This is not a selling point but rather a unfortunate but comprehensible circumstance. Nexus and later Pixel phones have not been anything more than reference hardware without significant sales until the Pixel 6. Google has been a software company that has greatly benefited by android being an “open” platform you could contribute to and use their services on.

The App / Cloud ecosystem has gained a lot of competitors, so Google is doing their best to reverse this course of action by pulling more and more functionality out of AOSP into Play services and now into Cuttlefish. We can only wait and see how other phone manufacturers react to this.

Would be great indeed, but “more neutral” in this case seems to mean vendor agnostic by abstracting the hardware away and have anything run on a closed source google container.

The GrapheneOS team is very aware of their dependence on google. They are planning to either find an OEM for their own line of hardware or a brand whose phones support their requirements other than google. That being said, it will complicate work a lot, but for now it would be to early to jump to that conclusion.

Also, Google couldn’t care less if <1% of buyers flash a custom ROM / OS on their phone, this is about tying the android ecosystem closer to google in general. Most other big phone manufacturers know this and are trying to come up with their own solution, like Huawei had to because of the ban when the orange man has been president the first time.

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There will be a lot of businesses who feel the (justified) need to hide the entrypoint to their infrastructure behind a VPN.

Wait, this can’t just be another useless DNS blocking, or is it?

Edit: Didn’t get the joke first lol

I’m shocked that this many people feel the need to disobey a rule that is only there to help the children. Next step must be to ban VPNs altogether, and enforcing all Internet users to be identified with their real identity (/s obviously).

I think you are mixing this up with the function of the executive goverment in a state with alleged separation of powers (one of the fundamentals of democracy).

A president himself sending out forces is in fact not normal.