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I'm buying a Fairphone six. In the US, you have to get it through Murena. Their offering doesn't run stock Android out of the box, but rather /e/OS, a version of Android marketted as "degoogled and privacy-enabled."
I was curious how they handle the accessibility services, since they all come from Google. e/OS's accessibility page states the following:
To learn about accessibility on /e/OS devices, go to [Google's Android Accessibility knowledge base.] Rest assured all the accessibility features you’ll find in /e/OS are deGoogled and Open Source. [...] When an update is available for an accessibility app, it’s part of our monthly updates.
My read of this is they ingest any updates pushed by Google to the TalkBack github when they appear. Unfortunately, the last push to TalkBack's github was from October 2024, meaning any updates will be few and far between. You'd be better off downloading TalkBack from the play store--except there is no play store!
Fortunately it looks like app lounge can also install play store apps via API's, so we'll see how that works.
Still real curious what "degoogled" means in this context!
André Polykanine
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Drew Mochak
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There is actually a mod called fairberry to add a Blackberry keyboard to the Fairphone four
github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry/…
I am gonna try and find someone with the requisit smarts to see if they can build me a similar thing for the six. We will seeee!
Fairberry/Documentation/Hardware_Arduinobased.md at main · Dakkaron/Fairberry
GitHubAndré Polykanine
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Drew Mochak
in reply to AndrĂ© Polykanine • • •To your larger point:
I have never quite gotten my head around the argument that the best way to deal with big tech surveilence is just avoid it. Sticking your head in the sand has never been a viable solution to anything. Do they not see the numbers? Gmail has nearly 2 billion monthly active users. Facebook has over three billion. Android (to get back on topic) has nearly four billion. That number is going up, not down. We are scraping up against the amount of people in the world with internet access. But yaknow, you don't have to, if you don't wanna. Wanna be a sheep, that is.
All the points are good ones, but they are made in a complete void absent how humans on planet earth operate in the 21st century.
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André Polykanine
in reply to Drew Mochak • • •Drew Mochak
in reply to AndrĂ© Polykanine • • •@menelion "Don't tell me you can make a better burger than McDonald's. I can make a better burger than McDonald's. Show me the people lining up around the block to buy your burger instead of McDonald's."
(Heard in the context of songwriting, but it applies to basically everything)
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Pitermach
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Drew Mochak
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Dennis
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There is a open source Version of Talkback installed. If you need or want Apps that need Google stuff you can just install them without problems. I was using the Google TTS that way on my Fairphone 5.
If you can get some value of getting rid of Google services is a highly individual matter. There are very good reasons for it. But it does not work for everyone.
Drew Mochak
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Dennis
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Drew Mochak
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Drew Mochak
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