We all know and probably are annoyed by everything supposedly (according to the CEOs out there) needing to be AI.
I am very glad to not be a Window$ user, especially with the whole Recall debacle and Microslop now shoving "Copilot" into everything, going as far as to rename the (IMO quite iconic) Microsoft Office to "Copilot", probably in order to be able to boast to shareholders about the high number of quote-unquote"Copilot users".
I'm pretty sure we all have seen the meme about the feeding with slop quite a few times already.
Well, Google hasn't precisely been much friendlier, Microslop has simply mostly taken our attention off them. And yes, they have been called out for the stuff they do as well, for example sparking the campaign Keep Android Open (which I fully support, by the way, Android has traditionally always been the more open mobile platform, and it should stay that way too1), but far from as loudly as Microslop. I think it's time to turn (at least part of) our attention to the last letter in FAANG now.
My previous collisions with AI in Android
I used to have a Samsung Galaxy A5 from around 2017. And of course it had Samsung's AI in it, Bixby. No problem, turn that off and we're golden. When that phone eventually started to lose compatibility for apps I need on the daily, I needed to get a new phone. So I bought myself a refurbished Fairphone 4, at that time running Android 13. And to my dismay, when I tried to shut down my phone and long-pressed the power button to do so, I got Gemini on my screen instead of the menu asking whether I wanted to shut down or reboot. Luckily it asked me whether I wanted to have it show the power options instead and I immediately clicked that to change it to the power menu. I am still in disbelief that they'd make an action that since computers existed has always been about turning off the device, suddenly open up an AI that most likely can not turn off or reboot the phone (unless it manages to kernel-panic it, but that's not intended behaviour and I don't know how an LLM could kernel-panic the whole phone).
What's up now?
I started watching a video by LTT, and just the TL;DW2 alone almost made me speechless.
So here I was, believing that I had saved myself from needing to flee a platform that is turning into AI by never relying on Window$ and being a Linux user basically from the start. Pustekuchen. Now Android is supposedly turning into a quote-unquote"agentic system" as well. I really hope I will not have to go off mainline Android soon in order to avoid that, because I doubt BankID and my banking apps are going to work on a non-Google ROM. And I don't either want to have to use two phones3, one for Google-reliant crap and another one for personal stuff.