I post this knowing the article naively hopeful but it’s also food for thought. With the recent drama where Google stopped publishing device-specific AOSP code - thus making maintaining custom ROMs more difficult - what will more tech-knowledgeable people do if Android is enshittified further?
Will “phone ludditism” - switching to dumbphone with a simple OS like Mocor RTOS, S30+, ThreadX etc. be the answer for some of them? They’re deGoogled out of the factory. I switched to a dumbphone as my main phone, but I still keep an Android smartphone at home for online banking. I also take the smartphone with me if I know I’ll need a hotspot or a map. I use the smartphone like a PDA, or a terminal to the Android ecosystem.
It’s also questionable whether “Europe is leading in the dumbphone sector”. Sure we have HMD, Doro, Crosscall, Gigaset (sold to South Koreans), MaxKom or myPhone but there are so many other potentially bigger companies like TCL or Itel. One thing is for sure - in the dumbphone sector and considering how simple those devices are, Europe at least stands a fighting chance. Whether somebody will become a dumbphone martyr in order to exist in this Europe-friendly sector is another thing.
I’m not sure that is necessary to go that far, unless one wants to. Both Volla and Jolla phones and Fairphone 5 version with /e/os are all degoogled out of the factory. Sailfish and Ubuntu touch are great Smartphone OS options. If you haven’t tried it on someone else’s phone, you should, they’re both really great.
But I completely support people using dumbphones. Getting away from the hassle and hustle of an app centered world is quite refreshing.
I’ve degoogled my Samsung Android quite a while ago. And, no, I don’t have Google Play Services in the background either. Completely degoogled. If you don’t know how to jailbreak it to remove the apps entirely, you can just deactivate the apps and uninstall the updates from them. It will free a lot of space and memory and your battery will last longer. My phone is over 5 years old and the battery lasts over 4 days. Although I only have two non-system apps installed, voyager for Lemmy and Pixelfed. And when I travel and need directions I install Herewego or Mapy. I take turns between them. When I don’t need them, I uninstall them. And that’s it. No Meta shit (no, not WhatsApp either), no youtube, nothing. I do my banking in person. Malware is getting too good too fast with A.I. as a sidekick for hackers. This is a huge cybersecurity concern all over. One can risk it out of convenience, I won’t. If the bank gets fucked on their end, the money is ensured, if I get fucked on my end, it isn’t. It’s that simple.
Anyway, there are decent European alternatives for both Smartphones and Dumbphones. And yes, we should support them. Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are some of the worst companies out there.