Sorry for a kinda clickbait title but it is what it is. I just watched a video about Android 15 changes and a lot of them are either not important or straight up bad.
I want to specifically mention increased background sensor usage (such as microphone) and the Find My Device network. These are serious privacy issues that just make lives of custom ROM developers and users harder by having to disable more and more stuff (that’s turned on by default of course), as well as a contribution to ewaste generation and general decrease of battery life.
I guess we are getting into the era of complete death of digital privacy and absolute surveillance. This is scary but not too unrealistic I guess. I just hope the devs of privacy-focused ROMs will be able to do something about it and purge these changes.
I don’t know. The sensor stuff sounds pretty gross but the assistants are already listening all the time so they probably got a good understanding of the battery usage and hopefully privacy and later they point out they’ve made significant battery life improvements.
The Bluetooth find my device stuff is icky but I’m using my Bluetooth basically 24/7 so the auto re-enable settings means nothing to me. I honestly think most people turn it off and get annoyed later when it’s not on so that’s probably a pretty compelling improvement for them.
There were some security wins too like the private app area, encrypted network controls and network monitor warnings.
So privacy dead? No it’s basically the same. kinda just another megh update from Android. Moving forward but not wowing anyone. Google is too busy putting all their resources into ruining their trusted search reputation by making it lie to everyone to invest in a real android update.
I wish someone would shake up the phone market again so we could look forward to these updates again.
The assistants at least can be deleted or disabled. That sensors stuff cannot
The sensor stuff for the adaptive vibration? The first screen in that section of the video is a big feature card like they put in the upgrade tours which let’s you turn it on or off.
True. But idk if I was talking about that feature. I remember clearly hearing of a feature that cannot be disabled in the video. Though I just rewatched it and I didn’t find anything about it. Idk if it was removed from the video or I started having hallucinations (which is absolutely possible) but it doesn’t seem to be there anymore. Idk what else to say about it