There’s virtually no choice for building competitive phones in Europe.
Or anywhere else for that matter. Know of any good phone made in Canada?
So FairPhone is really as European as it gets.
Indeed, and that was not an irrelevant consideration when buying one. As is often the conclusion when discussing FairPhone… “Yeah, that’s far from perfect but it’s truly the best they could do given the circumstances”.
electoral politics is over and done for
to disregard the movement Bernie started and continues to lead is disingenuous
If elections don’t matter, what’s left is surrender to the dictatorship or take arms. If elections don’t matter, I don’t see why any decision maker would care about any movement started by Bernie or whoever else
I think you are either replying to the wrong comment, or completely misunderstanding the issue.
The majority of Android is open source, though its development is still led by Google.
That is how you have so many deGoogled versions like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, CalyxOS, etc. They all start from the OS version, called AOSP, and then add things from there.
The Android you have on your phone contains a few proprietary bits by Google (the Play services) which are absolutely essential to using Android the way most people do. These can be replaced with open source versions that are mostly fine (mostly).
If Google makes android closed source, we stop getting updates, but we keep all we have, and can move forward from there.
Having a good mobile operating system without Google if need be is totally doable.
But if you want to use a mobile operating system, you first need a mobile phone to run it.
And while we can totally already have a mobile OS without the USA, right now we really can’t have a mobile phone without China. And neither can the US. And that’s going to take a long time to sort out.
Yes, but something like that will take a long time.
There is all the manufacturing know how and the need to make the manufacturing process economically viable. That is certainly not something that can be done overnight, but also certainly something that can be done.
But the materials are a way bigger mess. The literal materials you need in order to make that phone are not available here.
You need to start with a reliable supply of rare earths, and good luck doing that in Europe (the extraction is, with current industry practices, really quite polluting).
China developed the deposits they have in some regions and we were all too happy ti never have to do that crap again domestically. Then they put rare earths under export control, so that if you want rare earths in your products (and you do, you really do) you have to manufacture in China.
So yes, we really need to have an alternative, but your next phone is definitely going to be made in China just like the one you have now. And probably the one after that too.
wallet: my current solution is Garmin Pay. For that you need a compatible Garmin watch. Once the card is added to the watch, all the payment is done without even passing by the phone, just communication between watch and payment terminal. Garmin watches work really very well with Gadgetbridge. Cards have to be added via the Garmin App, and possibly via a phone running a stock OS (mine didn’t work from the aftermarket ROM, but may be bank dependent)
Family Link: For other options you may need to do a factory reset and install a device manager app, that then needs to be enabled via ADB. Or use a custom ROM. No pleasant options out there.
And you think Fairphones are made in Europe? They are made in China, just like all the iPhones and Google Pixels.
Fairphone is indeed Dutch, and they even make a point on their website of paying a decent living wage to all Chinese workers making their phones.
Typed from my Fairphone 4 running /e/OS
More like a derivative, they consistently port stuff over from Lineage, which is just a distribution of Android, which is in turn based on a gazillion other OS project starting from Linux.
In the end either it’s good enough to have the “headquarters” of this specific project in Europe, no version of Android can be considered European enough, as it all depends way too heavily on Google.
There is also a decent chance of Google making Android closed source in the medium term anyway, but the last several releases of Android have not exactly added mindblowing features, and I don’t have a tremendous amount of interest in whatever kind of enshittified cloud dependent AI infested mess they have planned next.
What is the stupid “freedom fries” thing and how does it compare to the current situation?
What I know of “freedom fries” seemed to me an inconsequential little bit of cosmetic chauvinism, while the current status of things is that the US have decided to strongly oppose Europe in both economic and geopolitical terms.
More correctly, it’s obsolete.
It just can’t keep up with a reality that is this absurd.
Thanks for your extremely thoughtful and interesting reply to my rather silly comment.
I regret I have only one upvote to give.
The other 40 had to disagree with the majority out of a knee jerk reflex.
Every country in the EU has some system for direct debit payments.
Italy has Bancomat, Germany has EC/Giro, France has Carte Bleue, Belgium has Bancontact/Mister Cash (still have not figured out whether they’re supposed to be different or just different names in Flanders and Wallonia), and so on and so forth.
Does the Netherlands not have such a system?
It used to be that people would use these within their own country, but there would be Maestro for payments around Europe.
MasterCard decided to discontinue Maestro for MasterCard Prepaid which has higher fees.
The Germans whined about it a little and said that Europe should have come up with its own payment systems, but nothing came of it.
By now we are also supposed to have SEPA Instant, that should offer Europe-wide bank transfers. I still have not quite understood why a debit card system can’t leverage that directly.
Give Piquadro a look. They are originally from near Bologna (Italy) though they’ve gotten so big I can’t imagine that they still produce everything there.
Wallets: https://www.piquadro.com/en-de/collections/wallets
And card holders: https://www.piquadro.com/en-de/collections/card-holders
Plenty of options with some style variations.
My last wallet was one of their “blue line” card holders in orange leather. The leather that was great and aged great for 10 years. I replaced it after 10 years of abuse because the pockets were getting a little stretched and the cards were occasionally falling.
Bought another one from them, more wallet-like this time. Let’s see if this one beats the 10 years mark. I still have the well-loved old one around if you want pictures.
mp4 is not really a video format. Depending on how recent they are they’ll play a broader or narrower range of MP4 files, depending on codec selection.
Time and convenience and… local shops were and are largely very disappointing for many types of purchases.
My first online buy (in 2003, at the age of 17) was a decent wired optical gaming mouse, a Logitech M510, in 2003. The first optical mouse I ever used that wouldn’t skip.
The selection at local computer stores was lacking to say the least, and they also could not give much good advice anyway.
I swear to you, my first thought was “an Apple peeler? Why would Apple make peelers? Do they have Bluetooth or Wi-Fi?”
What you read is true, and also total nonsense.
There is not too much point in discussing privacy and security without a threat model.
So once you put your threat model into focus, you can discuss how to mitigate those threats and pick the right browser for you.
And they have truly gone a long way.