this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
201 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37643 readers
148 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If Apple follows EU guidelines and opens their ecosystem to third-party app stores, like f Droid. Then this really won't be an issue
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.
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.