DuckDuckGo CEO says Google kills competition through phone deals that make it hard for users to switch search engines

celmit@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.ml – 1183 points –
DuckDuckGo CEO says Google kills competition through phone deals that make it hard for users to switch search engines: ‘It’s too many steps’
fortune.com
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I e been debating switching the graphene for weeks weeks now. But I just know I'm gonna end up installing Google play services on it and completely defeat the whole point of the OS. I'm probably gonna buy the pixel 8 when it comes out so once I have that I'll put graphene on my current phone and see how I like it.

I've just switched to it literally yesterday, and while you will probably not avoid Play Services, being able to install it into a different profile that's only limited to the few apps that need it is nice.

Also, just the fact that on Graphene Play Services do not have the special privileges as on any android phone, and are subjected to the same limitations as any other app (which are even stricter on Graphene) helps a lot. It also means that even if you end up just running the play services at all times, they can't do as much as they can on other android phones, and the data they can access without your explicit permission is really limited. So, even that helps by a lot.

This is actually great to hear. I'll probably still ending up holding off until I have a spare phone to test with just because wiping my phone and redoing everything just isn't something I'm up for right now though. Thank you very much for the info.

Play Services is sandboxed on Graphene and is treated as a regular app, so you can actually disable most of its features, including network access.