I haven’t been able to update my cellphone anonymously with Aurora since January. Every time I try, Aurora errors out with “Oops, you are rate limited”.
This isn’t the first time Google plays at making non-normies’ lives difficult. So I tried the usual tricks, updated Aurora, tried the nightly build, waited, tried again… for months - to no avail: Google just won’t play ball this time.
Last week, Signal stopped working and demanded to be updated. Fortunately, Signal offers the APK as a normal download without having to get it from the hateful Google Play store.
Today, my home banking identificator app did the same thing and stopped working. I needed to make a payment right now, and I had no way to update the app: “Oops, you are rate limited”. And my bank sure doesn’t offer the APK outside of anything but the goddamn Google Play store.
So I relented and created a Google account. Which of course entailed giving Google a phone number. I sure didn’t give them mine, so I phoned a friend abroad who doesn’t care to ask him to receive the verification SMS on his phone and read out the code to me. Which worked long enough to set up 2FA and do away with phone numbers altogether. And finally, after an hour of fucking around, annoying other people and compromising their phone number, I could update my banking app and make my payment at last.
All that because Google has decided they want to control my phone.
Fuck Google.
Seriously, how they are allowed to hold the Android world hostage like this without getting their monopolistic ass Sherman’ed AT&T-style, I’ll never know. It’s long overdue.
RCS just got cut for me again today because I’m rooted. At this point I’m spiteful enough that anybody who wants to reach me is going to have to do it through signal.
The egregious part in this is that Google presents RCS as an open standard to get carriers to adopt it. But then they retain enough control to exert their power over users like this. The same happened with Android. I don’t know how long such exploitation is tolerated before such aggressors are split up into a thousand competing businesses.
RCS is the non-Apple aquivelant to iMessage, right?
RCS is XMPP if it were invented by corporations for corporations with the goal of minimal EU data compliance of messaging interoperability & maximal loopholes. The irony is these big corpos used XMPP a decade ago until they realized they have nothing to gain from interop or contributing to the working groups, but everything to gain from walling off the gardens & making users create accounts.
There is RCS the standard, which isn’t really used - maybe Apple’s support will give it a boost. Then there is RCS + proprietary addons that is used, Google iMessage.
Sorta, it’s supposed to replace sms to an extent, but does require an internet connection. However, it is an open standard to my understanding meaning that any platform could implement it, not just android/ios.