this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Unfortunately the Android experience is getting more and more bloated and users' freedom to tinker with their phones or sideload apps is getting more and more difficult. The Play Store is riddled with more ads than useful content. Just try searching for something, and oftentimes more than half of your screen is ads.
I've been with Android since the start and I hate what Google is reducing it to. It pains me that the only viable alternative is Apple and I feel trapped.
Play Store is truly vile to use. It just feels gross and scammy and like a mine field of low quality slop and scam apps.
iOS isn’t great either but it at least feels a whole lot better. The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.
My experience with the iOS app store years ago was worse than Android. Searching for apps that were not chock full of spam was useless. I had to research the apps outside of the store then find direct links to them due to clones with the same names.
I have no idea why Apple and Google allow so much hot garbage in their app stores.
That's probably to reduce brigading? Android and iOS are infested with all sorts of fraduelnt marketing techniques like fake reviews, and mass fraud reporting for competition sounds like another.
F-Droid is a decent replacement for the play store. Lots of FOSS and less-enshittified apps available.
Unfortunately many of the apps needed just to exist as a member of society are only available in the Play Store.
Tried to rely fully on F-droid several years ago. That experiment went just fine until I needed up update the apps. Turns out, there wasn't a simple one button solution to that. I had to manually update each and every app one by one. Is it any better these days?
Unattended updates for everyone, 1.19 is here https://f-droid.org/2024/02/01/twif.html
That happened in 2024? About time! Sounds like F-droid is actually becoming viable.
I could be completely wrong as it's outside of my areas of competency, but my understanding is that the functionality was harder to achieve because of some technical reason due in part to Google/Alphabet fuckery. So another day ending in "y".
Try the Droidify app. I find it better than the main FDroid app.
Is there no Linux for mobile options currently available?
Your options are mostly UBTouch and PostmarketOS. Due to how PMOS is designed, it doesnt fully function on the phones it supports. UBTouch does work well due to the ability to use a driver compatibility layer with android IIRC, but you still have the issue of needing a phone that can support it. (I think the latest pixel UBTouch runs on is the 3?)
also, the security model of mobile linux is nowhere near what android is. Things that keep android secure like verified boot are not yet implemented on linux phone OSes AFAIK
We're all trapped. If you're not using either Android or iOS, you're pretty much screwed.
Technically, you can use one of the alternate phones, but the software support still leaves a lot to be desired. You can get most basic things working, but when it comes to crucial deal breaker apps like anything involving payments or banks, it gets a lot trickier. The world has become increasingly dependent on mobile phones, and if your phone can't handle train tickets, mail deliveries, restaurant reservations or pay your bills, it suddenly becomes very difficult to live in the 2020s.
More and more hardware also depends on specific iOS or Android apps, and those apps may also require GAPPS or some OEM Android. At some point, it just isn't worth the hassle, and it becomes easier to pick either one of the toxic platforms everyone else is already using.
I feel like the standard should be two phones. A disposable 'banking' phone: tiny, no camera, no speakers, small SoC, just the absolute bare minimum to live.
...And then a 'media' phone without all the enshittification.
Basically a lot like what my work phone is for now. It's just phone calls (yes, those still exist in the B2B world), SMS, Teams, and Outlook. Literally everything else happens on my work laptop. Most of the time, my work phone just pretends to be a wifi router + 4G modem. On remote days, the battery drains super fast, but when I'm at the office, the phone battery lasts way longer than you could reasonably expect. Then again, I don't really use that phone for anything, so I guess that's why.
I think I could do that with my personal stuff too. Get a nice laptop and prioritize using that for everything. Maybe I would end up using the phone like once a day at most.
Long term you should look out for Waydroid compatible devices. Basically linux devices (smartphones, tablets, pcs) that run android containers very close to hardware so you can run your important android apps while not having to rely on the mess that android is for everything. There is a GApps version too if you need google shitware for some reason. Ubuntu Touch (smartphone os) is one of the most prominent to implement it. Personally i hope to eventually just get rid of my phone and only have a laptop with a sim-card and waydroid.
Support devices like the Liberux Nexx or the pinephone, especially if you are a developer!
Funny enough, having Microsoft making the Windows Phone again would make a 3rd player, and maybe some competition in the market.
I don't know many companies that have the resources to fight in this arena right now...