Are you sure it won’t apply? As far as I understand, it’ll apply to all devices with Google services installed. Which includes most ROMs, as well as non-Google ROMs after you manually install gapps. Is my understanding off?

Some things are - on purpose - made easy to misuse and - by design - accessible to people, who are likely to misuse them. All this money, this supposedly cutting edge technology, and reporting to the police, but they aren’t able to tell when a child is at risk and report it as well?

Smells like bullshit to me. More like they don’t care. I’m not so sure children should even be allowed to use chatbots in the first place. Or only allowed to use versions specifically trained for interactions with children. But of course - banning children from accessing youtube and wikipedia is a much more pressing concern.

OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.

It’s very likely that no amount of negative feedback will change anything. Why not waste some of their time anyway? Write to them, call them, spread the word. This is the only thing we can do. Even if it goes through regardless - at the very least we can make it as unpleasant as possible.

Two things especially worth noting from the article.

If you have a non-Google build of Android on your phone, none of this applies.

This means that at least GrapheneOS will be unaffected for now. Other ROMs without gapps will be unaffected only as long as you don’t install gapps. Since Graphene has a sandbox for them, I’m assuming it’ll be fine. That is, unless Google decides to lock the bootloader entirely.

In September 2026, Google plans to launch this feature in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The next step is still hazy, but Google is targeting 2027 to expand the verification requirements globally.

So most users worldwide still have at least 1.5 years until it’s implemented. Plenty of time to get a Pixel and install Graphene on it. Or to figure out some other plan.

Don’t get me wrong - this is insane, unreasonable and horrible news for everyone. We should push back as hard as physically possible against it. However, at the very least we still have some time to figure things out before the policy rolls out.

That’s a great question! I’ll be happy to help you count the lights. I see five lights.

This symbolizes the fact that for the last five hundred years white people have been victims of genocide in South Africa.

Would you like to learn more?