enough. I had to step out of the entrance line to download the _arena-specific_ TicketMaster app to access my tickets. I hate the ticket systems that dominate the market, we deserve better.

... and you continue to let them abuse you.

Give a solution

Don't give your money to these places? HSBC won't let me use my rooted phone either, so guess who lost my business?

Next time we will go to the professional baseball stadium across the street instead.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want this stop, you gotta stop using these services, even if it means sacrificing a hobby.

If, on the other hand, you care more about your hobby than these quirks annoy you, than by all means, go right ahead.

I'd rather try and get the executives, product managers, and engineers who implemented it fired and elect politicians that will make policies like that illegal.

I could go to a baseball game last year and have been able to for decades. The march to enshittification isn't inevitable. Otherwise there will be no hobbies in the future, and I'll be hoarding my money to just sit in my house doing nothing.

> I'd rather try and get the executives, product managers, and engineers who implemented it fired

How has that been working out for you? Apparently you have some avenue to apply pressure for that, other than the obvious one of not buying the tickets.

Why should anybody fire them, given that their actions have caused no actual harm to the bottom line? Obviously the ticket buyers don't care, so why should management or owners care?

> and elect politicians that will make policies like that illegal.

Sounds great. Who do I vote for?

I agree with you in principle, but reality is far and away from this, unfortunately. These types of companies need an incentive to change their ways, and money is the only language they know how to speak—and in “they” I’m including all the executives, product managers, engineers and, ESPECIALLY, the politicians you spoke about. Money will always trump morals when it comes to companies that voluntarily elect to put such shady deals in practice.

People would quit the sport before to stop. They won't.

Lobby the government for providing basic guarantees for ease of access in digital environment. Some political factions like the Pirate Party in EU is already working on acts like Digital Fairness Act to prevent such monopolies.

You can have (or provide) a phone that's specifically for those use cases and you can turn it off for actual communication.

Boycott.

Lawsuit.

Organise.

Publicise.

Shame.

Stop buying their tickets.

The solution is to not buy the tickets

The solution is to quit frequenting places that abuse you like this.

But it seems you LIKE being abused.

It's not necessarily enjoying it. OP evidently just thinks the trade-off is worth it. Some people like baseball more than researching which phone they can buy, which one has an unlockable bootloader, and which is supported (even unofficially) by LineageOS.

That's fine. They don't have to. Their solution can be calling their local representative and complaining that the stadium their city is paying for, is locking them out.

I had forgotten that we are paying billionaires to own stadia. Cannot find funding for schools or libraries but we can sure pay someone who doesn't need the money so they can build a monument to their own ego.

1) My phone is not officially supported by LineageOS so I will have to port it first.

2) I did not analyze LineageOS yet and how it is different from stock Android, so I need to go through complete diff.

> If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself

My goal is to have an open source system that is under my full control and doesn't play tricks on my by sending telemetry or collecting forensic databases. Because now I cannot even connect the phone to Internet and it is not as useful as it could be.

I’d assume that with such a level of required inspection, you also have quite some security requirements. I’d say at that level nothing works as well as GrapheneOS (though you have to either delay security updates or accept temporarily closed source (they get access to the code only in exchange for not publishing it until X days or something) updates, thanks Google). As that currently requires a Google phone, the only way to get close to your price target would be buying it used.

I wonder if you could ask Opus 4.7 to port LineageOS for your phone. The LLM must’ve had plenty of training data from the gazillion LineageOS ports for other devices, so perhaps it might actually work (or brick your device).

Easier said than done in the US. Even of the phones that allow for rooting (which is few and far between these days) you're at the complete mercy of the carrier for whether or not that ability is actually available to you. Even if the gracious lords may allow it, you have to engage in a long and drawn out Byzantine rite just for the privilege. Currently sitting on a Pixel 10 that will not let me have root.

Give me a Linux phone with halfway decent modem drivers, or give me death.

If you do not update the phone, chances are high that there is some Linux vulnerability you could expoloit. The privileged vendor software also can have vulnerabilities. For example, here [1] researches hacked the phone with Verified Boot using a boot logo parsing error.

My impression that you should treat your phone as something that can be hacked any moment and not store anything important there.

[1] https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2024/SSTIC-actes/when_vendo...

> Currently sitting on a Pixel 10 that will not let me have root.

Stop buying phones from Verizon?

Not a Verizon phone.

That's surprising. Is this after you've paid it off? I thought only Verizon did this after the phone is paid off.

My biggest obstacle to de-Googling is the GBoard keyboard of all things. There's really no good open source alternative that even comes close.

I was in the same boat until a year ago or so. FUTO^[1] finally provided a good text prediction/correction pair + that simply better feeling the Gboard has^[2].

[1]: https://keyboard.futo.org/

[2]: I never investigated this, so I always assumed that GBoard predicted what key I wanted to press when close to two letters. With FOSS keyboards, with a physically identical layout, I tended to make way more mistakes.

I find GBoard to remain superior in multilingual typing, futo just can't seem to be able to switch to other languages consistently, even with the multilingual option enabled,

it's also not as good at "recovering" from typing too many letters (Gboard sometimes adequately completes with likely shorter words)

Have you tried the FUTO keyboard? I actually find I prefer it to gboard now.

https://keyboard.futo.org/

I don't think I ever tried this one. I think I tried every keyboard on F-Droid but apparently FUTO isn't in the main F-Droid repo. I'm liking it so far. I'm a swipe typer and on most keyboards the swipe functionality is much worse than GBoard but this one seems to work pretty well. I'm going to try it for a while, thanks for the suggestion!

Gboard is somehow still the best, the native android keyboard is hardly usable. I use it on GrapheneOS, but with network permissions removed. Haven't had an issue so far

Evidently some disagree, but I'm on your side. Biggest reason I didn't immediately think of "But what would I use for a keyboard" is my Q25 has on built-in.

UnifiedPush, F-Droid, a GMaps webview (arguably cheating, but I'm not RMS), NewPipe or Invidious are all good-enough alternatives, but I remember struggling to find a keyboard that felt right when I was using a Pixel 2 for a fortnight.

I think I went with the oldest Fleksy or Minuum APK I could find (from a reputable source), as they were fine without GApps.

Though I'd also like to call out the fact that AOSP has talkback, the accessibility service built-in, but there's no AOSP TTS engine to use it with. This is especially noticable when trying to use any spoken directions in OSMAnd, as it requires a TTS engine to use that function.

The only reason it's not the dumbest thing about Google's stewardship of AOSP is that I'm not sight impaired - as it stands, the multi-trillion-dollar corporation ripping out the built-in SIP client in their phone OS takes that prize

Heliboard is an option. No gesture typing out of the box but you can install an external library for that and it works good.

I do not type a lot on the phone (I own a laptop), so no worries.

Do the support the razr?

Re: de-Googling yourself:

Goldman Sachs paid $6 million to try to get its [soon-to-be] former chief counsel Kathryn Ruemmler's Google search results highlighting her close friendship and many-years-long association with Jeffrey Epstein off the first few pages of results.

Today, the first result on the first page of a Google search for her is the opening paragraph of her Wikipedia biography:

>Kathryn H. Ruemmler (born April 19, 1971) is an American attorney who was principal deputy White House counsel and then White House Counsel to President Barack Obama.[1] Previously a partner at Latham and Watkins co-chairing its white-collar defense group,[2] Ruemmler joined Goldman Sachs in 2020 and was Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel.[3] She announced her resignation from this position in February 2026, effective at the end of June, over her links to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.[4][5][6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Ruemmler

>How a Secretive Firm Tried (and Failed) to Fix an Epstein Friend’s Tattered Image

https://archive.ph/Biztm

I'm not sure what your point is.

Wrote tomaytotomato 3 hours ago:

>If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself, I have tried but failed twice now.

My point is that even with unlimited resources it's impossible to de-Google yourself.

De-Googling (in this context at least) means not running Google software on your phone. No Google Play Services always running in the background, plus not using Google apps.

Ah. I misinterpreted "de-Googling." It is refreshing, though, to know that the cranky folks of HN still downvote honest mistakes.

Yes as BenjiWiebe said.

I was meaning more removing your reliance on Google in your life for search, photos, entertainment.

You can start small with Duckduckgo etc.

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