Re:Microsoft stops Google being used for Cortana searches
by CaptSpify on Friday April 29, 2016 @10:27AM
(#11595911)
I know this is getting into off-topic territory: That's exactly why I want a solid "real-linux" phone. Android is just too locked down and closed off for me. I've yet to try out the Ubuntu phone, but I'm really excited about it. Other than that, there's just no non-android linux phone that I know of.
Re:Microsoft stops Google being used for Cortana searches
by tracker1 on Friday April 29, 2016 @02:43PM
(#11597835)
A lot of that is the binary drivers for essential phone components... that said, Cyanogenmod is pretty close to "stock" (no google apps) and if you're on a rooted phone with a first or third party build of Cyanogenmod, you can do pretty much whatever you want.
Unfortunately, it's really the chipset builders and the lack of UEFI/BIOS or something similar in ARM (and other non-x86 mobile platforms) that locks it out even further.
Re:Microsoft stops Google being used for Cortana searches
by kuschku on Saturday April 30, 2016 @05:26AM
(#11601044)
Yes, but compiling 40GB of Android source myself every time I want to change things is quite annoying.
And having to write my own smartlock provider as a system app isn't great either.
It'd be great if in addition to everything being AOSP, they'd also allow changing more at runtime.
One of my goals is to not share any data with a company I can’t trust – so I write my own tools for all these purposes, my own apps, and self-host these things.
I already have a several GB large archive of my mail as I self-host it, why shouldn’t I be able to write software to parse it and remind me?
Why do I always have to use services of a company when I buy a device, instead of being able to hack together my own?
When you bought IBM PCs, they didn’t force you to use Windows with Notepad either – instead, people could write Linux, GNU, and Emacs for their own usage.
This is what I expect from an open system, like Android.