Are these the only packages Google uses for this purpose?

Skill issue

And not as many people ever even care about doing this is exactly how we got to this point.

XDA is dead, and you just described one of the symptoms of a forum being dead.

That said there are still a small amount of people posting detailed posts for rooting Xperia phones, for how to flash OS updates with unlocked bootloader without losing your user data, for how to bypass carrier restrictions to get international model to work with the 5G bands in the US via build.conf edit and baseband flashing, etc. There are perks of a community being small and niche, and I guess not everyone is brained washed by Samsung’s propaganda they use to justify permanently locked bootloader on their phones lol

You said it like banking apps will be happy to work with a Linux phone lol, the banks always have their interests inherently conflict with user control anyway. And rooting and getting a custom ROM (one which exists or otherwise) are two completely different things that have nothing to do with each other, and you shouldn’t support manufecturers who choose to make it difficult to unlock bootloader anyway.

By 2025, rooting still empowers you to make your own Android device however you like it to be.

Also not many people care about custom ROM these days because Android stock ROM got much better in average, so there’s much less a need for creating a brand new ROM just to get basic features. Why making a brand new ROM instead of modding the pretty good one you already have now. And root empowered ROM modding tools that are developed as Magisk module or Xposed modules still have a pretty big community, there’s a long list of pretty big repos with hundreds of modules each, and with how sophisticated Magisk and Lsposed have evolved it’s easier than ever to write your own mods

Recent AOSP repo added lines of code to Package Installer to handle enforcing restricting whether Package Installer installs an APK file or not based on dev signatures, as well as denying installation if internet isn’t available so it can’t contact Google’s servers for dev signature verification.

So this is enforced by Package Installer, which is already how Google enforces their ridiculous minimal SDK version requirement for installing APK packages, as well as for blocking app update with an APK package with mismatched signature or blocking downgrading an existing app with an APK package, which I already have bypassed via Xposed this way.

Besides, rooting gives YOU total control over your own device like when you have sudo on Linux, even if Google tries some new BS there will be a way to counter it when you have root

Thankfully it’s not like I’ll still have the choice with my “do not buy from” list on my pocket notebook soon in this economy anyway /s

Thankfully I have root, I’ll just simply hook into it runtime via Xposed to bypass this nonsense.

Seriously anyone who doesn’t have root on their Android devices these days and age, well may Google have mercy on you lol

Exactly!

Ultimately rooting empowers users with control, and many company profit from users not having control, like Netflix, like Google with their ads, etc., so they love to make people think rooting is somehow unsafe lol

Exactly, taking away tools which enable you to enhance your digital privacy, or the ability to use such tools, is fundamentally a flawed way to enhance your privacy in the long term.

Same for security with rooting, and it’s the same reason why the argument that “rooting makes your phone less secure” is a fundamentally flawed argument.

Yes yes there’s been some incredible Android ports for PC games recently, other than XCOM 2, there was also GRID Autosport and more recently GRID Legends. And recently the original Subnautica also got ported. There was also Alien Isolation if you’re into horror games lol

Curious, as someone who’s an actual author, do you have any legal option at all for preventing Amazon (which I assume technically act as your publisher in this case?) to put DRM on your books, or demand them to remove DRM if they added DRM without your notice?

Uhhh I feel like reversing this wouldn’t be much easier than trying to reverse hash functions lol

Just get root, and it wouldn’t be too difficult to bypass.

I already bypass many of Google’s stupid and arbitrary restrictions like their minimal SDK version requirement for side-loading apps and such with Magisk and Xposed modules.

This is really interesting but it doesn’t surprise me.

AI and implementation of AI tend to be inherently good at optimizing efficiency of a system, and they can be exceptionally good at it. Look at Nvidia DLSS realtime AI upscaling for video games for example, it’s fundamentally a conventional TAA pipeline (a normally computationally expensive Antialiasing technique) that’s super boosted in efficiency by AI in only one of the steps of the pipeline, and it’s so efficient that it can be use to make image even more clear than original and in real time. And many of the actually practical machine learning systems that have demonstrated good results in scientific and engineering applications are fundamentally conventional algorithms that’s efficiency boosted so that the computation takes merely hours instead of many decades so they became practical. Not surprising the same approach can be used for business systems and give you actually good results.

But I fortunately majority of the snake oil marketing for AI products and services seem to focus on claims for generating new content with AI, which is exactly what the marketing people would want LMAO

Exactly, the users/installation count of such products are clearly a much more accurate indicator of the success of their marketing team, rather than their user’s perceived value in such products lol

I’m not sure Valve have folded as much as pretending to comply for now to stall for time to work on a more strategic countermeasure that will stay long into the future.

Maybe I’m just coping but it’s the logical thing to do in the US where Valve is based, and Valve is one of the few US companies who are not always under time pressure because they are like one of the biggest companies who’s private and not publicly traded.

Darktide, once I finally got a good grasp of all the major mechanics, which it has a lot of.

Which is awesome because I got the game 2.5 years after its release, when it was finally in a playable and fun state where they finally implemented most of the features they promised and should have been in the game from the beginning, and because of the age I got it for only $20, probably one of my most successful Patient Gamer™ moves so far lol

Approaching 800 hours recently, and it looks like I’m still gonna be spending a LOT more time in it since the most recent major update introduced some noticable change to difficulty (mostly in ways I’ve always wanted) and I’m getting my rear end handed back to me repeatedly once again in the highest difficulty, like the good old days XD

Yuck indeed.

People tried many ways to get around it, back when I was still using an US variant Samsung Note 9, people went as far as using a leaked engineering/preproduction ROM, which can be flashed using Samsung’s official tool because it does have the correct key for the locked bootloader to accept, being built and compiled by Samsung, and because it’s an engineering ROM it would give you root and everything despite of the bootloader still being locked.

But it was an exceptionally rare leak, and it was only meant for preproduction for a reason, it is very VERY unstable and not exactly usable for a daily driver lol

So happy I am leaving all that BS from Samsung behind with my current Sony Xperia 1 VI which is bootloader-unlocked and rooted and deeply modded and truly my own device lol

You are the only one here carrying on a grudge and being vocal about it.

Are you a big fan of FOSS? How much are you going to support FOSS developers today hmmm?