My thoughts about being an Android user outside US

So I decided to write this post to let other people, specially from the US, what Google is doing to android in other countries, and which I think is a clear "change of politic" to the openness of the android ecosystem.

I live in Spain, and apart from being excluded from a lot of Google products, like google home (that just arrived to my country a few weeks ago), the original Google pixel or even being denied guarantee for devices bought here, etc... (This is a post about android I don't want to keep going).

I just want to talk about android today, my first smartphone was a Nexus 4, and I chose it over other phones mostly because Android. I liked the idea of having a phone that I could tune, I could modify anything, even chose my own build of the OS, one that fitted all my needs. And I loved it, from the launcher, to the file system, I was able to mess with anything.

Today I tried to install Google News on my phone, which came with the old News and Weather. As always because some stupid dispute this App is not available in my country, and it's mostly because the newspapers here don't want Google to reduce their websites visits, It's fine I don't care I don't even read Spanish newspapers, I just want news from around the world, so I decided to download the apkl and install it on my phone.

The app asked for permissions, I granted them, everything was running smoothly, but after leaving the phone idle for some time the app uninstalled by itself (or some other app did).

After some googling I found out that the app was auto-disabling itself when detecting that I was running it from a country where is not available.

Nevermind, I will install it again and grant no permissions, I did and the app totally ignored me and somehow detected my location again and auto-disabled again.

The point is:

• Is okay for Google to try to stop me from using a non-available app, they could show something when I open the app or whatever.

• The fact that even without location permissions, the app still knows my location is worrisome, even if they accomplished it with IP geolocation.

• My phone should not be able to control critical things like uninstalling apps without user permission.

• The funny thing is that I can access https://news.google.com/ but not install an APP to see, is that just to make the android users mad?

I think that this is a step in the direction that Apple decided to follow one day, and I just wanted to give a heads up for those in the US which don't face location restrictions and open a discussion about it.

Submitted July 30, 2018 at 08:32PM by blitzzerg https://ift.tt/2LOp4tK https://ift.tt/eA8V8J