Yes, not ideal, but better than mere website.

Even better option would be a dedicated password manager with MFA like Proton Pass etc. but banks use their authentications in various ways and are regulated more.

You realize the mobile gaming market is mostly micro transactions and it has nothing to do with Google? The same happened to the PC gaming over the last ten years. You can blame customers for their human nature of feeling good for beating their in-game enemies with money to compensate for their psychological deficiencies.

The ruling was Absurd.

• Make an open system
• Add optional license to provide a dozen of your apps as a price for your infrastructure for the app marketplace (security scans, performance optimizations based on runtime, networking, marketing etc)
• your platform has a lot of competition, Google is the worst search engine these day, iPhone is dropping price sharply to aggressively grab new customers, China decouples, and you allow all competition to provide their own stores since day one.
• get sued and lose in a case where you need to provide 100% of your app library to Epic which is doing much worse practices, and their only motive is higher profit margin with zero interest in any improvement, in fact everything can only get worse - fragmented, low quality of EGS, no innovation just see how Amazon Appstore stiffles APK format.

Google is by no means perfect, or even good, but this ruling is outright bullshit, I'd go as far as saying Trump wouldn't be as dumb as these judges, and that means a lot.

I don't want to say they are influenced by Chinese money, because I don't have the evidence. Though Epic being Chinese and the ruling benefiting Chinese companies make me alert.

You are mentioning a domino effect, but the main goal is beneficial in itself, increasing security. I hope people posting here are not using Windows XP in 2024, or have not updated their Linux packages since 2017.

Go search for how long companies take to patch a vulnerability. It is like 60 days for critical CVEs on average, 300 days overall.

It is a good design, especially security wise. Many banks require 2FA from their app/companion app.

Fake news, Android is fully open source. You are talking about Google/vendor stack on top of it,

It is as if you started blaming a copy left car engine schematics provider that their engine is being used in a commercial car.

Google is by no means a monopoly. There is iOS, few other systems, and even on android you have a dozen of stores.

And the pre-installed Google apps package deal is completely fine. You get a system you would have to spend billions on, infrastructure, verified brand, and much more, and you get their product for the price of bundling it with few more, which end user can just not use or even debloat.

You must really hate Google to think this is in an way unfair.

Good, no need to pay for overpriced Snapdragon. It would make sense to stick to Snapdragon only to outcompete China, but Mediatek is a Taiwanese ally instead.

List one good ROM. I am on F3, there is literally zero interesting ROMs

No android phone has a decent custom ROM scene, let alone a great one. All these ROMs do is changing the wallpaper to some anime character and overclocking the device.

Enjoy no contactless payments, no support for bank, transportation tickets, ID apps etc.

On a custom ROM your phone is essentially a leisure tablet, but even then you can forget majority of games working and limited widevine support means it sucks for Netflix.

Yes, you can make some of these work, but not only does it consume lots of time, it has to be done regularly.

Plus all the launchers I've seen so far, all the options available are just crap compared to any OEM skin

I wish there was at least one good ROM, but there never will be, it is only getting way worse each year

Wouldn't it be MIUI without a coat of paint, considering this is their plan B system without or with limited Google services?

Of course they do, you can file a request so they would send you what info they hold. I did so. They store everything - your every message, all login dates, device metadata and anything else you can think of.

The best part? They say that the messages you send are like email, so they are not obliged to delete them.

On xiaomi blog they mentioned it will not get MIUI 15.

I've got zero expectations, they made POCO F3 and F4 with same SoC but F3 is EOL, and F4 still gets updates.

Considering they neglected it in ideal conditions, how can we believe them to support less convergent set of devices?

Anyway, anyone can tell me why should we care about Android updates except for security? I'm totally bored by Android 14, not even one interesting thing in release notes. Maybe taking sharing menu out of OEM hands and updating it through Play Store, but seeing how they did something like that in Chrome makes it rather intrusive feature.

MIUI is even more boring, from MIUI 11 to 14 on POCO F3 I have noticed no changes in the skin, they added widgets for China-only but these see useful, just nice to look at. I love widgets, but c'mon.