this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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I'm quite sure they will only allow this in EU (and maybe USA). If they do allow this in China, Regime will most probably ban every alternative app Store... if this is not already banned.
Thought and prayers to the people of china. I feel like they lost everything in 1989. Still hope they find the strength to get rid of this depressing system.
I feel the same about the US.
I don't know if this was just a joke or you really mean it that way.
I would partially agree that there are a lot of similarities between Mao and Trump, but current situation in USA is nowhere near current situation in china.
Not sure if this would work in China, but... I have a de-Googled bootloader-locked Huawei tablet (don't ask, it was cheap)... in the EU, but had to jump through some hoops to make it usable... and kind of did it, thanks to F-Droid, APKPure, and Gspace.
iPhones might be more tightly locked, but maybe people will find similar workarounds.
I think the issue is they’ll have to do much more work to get to those stores if they become remotely popular as a vector for bypassing censorship.
The minute people are using f-droid at scale to bypass controls and censorship, f-droid is going to get firewalled if it isn’t already.
China isn’t on the open internet. It’s a game of whack-a-mole for them, but they’re pretty good at it and throw a lot of bodies at this.
The average user won’t be jumping through the hoops required to make this work.
F-Droid has censorship resistance built in, it lets you share apps locally via bluetooth. It would be difficult, but I can imagine a bunch of protestors sharing apps, getting a mesh communication network going (like briar), all without clearnet access.
Not to mention lots of countries have "shut down internet access" in their protest playbook, so the freedom of speech, human rights, tech-bros are building the technology to work without internet.
Aren't android phones sold in China? Because they have been able to sideload apps since forever
From what I read technically "Android" is used as the most popular smartphone OS in China. But that's only because android is the foundation of costume Chinese OS that comes without any google services (nice) but is also highly restricted against side loading. Of course like always ways should exist to workaround those restrictions.
But to be honest getting information about all the restrictions people in china need to suffer from getting harder l with every day since they get encapsulated more and more.
They removed google but added their own state spyware. If you block the phone from phoning home (with Tracker Control, for example), the phone will still collect and save (into a user-inaccessible part of the phone) all those metrics, and eventually die, since it can't store any more. I got 6 months out of my Chinese phone, before it filled up its metrics memory and automatically shut down permanently.