I can’t speak for Canada but at least here in the US, I’ve used every Pixel on any carrier I wanted. And most of them were small ones. Straight Talk, Ting, T-Mobile, and one more I can’t even remember the name of.

IIRC, the “allowlist” stuff was just “known carriers that use towers that are compatible with this phone.” As in, different carriers use different “bands”, or frequency ranges, for their transmissions. Your phone has to have hardware support for those bands. So the “allowlist” is really just “we know these work.” I’m pretty sure neither Samsung nor Google will stop you from using an unlocked phone bought from them with any carrier that’ll accept it. These days, I just stick a SIM (or eSIM) into my phone and just go.

Should’ve been a shuriken!

I had to read the title three times before it clicked that it said 64 TERABYTES and not gigabytes.

Holy smokes.

Yeah, yeah, I’m up next on the sticks.

Yeah, yeah, I’ll be your player two!

Yeah, yeah, I can play with your Dad!

Yeah, yeah, got the DDR mat!

Yeah, yeah, got cheat codes like yuh.

Copied, not stole like yuh.

Computer froze like yuh….

You’re not wrong but it feels disingenuous to say this. The entire repo with all of its dependencies checked out for a large website can easily clock at half a gig but there’s no popular website now that’s asking any users to download half a gig worth of stuff before they can use it.

There ARE websites where, if you keep them open long enough, they’ll constantly pull more and more data (usually for ads) but even that is measured more so in tens of megabytes.

And none of this is to say that websites haven’t gotten too big, just that comparing a downloaded app’s size to the size of a website’s unbuilt unbundled source with all of its dependencies is an unfair comparison.

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.

But that’s Michelle Obama!

What’s probably happening here is your adapter is signaling some button press when you connect it that’s popping up the Assistant. Only way to fix that is to get a new adapter since you can’t manually disable that input from triggering the Assistant without root.

However, you can completely disable the Google Assistant from appearing at all via:

Settings > Apps > Default Apps > Digital Assistant App > Default Digital Assistant App > None

That should fully disable it in all regards and it’ll never pop up again.

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.