Last year, the teams responsible for Pixel and Android were merged into one division, and Google today announced a “voluntary exit program.”
    • icedterminal@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      5 hours ago

      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.

  • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.mlEnglish
    741·
    10 hours ago

    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

    • Noxy@pawb.socialEnglish
      192·
      5 hours ago

      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.

    • idefix@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      302·
      6 hours ago

      In my experience with this format, only the good ones are leaving and you’re stuck with the rest.

      • Buckshot@programming.devEnglish
        18·
        6 hours ago

        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.

      • Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtfEnglish
        9·
        6 hours ago

        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.

    • LedgeDrop@lemm.eeEnglish
      201·
      15 hours ago

      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).

      • Noxy@pawb.socialEnglish
        5·
        5 hours ago

        Which banking app? I can try to install and launch it, tho I probably won’t ask for your login to test that, haha

          • Noxy@pawb.socialEnglish
            2·
            50 minutes ago

            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!

        • Revan343@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          3 hours ago

          You’re gonna get piled on with requests now.

          …on that note, any chance you’d try the Servis Credit Union app?

              • Noxy@pawb.socialEnglish
                2·
                53 minutes ago

                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!

          • Noxy@pawb.socialEnglish
            5·
            3 hours ago

            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!

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 hours ago

        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?

      • mac@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        7 hours ago

        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

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        9 minutes ago

        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:

        1. main - no Google Play Services, most apps are from F-Droid
        2. work - Google Play Services, and only the apps I need for work
        3. “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.

  • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
    1401·
    24 hours ago

    Imagine all of this talent going to work for grapheneOS and/or hardware company willing to make a phone with grapheneOS as its OS.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      5 hours ago

      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?

      • Noxy@pawb.socialEnglish
        6·
        5 hours ago

        Lead dev accepts donations for the project (username “thestinger” on github)

      • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        10 hours ago

        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.

        • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 hour ago

          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.

    • TK420@lemmy.worldEnglish
      60·
      23 hours ago

      I’m ready for Linux-phone, but maybe GraphineOS is my gateway. I’m tired of my iPhone not doing the things it should.

  • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
    343·
    21 hours ago

    I don’t work for Google. I’m but a voluntary product customer. 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)

    • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      I’ve seen enough traps set by Oracle to be extra afraid of any wooden horses they are offering up.

    • Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.itEnglish
      281·
      16 hours ago

      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.

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        10 hours ago

        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.

    • plz1@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      19 hours ago

      Forever is only forever until profit margins get tight or they have a bad enough fiscal quarter…

    • iopq@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      20 hours ago

      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

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
    591·
    24 hours ago

    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.

  • ALQ@lemmy.worldEnglish
    351·
    24 hours ago

    Did they title the offer “Fork in the Road,” too?