Thank You, Brussels: Making the Dashboard the Next USB-C

by Leo Gaggl • WOL Notes

In part one I argued that convenience is the bait, and that doing things the hard way is worth the friction. I also conceded Cory Doctorow’s point: individual choices won’t fix enshittification. Policy will. This post covers why GrapheneOS needs that policy to survive, who is actually writing it, where they should point it next, and what you can do to help.

Standing on Google’s Shoulders

GrapheneOS works because it’s pragmatic: it takes Google’s Android and strips the bad stuff out. That pragmatism comes with a catch.

The irony is hard to miss. GrapheneOS runs best on Pixels, so to get away from Google I paid Google for the hardware. And Google has been making even that road narrower: in 2025 it stopped publishing the Pixel device trees that projects like GrapheneOS build on, along with the kernel’s commit history. The GrapheneOS team adapted, but the message is clear enough.

And the road ahead has more potholes. Since 30 September 2026, certified Android phones in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand refuse to install apps from developers who haven’t registered their identity with Google, and the rule goes global in 2027. Google has added an “advanced flow” for people who insist, a one-time process with a 24-hour wait, and installs from a computer over adb are exempt. GrapheneOS phones aren’t certified, so the check doesn’t apply to them directly, but F-Droid has called the plan an “existential” threat to alternative app stores, because many of the volunteers who write open source apps will never register.

A project that stands on Google’s code and Google’s hardware can be knee-capped by Google whenever it chooses: stop publishing a bit more source code, tighten app certification, or let banks and app makers lock out any phone that Google hasn’t certified. GrapheneOS’s best defence isn’t technical. It’s the law, and right now the only place writing that law with any teeth is Brussels.

Thank You, Brussels

The Atomium in Brussels, its steel spheres and connecting tubes shining against a deep blue sky, by Maria Firsova, on Flickr
"Atomium" by Maria Firsova (CC BY 2.0)

For all its slowness and compromise, the European Union is the only body with both the power and the willingness to push back on the tech giants, and it deserves more thanks than it gets.

The most visible win sits in my pocket. The EU’s common charger rules made USB-C mandatory for new phones sold there from 28 December 2024, and Apple, after years of arguing that a common charger would stifle innovation, switched the iPhone 15 to USB-C more than a year ahead of the deadline. Every drawer of mismatched cables in the world got a little smaller because of a decision made in Brussels.

It goes much further than chargers. Under the Digital Markets Act, Apple had to allow alternative app stores on iPhones in the EU from March 2024, and in April 2025 the Commission fined Apple €500 million for stopping app developers from pointing users to cheaper offers, and Meta €200 million over its “pay or consent” model for personal data. WhatsApp now lets users in Europe exchange messages with other apps, a change Meta made only because the law required it. If my partner lived in Vienna instead of Adelaide, her WhatsApp could already talk to apps outside Meta’s walls. There are only two small ones so far, but the door is open.

The Commission fined Google €2.95 billion in September 2025 for favouring its own advertising exchange, after Europe’s top court upheld the earlier €2.42 billion Google Shopping fine. The Digital Services Act produced its first fine in December 2025: €120 million against X, for a blue tick that no longer verifies anything, an incomplete ad archive and blocked access for researchers. And since June 2025, ecodesign rules require phone makers selling in the EU to stock spare parts for seven years and provide software updates for at least five years after a model leaves sale, with the battery rules, loophole included, to follow in 2027. iFixit called the ecodesign rules “two steps forward, one step back”, and the critics are right that they don’t go far enough. But they exist.

That loophole matters. Sealed batteries are planned obsolescence with a nicer finish. A phone with a perfectly good camera, screen and processor goes in the drawer because one cheap part is glued in. The EU’s Batteries Regulation was meant to fix this, requiring phone batteries that users can remove and replace from February 2027. Then came the exemption: a phone rated IP67 whose battery keeps 80% of its capacity after 1,000 charge cycles can keep it glued in, and every Pixel since the 8a meets that test. Australia should do better than follow, and until someone does, a Pixel’s battery life is effectively its lifespan.

Compare that with the United States, home to almost every company in this post. A US court found Google guilty of illegally monopolising search in 2024, then in September 2025 declined to make it sell Chrome or stop paying billions to be the default search engine. In November 2025, a judge ruled Meta isn’t a monopoly at all, so it keeps Instagram and WhatsApp. When the EU fined Google, the President called it unfair. Less than three weeks after the EU fined X, the State Department imposed visa bans on five Europeans it accused of censoring American platforms, including Thierry Breton, the former commissioner who steered the Digital Services Act. Washington isn’t just failing to rein in its tech giants. It’s defending them against the people who try. That’s a system captured by the interests it’s supposed to regulate.

Gil Durán’s new book has a name for the people steering this capture: The Nerd Reich. His argument is that a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires and investors has come to see democracy as an obstacle to be routed around. You don’t have to accept every part of that argument to see the pattern: the companies Brussels fines are the ones Washington now defends, and their owners are increasingly open about what they think of the rest of us.

Australia sits somewhere in between. In December 2024 Treasury proposed a digital competition regime of its own, with app stores and ad tech first in line, and Canberra could do worse than copy Brussels, and faster. In the meantime, every European rule that forces an opening gives the rest of us a crack to work through, and people doing it the hard way are often the first to use it.

The Dashboard Duopoly

My Android Auto saga from part one deserves more than a grumble, because the car is where the duopoly is tightening its grip fastest, and where almost nobody is paying attention.

Look at the screen in nearly any new car and you’re looking at one of two systems: Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. Which one you get isn’t decided by the car you bought, but by the phone in your pocket. And once you’re on that screen, Google (or Apple) decides everything else: which kinds of app are allowed at all, which apps pass its review, and, as I found out, which shop your apps have to come from. Magic Earth has already passed Google’s car app review. That’s why it works with Android Auto for everyone who installs it from the Play Store. The same app, with the same code, is blocked on my phone because I downloaded it from a different shop. The installer check adds nothing to safety. What it adds is a Google login.

This isn’t just one annoyed driver’s opinion. In 2018, the Italian energy company Enel X asked Google to let its JuicePass app, which finds and books electric car chargers, run on Android Auto. Google said no. At the time, it only supported media and messaging apps from other developers. Italy’s competition authority fined Google more than €100 million for it, and in February 2025 Europe’s top court backed the principle. The Court of Justice ruled that when a dominant company builds a platform like Android Auto for other developers to use, refusing to let a rival’s app work with it can be an abuse of that dominance, even if the app could survive without it. Google can say no only where letting the app in would genuinely put safety or the system at risk, or is technically impossible, and even then it may only take a reasonable time to build what rivals need. “We’d rather you came through our store” is not on that list.

What’s missing is any real alternative. There have been attempts at an open standard. MirrorLink, backed by an industry consortium that included carmakers and phone makers, was meant to be exactly that: one open way for any phone to talk to any car. It never got enough support from the two companies that mattered, and its operators shut it down in 2023. SmartDeviceLink, which Ford open-sourced in 2013 and Ford and Toyota put into a non-profit consortium in 2017, still exists on paper, but its last major release was in 2020. The hobbyist projects that turn a Raspberry Pi into a car head unit mostly speak Google’s Android Auto protocol, so they widen the choice of car screens but not the choice of rulebook.

The carmakers’ own escape route isn’t much better. General Motors dropped CarPlay and Android Auto from its electric cars in 2023, and plans to remove them from the rest of its range from around 2028. That sounds like independence, until you notice that GM’s replacement is Android Automotive, Google’s operating system built into the car, with Google’s services and GM’s subscriptions. That’s not breaking the duopoly. It’s moving it from your phone into your dashboard, where you can’t swap it out.

Farmers have already solved most of this problem. A modern tractor pulls implements from many different manufacturers: a seeder from one company, a sprayer from another, a baler from a third. Each of those used to come with its own control terminal, bolted into an already crowded cab. The answer was ISOBUS (ISO 11783), an international standard for how tractors and implements talk to each other. Its Universal Terminal does exactly the job Android Auto does in a car: the implement brings its own control screens, and any ISOBUS terminal in any tractor displays them. Since 2008, the Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation, set up by the manufacturers themselves, competitors included, has run independent test laboratories and a public database showing which tractors and implements work together. It isn’t perfect: compatibility can still be patchy, and some makers sell the more advanced ISOBUS functions as paid unlocks. But no tractor maker gets to decide which brand of sprayer you may hitch up, let alone which dealer you had to buy it from. Swap the tractor for a car and the implement for a phone, and you have exactly the open interface the dashboard is missing. If the people who build combine harvesters can agree on a common standard, so can the people who build cars and phones.

The fix is the one Brussels already applied to chargers: a common, open interface. A car’s screen, buttons and speakers should be reachable by any app on any phone through a published standard, with safety rules that are written down and apply equally to everyone, not enforced through whoever runs the app store. The Digital Markets Act already forces Apple to give other companies’ accessories the same access to the iPhone that its own products get. A car is just a very large accessory. The EU, and every other government with the power to do it, should throw the book at Google, and at Apple for that matter, and make the dashboard the next USB-C.

You Don’t Have to Do It Alone

If Brussels is the regulator doing the heavy lifting, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the friend in your corner. The EFF has been defending people’s rights online since 1990, in courtrooms, in parliaments and in code. Doctorow himself is one of its special advisers. It’s among the more than 70 organisations backing the Keep Android Open campaign against Google’s developer verification plan, and that campaign deserves every bit of support it can get. After a few weeks of watching Google use “trust” as a reason to decide which apps I may run, on a phone I paid for, I’d sign it twice if I could. And the EFF builds tools ordinary people can use: Privacy Badger blocks trackers in your browser, Certbot put free HTTPS certificates within everyone’s reach, and its Surveillance Self-Defense guide is the best plain-language starting point for anyone who wants to try the hard way.

If this post has struck a chord, the most practical step isn’t a phone. It’s to support the people who fight these battles full-time. Donate to or join the EFF. In Australia, Electronic Frontiers Australia, founded in 1994 and incorporated right here in South Australia, and Digital Rights Watch do the same work closer to home. A membership costs less than most streaming subscriptions, and it’s one of the few tech purchases guaranteed not to get worse over time.

Part two of three. Previously: Convenience Is the Bait: Why the Hard Way Is Worth It. Next: , the technical detail of what worked, what didn’t and the pitfalls to avoid.

Sources

←Convenience Is the Bait: Why the Hard Way Is Worth It

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