The people who want a world where iPhones are like Linux by default don’t use iPhones; they use Linux phones.

The vast majority of us just want to have the ability to use our devices to run what we want when we want to. The App Store is a good, fine thing. I like that it exists and I don’t want it to go away.

But I don’t think it’s fair that Apple gets to tell me I can’t run emulators on my phone. It’d be like Ford telling me I can’t drive my car on an interstate or something. The whole concept is weird.

Let me own my device, please. I paid for this hardware; why am I not allowed to choose the software that runs on it?

Android handles this in what I think is a great way. By default, you can’t install 3rd party apps. You have to dig into your settings to enable that and then your phone is unlocked. I do think that’s bad for alternative app stores (but that’s a whole ‘nother problem) but the vast majority of people who seek apps that aren’t available in the phone’s App Store do so because they’re more technically minded and so don’t mind a more technical solution. If you go take a random Android user off the street, 9 times out of 10, they won’t even know you can install apps from outside of the App Store and that’s a good thing.

Apple loves to tout “security” and “efficiency” for why they don’t allow 3rd party apps and that’s so silly to me. If I want a less secure and less efficient phone so that I can use features Apple doesn’t like, that should be purely my decision to make. It doesn’t affect anyone else but me.

They may have at one point but they do not now.

It’s so unbelievably annoying that PayPal doesn’t let you use whatever display name you want to. Not everyone uses their legal name in their social life.

I understanding needing you know your customer, but why not let me set what my display name is?!

To Rule A Butterfly

Even if you turned it back at this point, it still wouldn’t work.

This is pretty infuriating though; Google works just fine with any device that doesn’t run Android so why would they care that you’re running a custom ROM?

My guess is something less evil and more mundane: something about your number changed in their system and now they can’t send codes to it, which is why it’s grayed out. Maybe it was previously classified as a mobile number but now is classified as a landline.

Your only option, if you don’t have any backup codes, is to use that “Get Help” option they have that takes a few days and then either start carrying around backup codes, a Yubikey, or De-Google.

Hey, maybe all 3!

A Travel Roku is the real pro tip.

The most adorable robbers I’ve ever seen!

I can’t speak for GCP as I’ve never used it, and as much as I love to jump on the Google hate train (they really do suck in so many ways), I am an Android app developer who also has to deal with the target API upgrades and they’re usually not terrible. Most of the time, just a single line change, build, and push.

But most of my apps don’t do any sort of tracking or access the file system, so outside of the whole permissions change a few years back, these have been easy to do.

The name truncation thing here is silly, though. Very annoying.

I say all this to say that I do think Google is doing a good thing here. In this one regard. I can’t stress enough how specific I’m being with my praise here.