I used to have a Microsoft Lumia 550 phone, which although basic just worked and really well. Unfortunately I’m a little clumsey and managed to drop it around a dozen times when getting out of the car at work (yeah, you’d think I’d learn). It managed to survive those drops, but only just and ended up with a lovely set of cracks across the screen which I superglued to stop them completely distroying the screen and to prevent getting glass shards in my fingers.
Anyway, it’s got to the point where I needed to get a replacement phone and I would have gone for another Windows phone, but there haven’t been any new releases for a while and I refuse to pay £600+ for the HP one. So, I’ve reluctantly bought an Android…
Why reluctantly? Well I believe Google is getting a little scary in it’s acquisitions (Boston Dynamics) and the recent purchases of a couple of certificate authorities concerns me about personal privacy.
Anyway, I’ve set up my phone to remove a lot of the Android pre-installed crap from Google and set my default browser to Firefox. I thought nothing of doing this until just last week when Outlook refused to connect to my Gmail account and prompting to re-authenticate. I’d click ok, re-authenticate and get a 403 error from Google. After a couple of tries, I remove my Gmail account and tried to re-add it.
Much to my suprise, I can’t re-add my account unless I set Chrome as my default browser!!! Talk about anti-competitive behaviour from Google!
I absolutely refuse to use Chrome as my default Android browser just so that I can use my Gmail account from Outlook!