Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse
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I appreciate that! I’m in the states unfortunately
Can't easily help there. Maybe you can find someone local who could help. Best of luck.
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2 days ago I moved from GrapheneOS back to Stock Pixel in my 8 Pro, just to see what all the hype about the new android 16 in Pixel is about. Jesus, this is way worse than I remember. i tried it for 2 whole days, and that shit just won't allow me to have ANY control over my phone. It's fucking ridiculous. On Android 15 I was able to uninstall Google Drive, Meet, Youtube, and many other Google apps, this time around all it would allow was "disable". What's next, removing the ability to disable (which I don't trust anyway)?
Fast forward to today, I'm back on GOS, and my anxiety levels are down again. This shit is insane, and I honestly can't understand why anyone would put up with this crap.
this time around all it would allow was “disable”.
This has been par for other OEM-flavored Android phones for years, unfortunately.
Disableis alright, not that the phone itself isn't a privacy nightmare in other ways. -
2 days ago I moved from GrapheneOS back to Stock Pixel in my 8 Pro, just to see what all the hype about the new android 16 in Pixel is about. Jesus, this is way worse than I remember. i tried it for 2 whole days, and that shit just won't allow me to have ANY control over my phone. It's fucking ridiculous. On Android 15 I was able to uninstall Google Drive, Meet, Youtube, and many other Google apps, this time around all it would allow was "disable". What's next, removing the ability to disable (which I don't trust anyway)?
Fast forward to today, I'm back on GOS, and my anxiety levels are down again. This shit is insane, and I honestly can't understand why anyone would put up with this crap.
Those apps are installed in the squashfs image. Such images are write once, read many and thus they can't be mutated at runtime.
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The obfuscated nature of compiled code does an incredible amount of heavy lifting on behalf of shareholders. Imagine a world where x-ray specs suddenly revealed source code. The flight to open solutions would be irresistible. Windows is hot garbage but it clings to its market share like a limpet, through the magic of closed source, occupying space like a flabby tumour. It doesn't care if it kills the host because the top priority is growth and an unassailable market share. That's the magic of capitalism.
Honestly I don't think many people would care? Until the security holes became intractable, I guess.
Its proven Android phones are doing awful stuff, even client side, and has that slowed them down?
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Play Store is truly vile to use. It just feels gross and scammy and like a mine field of low quality slop and scam apps.
iOS isn’t great either but it at least feels a whole lot better. The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.
The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.
That's probably to reduce brigading? Android and iOS are infested with all sorts of fraduelnt marketing techniques like fake reviews, and mass fraud reporting for competition sounds like another.
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Play Store is truly vile to use. It just feels gross and scammy and like a mine field of low quality slop and scam apps.
iOS isn’t great either but it at least feels a whole lot better. The iOS store needs the ability to report fraid which it doesn’t sort until you install an app.
My experience with the iOS app store years ago was worse than Android. Searching for apps that were not chock full of spam was useless. I had to research the apps outside of the store then find direct links to them due to clones with the same names.
I have no idea why Apple and Google allow so much hot garbage in their app stores.
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We're all trapped. If you're not using either Android or iOS, you're pretty much screwed.
Technically, you can use one of the alternate phones, but the software support still leaves a lot to be desired. You can get most basic things working, but when it comes to crucial deal breaker apps like anything involving payments or banks, it gets a lot trickier. The world has become increasingly dependent on mobile phones, and if your phone can't handle train tickets, mail deliveries, restaurant reservations or pay your bills, it suddenly becomes very difficult to live in the 2020s.
More and more hardware also depends on specific iOS or Android apps, and those apps may also require GAPPS or some OEM Android. At some point, it just isn't worth the hassle, and it becomes easier to pick either one of the toxic platforms everyone else is already using.
I feel like the standard should be two phones. A disposable 'banking' phone: tiny, no camera, no speakers, small SoC, just the absolute bare minimum to live.
...And then a 'media' phone without all the enshittification.
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But is it even slightly better? It's debatable. Both are completely awful, but I guess iOS is just terrible in different ways.
My last iPhone was a iPhone 5. Or 6, maybe?
Fast forward, and I've been on Android until right now, when I got an iPhone 16 in a loss-leader sale.
...And I am astounded by how much worse it is. My old jailbroken iPhone's UI was both simpler and 100x times more customizable and useful than all these bizzare required gestures; I spent days trying to teach my Mom and grandpa how to use it, to no avail. At the same time, its as uncustomizable as ever.
I had basically every feature the 16 has now, like the action button, and more. And it somehow feels slower in browsing than my SD845 Android 9 phone.
It wasn't perfect back then, but the App Store is flooded with garbage now.
I literally want my iPhone 5 back. WTF has Apple been doing?
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android peaked with the pixel 2. then everyone went overboard on bezel-less displays and fast refresh rates and smart assistant services and brought the whole damn thing crashing down.
Fast refresh rates are amazing. I cherished my old Razer Phone 2.
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Yep, didn't use it much but I have studio headphones that I lliked to plug from time to time.
TBH getting a nice dongle like a Fiio KA5 is not so bad. It's small enough to just hang off the cord, and sounds better anyway, and you don't have to throw it away every phone switch.
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Still use my Windows Phones with Windows 10 Mobile as my daily drivers. Best OS to date.
Eh, even if they got it right and more popular, it would have enshittified quick.
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Those apps are installed in the squashfs image. Such images are write once, read many and thus they can't be mutated at runtime.
Well who made the decision to put non-system apps in the system partition?
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Unfortunately many of the apps needed just to exist as a member of society are only available in the Play Store.
Aurora store front end works fine no Google account needed.
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Those apps are installed in the squashfs image. Such images are write once, read many and thus they can't be mutated at runtime.
I know, and that's exactly my point. They used to be in the user space, now they are in the system partition. They CHOSE to do this.
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Aurora store front end works fine no Google account needed.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. And even when it does, it still requires Google's spyware to be installed on your device.
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Google’s Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. In its quest for ever-greater profits, the tech giant has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source nature over the last decade.
Originally published on The Lever, but that one asks you to sign up.
The best thing about switching to an iPhone is that I use my phone way lesser
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2 days ago I moved from GrapheneOS back to Stock Pixel in my 8 Pro, just to see what all the hype about the new android 16 in Pixel is about. Jesus, this is way worse than I remember. i tried it for 2 whole days, and that shit just won't allow me to have ANY control over my phone. It's fucking ridiculous. On Android 15 I was able to uninstall Google Drive, Meet, Youtube, and many other Google apps, this time around all it would allow was "disable". What's next, removing the ability to disable (which I don't trust anyway)?
Fast forward to today, I'm back on GOS, and my anxiety levels are down again. This shit is insane, and I honestly can't understand why anyone would put up with this crap.
Thanks for the anecdote now i know i can just stay in gos
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TBH getting a nice dongle like a Fiio KA5 is not so bad. It's small enough to just hang off the cord, and sounds better anyway, and you don't have to throw it away every phone switch.
Not so bad?
That thing costs 230€ vs a free headphone jack.
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Not so bad?
That thing costs 230€ vs a free headphone jack.
Sorry, I meant the KA1 or KA3, got them mixed up. My KA3 was like $50 used.
I use it on my PC, too.
Considering the cost in reference to the hardware, and that I can use it basically forever, and that it's a lower distortion DAC than any phone? It's not bad. And it's a barely-noticable addon for my headphones that just lives on the cord.
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Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. And even when it does, it still requires Google's spyware to be installed on your device.
Only certain apps require play services, aurora store itself requires no play services. Just the potential for the apps you are trying to use. I've used F-Droid and aurora for years.
