Ads – they’re everywhere. The only way to stay sane on the Internet is to attempt to mitigate the horrors of relentless ads. This article summarises how we might still keep the ads under control at the Android platform level in 2026
There is one smaller player here out of Singapore, UOB, which offers a hardware token for like $11. It isn’t as generic as say an OnlyKey/NitroKey/SoloKey, but it serves a single purpose while, importantly, being decoupled from a phone OS. I am going to look into the feasibility of opening/migrating—an this dumb device meets the securiny requirements under law.
I agree tho that probably have these personal, internet-always-on was a mistake. The masses are not ready to be responsible enough, meaning they hawe all been crippled into being a portal to proprietary services over time. That would be okay if I was allowed to fairly trivially participate in society without—but that part seems not to be going well edther. Moreover, Google will try to get attestation into Chrome (again), & then it’s likely gameover for us & our personal compute devices. 😢
Well, my thought is- the main problem of being forced to have an Android/iOS dongle is that you have to pay for it, when it’s required of you. Otherwise… technically where’s the problem with that?
We will see, but right now I would expect traditional PCs to continue existing for a long time, perhaps for as long as I intend to want to do computing. Right now I’m a bit unhappy with Linux + Gnome, but I think I could switch to FreeBSD + KDE and hopefully that would keep working for a good while.
In the past, we used to have a single computer, so switching to Linux meant dual-booting for the stuff that required Windows and a lot of headaches. Nowadays keeping what I call “the compliance device” and “the cult device” (a device you keep for general computing in a “praying” room at home) seems more doable.
Price alone isn’t the problem but we know about the other meaning of “free” from FOSS. We have been able to get open source to work so hard for us to be the alternative to these proprietary services—even self-hostable so the big, bad government can’t easily ruin our fun… but that’s changing. Your compliance device… well, Google is now requiring app makers doxx themselves & are putting the ability to load your own software (named “sideloading” to scare users) on a cooldown. You know who originally showed me CyanogenMod? My tech enthusiast uncle with no FOSS or software support—as a way to get better battery life, customize the OS, & so on. He hasn’t used something like that in ages due to all the stupid hoops the corpos keep putting in our way to device freedom. Compute devices got so accessible that now you don’t need know how they are operated (unlike the first Windows 97 box we got in the “family room” where my Dad & I read a tome we bought on how to operate & debug Windows issues). This is somewhat nice for a11y, but the cost is now folks don’t know how it works & want the companies be in charge/be liable for the safety/security which gave up their autonomy …but not just their own autonomy, but governments have been lobbied to let require them nanny us, all of us, even the ones that know what we are doing. The broader free software & adjacent ideals got us so close to the freedom. While we’ve been snuck up on in the other direction in the form of phones/tablets making this acceptable. You’d think with these right-to-repair initiatives against John Deere & the like, we could also get broader consumer rights to the same things.
The fact that they are requiring SIM cards only network activity tied to IDs + KYC, is where I get truly peeved. This says I basically must keep a tracking device on me & probably powered on to participate. It isn’t good enough that my consumer desktop/laptop can run Linux/BSD/Haiku… especially if general services get disconnect from the internet (which is happening from yet another direction now with LLM agent bullshit). Makes you wanna move into the jungle/forest & not deal with any of this (except you will still owe taxes & they’ll still demand you have accounts/services).
Actually, the sideloading Google measures as they are now do not bother me as much as the rest of stuff that’s happening and that is coming. (Apparently, people do fall to installing malicious APKs from outside the Play Store!)
For banking, as long as you can get physical cards, in the end you will be carrying a tracking device because you want to carry a phone on you; if you have a physical card you could leave the compliance device at home most of the time and use it only for stuff other than payment. (I still use physical cards to pay because I don’t think phone payments are really more convenient. Digging my card from my wallet is inconvenient, but I don’t think paying with my phone is better on every sense.)
(What pisses me off in this case is that the reason it is a tracking device it’s because it’s associated to an id card because you cannot buy phone line without providing id. AND THIS SHOULD MAKE PHONE SPAM SOLVABLE YET IT’S NOT. If they solved spam then at least there’d be a good reason for it!)
My plan would be: phone only for calls, “urgent instant messaging” (e.g. messages that cannot wait until I’m home), and apps that are forced on me (banks, gov’t, proprietary messaging platforms for people I must communicate with that won’t use anything else, etc.). Absolutely nothing else. Anything that I can do on a Linux desktop at home, is done there, or not done at all.
Oh I understand this stance for sure. I just like being able to catch up with friend/family (using open source & ideally self-hosted software) as well as browse the web when certain parts of my day are tedious/boring as I have nothing better to do—like now waiting in line at the physical bank. I’m also in a state where somewhat frequently I end up using my phone as a hotspot for the laptop which a SIM provides me. I like the convenience when I get to be in control of the software. I don’t think a SIM should be a whole lot different than getting service from my ISP (& the net should remain neutral)… it’s just a data connection (that I can disable when I want). I use my laptop quite a lot & will even pull it out in some odd times to some like at a restaurant, but it’s too cumbersome many times or the batter life isn’t sufficient to treat it as my lifeline. A phone to me is just a more portable Linux device for tasks on the go where I still want to have full control.
Here, cash is almost always accepted & cards often aren’t (neither is NFC or Apple/Google pay to the chagrin of Western tourists it seems), but the 2 elephants in the room are a) QR code payments which are everywhere & none work over the web (I can’t come up with a technical reason why) b) online payments, even ones using the credit/debit almost always trigger their 2FA systems (which in all but 1 or 2 banks now will be exclusive to an app on Android/iOS (sometimes HarmonyOS), rather than something generic like WebAuthn).
To give it to say Google (to which I might even choose Apple or Huawei as I want to throw up a little) just goes against what I have been trying to stand for & migrate away from. I’ve dealt with a lot of inconvenience, but this has finally gotten to full on technical limitations as you can’t truly fake the levels of attestations they are doing. To not even be able to check your account balance without going in physically or keeping spreadsheets or whatever at home feels like too much regression. I can’t believe internet banking is the hill I am dying on while yelling at clouds…
No physical cards and only accepting cash or QR-based custom app payment is a really bad combination.
My stance about using a phone as little as possible is not about replacing it with a laptop, it’s about doing something else entirely. I’m starting to carry a paperback book if I expect to be idle outside for enough time to read. (And if I don’t have enough time to read, I shouldn’t be bored enough to get my phone out, right?)
Of course, that’s something I’m exploring personally. But if I manage to do that, then I don’t really care so much about my phone not being mine. I’d be doing most of my computing on a computer I own. And yep, that doesn’t solve needing to do tasks on the go… hopefully that will work for me, but might not work for others.
Funny enough, I have been trying similar with my e-reader… but the biggest problem is the device doesn’t boot fast enough to just read a couple pages & put it back like a physical book. But I don’t have the place to store so many book, library is limited in English books, & I’m also less sure about money (something about LLMs). It’s easier to whip out a phone to read a Lobste.rs article most of the time. I also have a dedicated (offline) DAP for music (I should write some scripts to make it fetch casts, but the fact that it can’t keep position of multiple scenarios—such as pausing to listen to music for a task—make it hard to use as well). I have a nice mirrorless camera too… which I like but it took is a bit more faff to get out for something small (tho this is largely a result of not choosing a good bag for my latest one, but it’s reaching the end of its life, so I can hopefully fix this). I’ve started to do the device decoupling in many ways, but it’s a more cumbersome carry if I’m being honest. This broadly is the appeal to most folks it seems—replacing the gadgets with one device. I get that convenience appeal—even after being one of the last of my circle to adopt a smart phone with my clamshell doing the job just fine. …But maybe that’s the insight to reconsider: less data & instead get minutes again? …No, the encryption on these calls is never good. What to do. (rhetorical)
Wait, isn’t the point of ereaders that they are “always on”?
I would prefer an ereader instead of a physical book (hard to carry one sometimes), but my main issue with ereaders is soucing the books I want to read legally in a pleasant enough way.
The Android ones at least power down since they do suck juice to keep the OS running. There might be some lighter platforms that can always be on, but the OS/firmware are probably less maintained, inflexible & the hardware probably costs more. Since they all want to sell you book distribution, you need internet access, ca certs, & the like to keep up to date—& I personally love having a browser so I can read my feedreader from my hotspot.
There is one smaller player here out of Singapore, UOB, which offers a hardware token for like $11. It isn’t as generic as say an OnlyKey/NitroKey/SoloKey, but it serves a single purpose while, importantly, being decoupled from a phone OS. I am going to look into the feasibility of opening/migrating—an this dumb device meets the securiny requirements under law.
I agree tho that probably have these personal, internet-always-on was a mistake. The masses are not ready to be responsible enough, meaning they hawe all been crippled into being a portal to proprietary services over time. That would be okay if I was allowed to fairly trivially participate in society without—but that part seems not to be going well edther. Moreover, Google will try to get attestation into Chrome (again), & then it’s likely gameover for us & our personal compute devices. 😢
score 1 · canonical
Well, my thought is- the main problem of being forced to have an Android/iOS dongle is that you have to pay for it, when it’s required of you. Otherwise… technically where’s the problem with that?
We will see, but right now I would expect traditional PCs to continue existing for a long time, perhaps for as long as I intend to want to do computing. Right now I’m a bit unhappy with Linux + Gnome, but I think I could switch to FreeBSD + KDE and hopefully that would keep working for a good while.
In the past, we used to have a single computer, so switching to Linux meant dual-booting for the stuff that required Windows and a lot of headaches. Nowadays keeping what I call “the compliance device” and “the cult device” (a device you keep for general computing in a “praying” room at home) seems more doable.
score 1 · canonical
Price alone isn’t the problem but we know about the other meaning of “free” from FOSS. We have been able to get open source to work so hard for us to be the alternative to these proprietary services—even self-hostable so the big, bad government can’t easily ruin our fun… but that’s changing. Your compliance device… well, Google is now requiring app makers doxx themselves & are putting the ability to load your own software (named “sideloading” to scare users) on a cooldown. You know who originally showed me CyanogenMod? My tech enthusiast uncle with no FOSS or software support—as a way to get better battery life, customize the OS, & so on. He hasn’t used something like that in ages due to all the stupid hoops the corpos keep putting in our way to device freedom. Compute devices got so accessible that now you don’t need know how they are operated (unlike the first Windows 97 box we got in the “family room” where my Dad & I read a tome we bought on how to operate & debug Windows issues). This is somewhat nice for a11y, but the cost is now folks don’t know how it works & want the companies be in charge/be liable for the safety/security which gave up their autonomy …but not just their own autonomy, but governments have been lobbied to
letrequire them nanny us, all of us, even the ones that know what we are doing. The broader free software & adjacent ideals got us so close to the freedom. While we’ve been snuck up on in the other direction in the form of phones/tablets making this acceptable. You’d think with these right-to-repair initiatives against John Deere & the like, we could also get broader consumer rights to the same things.The fact that they are requiring SIM cards only network activity tied to IDs + KYC, is where I get truly peeved. This says I basically must keep a tracking device on me & probably powered on to participate. It isn’t good enough that my consumer desktop/laptop can run Linux/BSD/Haiku… especially if general services get disconnect from the internet (which is happening from yet another direction now with LLM agent bullshit). Makes you wanna move into the jungle/forest & not deal with any of this (except you will still owe taxes & they’ll still demand you have accounts/services).
score 1 · canonical
Hah, you are not wrong.
Actually, the sideloading Google measures as they are now do not bother me as much as the rest of stuff that’s happening and that is coming. (Apparently, people do fall to installing malicious APKs from outside the Play Store!)
For banking, as long as you can get physical cards, in the end you will be carrying a tracking device because you want to carry a phone on you; if you have a physical card you could leave the compliance device at home most of the time and use it only for stuff other than payment. (I still use physical cards to pay because I don’t think phone payments are really more convenient. Digging my card from my wallet is inconvenient, but I don’t think paying with my phone is better on every sense.)
(What pisses me off in this case is that the reason it is a tracking device it’s because it’s associated to an id card because you cannot buy phone line without providing id. AND THIS SHOULD MAKE PHONE SPAM SOLVABLE YET IT’S NOT. If they solved spam then at least there’d be a good reason for it!)
My plan would be: phone only for calls, “urgent instant messaging” (e.g. messages that cannot wait until I’m home), and apps that are forced on me (banks, gov’t, proprietary messaging platforms for people I must communicate with that won’t use anything else, etc.). Absolutely nothing else. Anything that I can do on a Linux desktop at home, is done there, or not done at all.
score 1 · canonical
Oh I understand this stance for sure. I just like being able to catch up with friend/family (using open source & ideally self-hosted software) as well as browse the web when certain parts of my day are tedious/boring as I have nothing better to do—like now waiting in line at the physical bank. I’m also in a state where somewhat frequently I end up using my phone as a hotspot for the laptop which a SIM provides me. I like the convenience when I get to be in control of the software. I don’t think a SIM should be a whole lot different than getting service from my ISP (& the net should remain neutral)… it’s just a data connection (that I can disable when I want). I use my laptop quite a lot & will even pull it out in some odd times to some like at a restaurant, but it’s too cumbersome many times or the batter life isn’t sufficient to treat it as my lifeline. A phone to me is just a more portable Linux device for tasks on the go where I still want to have full control.
Here, cash is almost always accepted & cards often aren’t (neither is NFC or Apple/Google pay to the chagrin of Western tourists it seems), but the 2 elephants in the room are a) QR code payments which are everywhere & none work over the web (I can’t come up with a technical reason why) b) online payments, even ones using the credit/debit almost always trigger their 2FA systems (which in all but 1 or 2 banks now will be exclusive to an app on Android/iOS (sometimes HarmonyOS), rather than something generic like WebAuthn).
To give it to say Google (to which I might even choose Apple or Huawei as I want to throw up a little) just goes against what I have been trying to stand for & migrate away from. I’ve dealt with a lot of inconvenience, but this has finally gotten to full on technical limitations as you can’t truly fake the levels of attestations they are doing. To not even be able to check your account balance without going in physically or keeping spreadsheets or whatever at home feels like too much regression. I can’t believe internet banking is the hill I am dying on while yelling at clouds…
score 1 · canonical
No physical cards and only accepting cash or QR-based custom app payment is a really bad combination.
My stance about using a phone as little as possible is not about replacing it with a laptop, it’s about doing something else entirely. I’m starting to carry a paperback book if I expect to be idle outside for enough time to read. (And if I don’t have enough time to read, I shouldn’t be bored enough to get my phone out, right?)
Of course, that’s something I’m exploring personally. But if I manage to do that, then I don’t really care so much about my phone not being mine. I’d be doing most of my computing on a computer I own. And yep, that doesn’t solve needing to do tasks on the go… hopefully that will work for me, but might not work for others.
score 1 · canonical
Funny enough, I have been trying similar with my e-reader… but the biggest problem is the device doesn’t boot fast enough to just read a couple pages & put it back like a physical book. But I don’t have the place to store so many book, library is limited in English books, & I’m also less sure about money (something about LLMs). It’s easier to whip out a phone to read a Lobste.rs article most of the time. I also have a dedicated (offline) DAP for music (I should write some scripts to make it fetch casts, but the fact that it can’t keep position of multiple scenarios—such as pausing to listen to music for a task—make it hard to use as well). I have a nice mirrorless camera too… which I like but it took is a bit more faff to get out for something small (tho this is largely a result of not choosing a good bag for my latest one, but it’s reaching the end of its life, so I can hopefully fix this). I’ve started to do the device decoupling in many ways, but it’s a more cumbersome carry if I’m being honest. This broadly is the appeal to most folks it seems—replacing the gadgets with one device. I get that convenience appeal—even after being one of the last of my circle to adopt a smart phone with my clamshell doing the job just fine. …But maybe that’s the insight to reconsider: less data & instead get minutes again? …No, the encryption on these calls is never good. What to do. (rhetorical)
score 1 · canonical
Wait, isn’t the point of ereaders that they are “always on”?
I would prefer an ereader instead of a physical book (hard to carry one sometimes), but my main issue with ereaders is soucing the books I want to read legally in a pleasant enough way.
score 1 · canonical
The Android ones at least power down since they do suck juice to keep the OS running. There might be some lighter platforms that can always be on, but the OS/firmware are probably less maintained, inflexible & the hardware probably costs more. Since they all want to sell you book distribution, you need internet access, ca certs, & the like to keep up to date—& I personally love having a browser so I can read my feedreader from my hotspot.
score 1 · canonical