- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
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I hope they join Mozilla 😏
Fuck is Pixel going to go away? Apparently the pixel 9 sold well
I can’t imagine so, they’re only just now prepping the first pixel phone on their own in-house CPU (pixel 10) and development is underway for the following generation (pixel 11). To axe the line now would be crazy.
Maybe they just want to downsize cause there isn’t as much to do nowadays when the OS is so mature?
This is not the way to do that. This is a way to get rid of your best people because, as the United States government is about to find out, when you offer a voluntary exit to people with a severance package the ones who know they have ability and are competent will take that package and leave and get better jobs. And the ones that know they suck or are too lazy are going to stay. There’s actually a list somewhere of companies that have done this and have gone under because of it.
Probably the aim of the failed state to be fair. Privatise talent, leave behind people alienate and blame. Shithole country.
The Pixel 9 Pro is incredible. Writing this on it right now. I love it. Previously had the 6. I’ll be sad if they go away, for real.
I have pixel 9 which is my first pixel phone. I agree
it’s got 8 years of updates right? You think it’ll last until Google comes back into a pro hardware phase?
Who’s gonna update it?
GrapheneOS
Can Sundar Pichai please take the offer?
And Prabhakar Raghavan aka worsener of search
So you’re being “voluntary” fired? You can’t quit when you want?
It’s probably implied that if not enough people take this offer - people will be fired.
I’ve been through tech layoffs. Random people are axed and people who thought about leaving anyways stay. This is a much better solution where those who considered leaving anyways can take them up on the offer.
Get a payout for volunteering to quit. People are fired if not enough volunteer
You don’t get severance when you quit.
Severance is usually worse if you wait to get fired rather than taking a voluntary exit.
If you aren’t happy at a job, taking an offered exit is often a good decision.
Hilarious, I just got a reach out for working on the Pixel camera
Are you sure that wasn’t a reach around, instead of reach out?
plz
Ah yes, we need more laid off tech workers in the sector. We nearly don’t have enough!
This is the best way to do headcount reductions imo. In large organisations there’s always someone who’s been there for a long time and gotten tired of the work, and that would gladly take this type of offer if it’s lucrative enough.
To demonstrate - imagine that you’ve been considering quitting your job for a while. Then someone comes along and says that if you do that, you also get some additional cash for free. You’d probably take it, right?
And if you necessarily need to reduce headcount, then there’s also the argument that if someone leaves voluntarily, then someone who wants to stay doesn’t have to get pushed out.
So yeah, I’m not against this
Neither pixel nor android teams should need reductions, this is Google being cheap and fucking with employees’ income for no reason other than blind greed.
I mean, you’re probably right, but between this and regular layoffs? This every day of the week
Well yeah, being given the option is better than the alternative. I just wish folks wouldn’t accept the premise that Google has any legitimate reason to lay anyone off from Android or Pixel teams. Android, of all things, one of the most widely used operating systems on the planet.
It’s not to say I accept it, but I also know that I don’t exactly have a choice in the matter.
This has been the worst part about working in tech since the big layoff period from about the beginning of 2023 - unthinkable levels of uncertainty in your life.
Still definitely got a better deal than most in life, but damn if it hasn’t been mentally taxing
I feel it. My company thankfully hasn’t done any layoffs, but I still don’t feel very secure, and I no longer feel like I’ll be able to easily find another job that pays enough if something does happen.
And that’s without all the rest of the uncertainty going on right now…
We power on, my friend. We’ll make it in the end
Neither pixel nor android teams should need reductions
Oh, you work there? Please regale us with your insider knowledge
If they did have insider knowledge why would they explicitly say so in a public forum that may not be anonymous?
My thoughts exactly.
In my experience with this format, only the good ones are leaving and you’re stuck with the rest.
My last job did this. They offered more for those who had worked there longer. People with over 15 years got about a years pay and they all took it. People who had been there under a year got nothing so they all stayed.
I was going to take then they withdrew the offer for all devs. I think a lot tried to take it and they realised no one would be left. I would have got 3-4 months pay. Loads of institutional knowledge lost though, i left anyway a few months later.
Depends on if the good people have better places to go, I guess. My guess is that you’re probably going to lose people who have some amount of tenure, especially if you’re the kind of company that gives equity that vests on a 4-year schedule. Even if you’re not, people with some amount of tenure will be the ones trending towards being checked out already.
Losing people with tenure means you lose organisational memory, which can definitely be negative.
This is all to say that as an organisation, you should think twice about doing any kind of layoff. They are all bad in their own way. This just happens to be the format that is least bad for most workers, which is why I prefer it.
Absolutely. The ones who’ve resigned mentally are fine within their positions. The people with all the business connections and references will be the ones to grab the money and simply start something new. It happened at my company. I was only 3 years in, so it wasn’t enough money for me to quit. But loads of good people left the company.
Verizon let me root my 2018 phone and stop installing candycrush on it you fucking pieces of shit!!!
If you have any intent to play with Android OS variants or the stock OS, don’t buy Verizon devices. Ever. They will not give you the decryption key or unlock key.
Apple, Google, Samsung and Motorola all sell devices on their websites as full price or up to 36 month financing. You can get them carrier unlocked. Motorola and Google offer bootloader unlocking should you want to.
No, they will give me root access to the devices that I own. Or they will cease operations on this planet.
Luigi, is that you?
Verizon will let you transfer the phone to a different carrier after like 3 months of owning the phone.
Are you able to buy unlocked directly from Google? I typically avoid the carrier when I can.
Buy an unlocked one from box box stores. Bought mine from best buy. Immediately threw GrapheneOS on it. Coming from a locked down Samsung s9 that I couldn’t root to an degoogled android experience I didn’t even have to root is fucking awesome!
Have you considered voluntary redundancy?
No.
Have you considered involuntary redundancy?
I really should switch to Graphene
Can I install my bank app on it yet? I remember having problems with attestation in the past.
What about full application backups? I’ve got a few offline apps, I’d like to transfer the data to/from. However, I thought grapheneOS needed the application developer to “approved” this backup/restore method - or you needed root (which invalidated attestation)… I don’t recall which it was (but I really miss titanium backup).
They have sandboxed Google services if you need it. But kind of defeats the purpose of Grpahene OS.
I have been on Calyx for a year now. Bank apps in my country totally works with microg.
But kind of defeats the purpose of Grpahene OS.
No, it doesn’t. The sandboxing ensures that the Google services have none of the broad access to the operating system they have on a normal Android. For example Google won’t get access to your location unless you explicitly give the permission.
here is a list of compatible banking apps, however the list is crowd sourced so trust but verify.
I assume Graphene won’t work with my employer’s MDM software. :/
Which banking app? I can try to install and launch it, tho I probably won’t ask for your login to test that, haha
Does Stanford Federal Credit Union launch?
This one also needed me to enable “exploit protection compatibility mode” for the app to get it to stop crashing immediately on launch, but it doesn’t complain about attestation or anything. I get right to the login screen. Seems fine from what I can see without a login!
We appreciate your community service.
You’re gonna get piled on with requests now.
…on that note, any chance you’d try the Servis Credit Union app?
Be careful about mentioning who you bank with on the internet, using an account that anyone can browse your comment history.
Can’t find that app, is it “Servus” instead?
It is indeed, whoops
I had to enable “exploit protection compatibility mode” for the app. Otherwise it just sits on the logo indefinitely. But after enabling that compatibility mode it launches fine, asked me for location permissions (which I denied), and I can get to where I enter User ID to login.
Seems fine from what I can see without a login!
Can you give RBC (royal bank of Canada) banking app a shot for me if you don’t mind?
I had to enable “exploit protection compatibility mode” for the app to get it to stop crashing immediately on launch, but it doesn’t complain about attestation or anything. Seems fine from what I can see without a login!
Hey thanks a lot! I appreciate that you took time out of your day to check for me :)
Welcome! Seems like a fairly low-effort way for me to help nudge folks towards GrapheneOS <3
You’re a nice person. Keep being you!
Just use the browser
my bank app is specificially listed as working but i would def check
And as a follow up question to this, are there any container apps to run those apps that won’t work in a way that they think they are running on stock android?
Depends on the bank. Graphene has support for seedvault backups, or you could use syncthing-fork to sync the data over. Or any one of those Foss airdrop clones
Nope, but you can use their web apps.
Not sure about backing up apps, never looked into it.
What’s making you choose Graphene?
I also went Graphene, and it’s privacy for me too.
I really don’t want Google Play Services running, and GrapheneOS gives me that option. I have three profiles:
- main - no Google Play Services, most apps are from F-Droid
- work - Google Play Services, and only the apps I need for work
- “google” - Google Play Services, and only apps I need occasionally (e.g. Google Watch/Wallet, Maps, etc)
I spend 99% of my time on main, and most of the rest in “work” (need it for MFA). My phone reboots every 4 hours, so Google Play eventually stops running in the background (tried more frequently, and it was annoying).
There are other Android ROMs, but GrapheneOS has really rapid security updates, perhaps faster than anywhere else. The other projects are good too, it’s just the first I tried and I’ve liked it so far.
Thank you for this answer. I’m interested in using something like this rather than the mainstream OSs.
Lots of reasons but mostly privacy and a boner for doing nerdy shit.
Privacy
Imagine all of this talent going to work for grapheneOS and/or hardware company willing to make a phone with grapheneOS as its OS.
Yeah but AOSP practically does most of the heavy work for graphene.
Does grapheneOS have paid devs or is it all volunteer work? And if they do pay devs, how do they get the money to pay them?
Lead dev accepts donations for the project (username “thestinger” on github)
Not only that, but they apparently also get large amounts of donations in crypto currencies. They also allow donating via PayPal or bank transfer. They set up a whole Canadian non-profit foundation in 2023. GrapheneOS isn’t a small niche project anymore, it’s actually a sizable organization with paid staff (see https://grapheneos.org/hiring). @Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
I’d rather see phones with Ubuntu Touch, PostMarketOS, and Mobian OS’s.
Imagine using Ubuntu Touch with Waydroid for Android Compatibility. Would be sick.
Why would you rather see that over graphene? Don’t know enough about either
Overlap with desktop Linux means support for that is support for these mobile Linux distros, and desktop Linux gets support from a range of people and companies, not just Google.
Because graphene is just android without makeup
Same, I’m really tired of the annoying Android logic. I wish we could have a logical OS where we could manage our files properly instead of the filesystem mess we currently have with stuff all over the place.
It didn’t matter when the phones just had a few megs of storage, but you can carry some serious data on those things nowadays.
That was one thing that was wild about the Palm WebOS devices. It was just plain old linux. Games? They were just Linux games using SDL. Porting WebOS applications to desktop linux would have been nearly trivial. It would have just been amazing if Palm had pulled it off (alas, they chased a single design, Blackberry-style with small form factor, which missed just so much of the market). The users were utterly oblivious to all this (which is good) and it was just the best combination of capable of great things easily with a power user and able to run whatever the casual user would have needed.
It was still before Android was pretty much a sealed deal in the market (2009 Android was still horribly rough) so it had a shot, but Palm just couldn’t pull it off.
Oh man… What a great phone. Awesome multi tasking. Wifi charging standard. A back button that actually worked. A slide out keyboard. They just could spool up an app ecosystem quickly enough to gain traction…
The apps may have been a bit anemic, but it was early enough that all the app stores were not great. They were certainly hurt by their initial “JavaScript only” stance.
Really painful was that they had exclusivity with Sprint of all carriers. That was a really limiting decision.
I think ultimately the singularly fatal issue was the HP debacle. The initial circumstances of the acquisition might have been ok for the platform. Thanks to some leaked material HP under Hurd actually seemed to have some vision for reinvigorating their consumer brand including an emphasis on former palm products. But Hurd was ousted and that whole initiative was canned and the new leadership killed the product line that they had just bought. Which was the most baffling call, they didn’t make room for some other smartphone or tablet platform, they just shrugged and killed off a product that was their only shot at relevance for a clearly exploding new consumer market.
Same. They just don’t do what I need on my phone. Hopefully that changes, but PinePhone HW kinda sucks (poor battery life and audio quality), and most of the other phones w/ Linux support have some pretty serious caveats.
I’m using a pixel 3a xl with ubuntu touch. Works great!
I just looked and that seems surprisingly usable. I might just pick one up and mess with it.
i will second this too!
I’m ready for Linux-phone, but maybe GraphineOS is my gateway. I’m tired of my iPhone not doing the things it should.
Isn’t android technically linux?
I dunno to be honest.
Just give me mobile Debian, and I’ll be happier.
it is also doing a lot of shit it shouldn’t ;)
I’ve been trying to take ownership of my data and simplify my digital life. The greatest barrier to this by far is Apple/iOS.
Sure am glad I picked that walled garden 15 years ago, when I was none the wiser.
What do you want to know how to do?
I have to use an iPhone for work and I don’t understand a vast amount of the UI choices - and that’s before data fuckery.
Where’s the fucking back button? When I rarely use my wife’s phone I’m like how can you deal with this?
And why does where you swipe down on the notification bar change what’s shown?!
deleted by creator
Have they done layoffs yet?
Last year, the teams responsible for Pixel hardware and Android software were merged into one division, and Google today announced a “voluntary exit program” for employees working in the Platforms & Devices group.
At least there’s some plausible reasoning for this, instead of blanket headcount reduction to pad profits. Reasoning doesn’t change much of course.
It’s still just an excuse to pad profits.
The whole market’s about to roll into recession. All the companies are trying to get ahead of their firing before the market goes tits up.
Probably.
I don’t work for Google. I’m but a voluntary
productcustomer. But if they could offer me a way to get away from them, I’d gladly take it.Right now I’m moving my personal domain over to cloudflare and email to mxroute. Considering setting up some calendar and similar groupware stuff on kubernetes on Oracles free tier as well.
That’s the other rub…if I want to cloud host anything, I get to choose between Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Alibaba. Wonderful selection we have there.
(I recognize there are smaller players out there like linode and ovh and a trillion VPS providers…only reason I’m considering Oracle is because they give so much free “forever”. And kubernetes is fun for me in like a jigsaw kind of way. Not like the puzzle but the guy from Saw)
I’ve seen enough traps set by Oracle to be extra afraid of any wooden horses they are offering up.
Oracle has been coasting on legacy crap for a long time. They’re just like IBM.
Sorry for being harsh, but if you use the “free “forever”” offering of any company as alternative to what google offers you learnt nothing from using google.
I think free cloud compute offerings are a bit different. Different motivations. They aren’t trying to harvest your data, they are trying to advertise their product.
They want sysadmins to play around and convince their bosses to buy in on Oracle. They want web devs to build demos and get their clients to host there. They want companies to get their feet wet risk free, before spending tens of thousands of dollars migrating existing workloads to them.
Harvesting data from those customers would be a scandal, and have massive negative repercussions.
And honestly, even with the announcement of Stargate and Oracle being a partner, I’d probably rather give them a couple dollars a month to run a couple small buckets than to give it to Amazon.
I can’t self host at home because no incoming IP. Unless I want to switch to my only other option, Xfinity. Which I don’t.
And…let’s face it…if the government wants to find me, they are going to find me. It doesn’t matter if my Bluesky PDS or my kids Minecraft server is hosted at home or up there. It’s tied to me either way.
These are the same people who brought you Oracle DB licensing. They’ll fuck you over someday, the countdown clock is already ticking
Just pay the 1$ per month of a lowendbox. Com
I replaced most cloud services with my own Nextcloud instance. I like Nextcloud.
It rules!
Forever is only forever until profit margins get tight or they have a bad enough fiscal quarter…
I have two free forever servers, they are alright, but they route weird. When I’m in China they go from Beijing to Japan and then to Korea causing packet loss and delays
Did they title the offer “Fork in the Road,” too?
