Hey, what camera do you use? My phone is showing its age and I was thinking of getting a secondhand pixel, but I've also been looking at cameras to stand in for the phone camera.

I was thinking I should go for beginner friendly and small.

It's mostly lemmy. In real life people go from amused to indifferent. I have never met anyone as hostile as the lemmy consensus seems to be. If a feature is useful people will use it, be it AI or not AI. Some AI features are gimmicks and they largely get ignored, unless very intrusive (in which case the intrusivity, not the AI, is the problem).

Hey, what camera do you use? My phone is showing its age and I was thinking of getting a secondhand pixel, but I've also been looking at cameras to stand in for the phone camera.

I was thinking I should go for beginner friendly and small.

If you want you can install Pixel Camera (official Google camera) from Aurora Store, and deny it Network permissions and any other permissions you want. It still works pretty well for point and shoot but I can't speak for every single feature. Also you can install simulated services that the Gcam requires to function, without having to run Play Services.

Android... is a Linux phone..?

android is linux and its great. the problem is the google crud on top of it, and their iron fist ruling it. windows is similar tbh.

we have to fight google not compete with android. the problem is not technology itself, its the oligarchs controlling it.

This has got to be a prank.

I recently tried using the Google Translate image translator. Totally locked up now, requiring Play Store and Google App. Still didn't work, but is was seriously just "if you don't give us everything now, we won't do basic shit for you."

Google’s Gemini team is apparently sending out emails about an upcoming change to how Gemini interacts with apps on Android devices. The email informs users that, come July 7, 2025, Gemini will be able to “help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.” Naturally, this has raised some privacy concerns among those who’ve received the email and those using the AI assistant on their Android devices.

You think there aren't driver and software support issues in windows 11?

If a feature is useful people will use it, be it AI or not AI.

People will also use it if it's not useful, if it's the default.

A friend of mine did a search the other day to find the hour of something, and google's AI lied to her. Top of the page, just completely wrong.

Luckily I said, "That doesn't sound right" and checked the official site, where we found the truth.

Google is definitely forcing this out, even when it's inferior to other products. Hell, it's inferior to their own, existing product.

But people will keep using AI, because it's there, and it's right most of the time.

Google sucks. They should be broken up, and their leadership barred from working in tech. We could have had a better future. Instead we have this hallucinatory hellhole.

Google Wave was actually pretty awesome. Google just had no idea what to do with it and it was too heavy for phones of the time.

I should rephrase. They don't make cheap bad products. I think iOS, Mac OS, and their walled garden approach makes their hardware a bad product. Compound that with being exorbitantly expensive for what you get, and that's always been too much to overcome for me to support. Now they are/have becoming the less bad option.

The user experience of GrapheneOS is basically the same as vanilla Android, except that you have more control (you can uninstall google apps, for example), but at the cost of a small minority of apps (banking ones, for example) not working (out of the box, sometimes at all). My banking app works, and a quick google search will tell you if yours does too. If your old pixel is not too old (4 is no longer supported, 8 definitely is, not sure abt in between), you should give it a go. I think you'll see it's not as big of a step as you maybe currently imagine.

I do have it disabled, but this article suggests that it will ignore that and it will be integrated in apps that I really really don't want it in. I could stomach it if it was search and other functionality like that only, or even if it 100% ran local with no ability to phone home and train on my data, but it doesn't. Not that it can be listening to calls, reading messages, etc, I'm definitely hard out.

this can be great for a disabled person i guess, i wonder if it works locally in a degoogled way

this can be great for a disabled person i guess, i wonder if it works locally in a degoogled way

For sure, as long as that's a viable option for me, I'll do it, but if I don't have that option...

You can remove most apps using ADB. Universal Android Debloater is helpful for this, just make sure you read the comments for each app so you dont remove something you need.

Sadly, SailfishOS is region locked. Being from North America, I can't purchase their phones, or use the trial/emulation option, which really sucks because I like a lot of what I'm seeing there.