Yes, absolutely there is hope.

Phones that don’t support Google play services (AKA any hardcore privacy phone) will not be directly effected by Google restricting sideloading. The restriction is only for phones that use the Google suite. (source: https://9to5google.com/2025/08/25/android-apps-developer-verification/ “This requirement applies to ‘certified Android devices’ that have Play Protect and are preloaded with Google apps.”) Graphene OS isn’t going anywhere, AOSP is open source, even if Google tried to make that change in the OS, the community would hard-fork AOSP instantly and continue like nothing ever happened.

Realistically this is going to squeeze people “in the middle” towards fully-google controlled Android (one exteme) and towards fully-de-googled Android (the other extreme). Its just elminating the middle. Which is bad for people trying to gradually de-google their life, but not as dire as it might seem.

On the bright side, this is an opportunity for play-services spoofing to become commonplace and easy, and could cause more apps to avoid google play services. The EU also has a shot at forcing google to allow sideloading, since they’ve recently been forcing Apple to move in that direction.

So, while not a bright future, its far from hopeless for privacy respecting Android phones.

I actually talked with her recently! She didn’t know about Lemmy! So of course I told her last week.

She also said there wasn’t a group chat for sci-hub because of scammers trying to bring the project down from the inside. Which I thought was really sad. If someone creates a group chat and posts it on Lemmy though I feel like it would do really well.

I had some questions about scraping the data and I felt bad having to ask her directly for every little problem I had.

I mean I actually kinda agree with them. I don’t like vacuum chambers and some of the stuff on here really does ignore the practicality of people’s situations.

I’m on here for the good arguments and laughs, not getting in so deep that I think everyone can and should sell their car tomorrow.

Sorry if it came across that way, I actually didn’t mean it pessimistically. The improvements the article talks about are great.

I just find it funny, as an AI researcher, how much AI is celebrated compared to boring solutions. I mean imagine the public being super excited about the same article, but this time “AI” was replaced by “bikes”. I find that mental image hilarious, and that is what I wanted to share.