Re: Your Phone Should Be Distributed, Not Centralized
My friend Wouter posted about his frustrations with how modern society seems to require access to either the Apple Store or the Google Play Store. I'm intimately familiar with these feelings of frustration, anger and helplessness as I've written about it many times on this blog. Wouter says:
The worst thing, however, is that I fear it is too late to stop this. That 1% critical mass like this rant here is not going to change anything. We can urge people to be more mindful when it comes to phone and services-on-phone usage, but we cannot turn the tide thanks to, among many other factors, the way capitalism seems to work. Judging from the way most people use their phone, it seems that either they don’t care or they’re in too deep.
Oh yeah, I'm convinced that ship has sailed, and as I wrote recently, I'm simply making peace with the idea that I must have access to one of the major app stores. The real travesty to me is that there's only two legitimate app stores. I know about and use F-Droid, and if an application is available there, that's where I download it from but neither the app my bank uses nor the app used by the city for parking is available on F-Droid.
This is very obvious but deservers to be mentioned time and time again: get rid of your Google account. Find other ways to host your photos and contact information.
No. My goal is to avoid vendor lock-in. I don't believe it's possible to avoid big tech, unless I just want to abstain from technology in general. The best I can do is not being locked into Google or Apple. I want the option to choose when it suits me. There is no legitimate third option unfortunately. I have peeled off as many services as I can from my mobile OS of choice (Android, for now). My photos sync to my local NAS with Syncthing. My contacts are hosted at Fastmail.
I know this sounds easy but in practice can be a real pain, especially if you’re not very technical. And that is exactly why all this makes me very mad: if I as dabbler in technical things can’t even get all this done, then how are we supposed to protect everyone else who also deserve privacy and security?
I can relate to this sentiment. I remember being very frustrated with the state of things because I wasn't able to avoid all the big tech companies. For my mental health, I needed to let it go though. I occasionally catch myself drifting back to the thinking but there's nothing I can do about the fact that my bank requires I use an app that's only available on one of the major app stores. Should we shop around for banks that do not require that? For me, I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze but each of us has to decide for ourselves. I'd rather go on a bike ride, fire up the grill or read a book instead of shopping for banks.
Good luck, Wouter. I hope you find peace.