Sorry for a kinda clickbait title but it is what it is. I just watched a video about Android 15 changes and a lot of them are either not important or straight up bad.
I want to specifically mention increased background sensor usage (such as microphone) and the Find My Device network. These are serious privacy issues that just make lives of custom ROM developers and users harder by having to disable more and more stuff (that’s turned on by default of course), as well as a contribution to ewaste generation and general decrease of battery life.
I guess we are getting into the era of complete death of digital privacy and absolute surveillance. This is scary but not too unrealistic I guess. I just hope the devs of privacy-focused ROMs will be able to do something about it and purge these changes.
Afaik it already is in Android but it’s hidden. Also such changes won’t make Android a decent OS to store private information on or bring the device with you. It’s getting more and more privacy-hostile and imo it’s much more important than visuals
I keep hoping that mobile linux will get better and pinephone will start popping off but the software experience so far has been absolutely miserable and progress has been incredibly slow on gnome and kde mobile experiences, modem drivers (missed calls and sms), and so on.
There is progress, so it’ll get there eventually but how long that is is hard to say.
And i know it requires volunteers in their free time. I’d like to contribute to the code but i’m far too inexperienced to do so and im too broke to fund anything. They expect far more detail in bug reports than im able to provide, so its all a wash.
