Thanks for that. I’ve been meaning to (re) disable Google Play services. I have a few older phones too that never had it to begin with. I wonder how/if Aurora Store will be impacted. Presumably, if you don’t have Google Play Services functioning, you don’t get the poison pill. But…given that Big Evil likes to just … do shit (cf the recent 4GB forced ingestion of their LLM with Chrome) I dunno.
In any case, step 1 is probably nuking that.
Cool. So what happens if I run a version of Android that doesn’t inherit Google security theater cruft? That is to say…what if the user simply…does not…upgrade the Android version to be affected by this (eg: uses an old phone or blocks OS version update?).
My phone is going on 7yrs old. Perfectly happy with it. When it breaks, I will get a phone of the same era (2nd hand or new-old stock) or investigate other options.
So, it seems to me, the winning move is not to play the game (in any one of 100 diff ways).
Or am I missing something here? Is there something that will prevent older tech from working? Because if so, I am happy to YOLO my phone and switch to a dumbphone if I have to.
It’s a more convenient method for some to pirate content, as it requires comparatively little set up. Think: Netflix but yaaar. You pay upkeep but they ensure content is there (as best as possible).
Other similar options include things like Flixify and FMovies.
It always surprised me folks into self hosting prefer pirate streaming. That’s still someone else computer - I’d rather D/L it myself when possible. I get it though - some of the services are very good and near Netflix level convenient.
There use to be one called PDFDRIVE. I mean, there still is, but there use to be too :)