Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse
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... and I want my headphone jack, back.
Yep, didn't use it much but I have studio headphones that I lliked to plug from time to time.
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Unfortunately for the EU only.EU only
Ebay it is. Bands are what matter. If it picks up Tmobile, Tello and the like, who cares who's market it's for?
But really, for me, it's still Android. It's just a band-aid on the bigger problem of reliance on Google.
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isnt graphene mostly pixels only.
it's not "mostly", it's only available for several latest Pixel generations.
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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.
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Linux phones will hopefully fix that soon(ish)
It's the year of the Linux phone!
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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.
MS keeps making Windows worse but that is not a problem because Linux is great on PCs. The reason is that PC is made out of standardized plug&play components that you can make generic OS image for.
There is no such thing in smartphone world. Each chipset is it's own Linux fork that gets only most crucial bug fixes while in warranty. Same is true for ARM SBCs where I believe the only board that supports generic image are new RPis.
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Still use my Windows Phones with Windows 10 Mobile as my daily drivers. Best OS to date.
I loved my Lumia 1520, but it just doesn't hold a candle to a modern Android phone with LineageOS installed. Both in functionality and in privacy.
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Spanish authorities*. Not really European-wide thing, but a local one.
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Linux phones will hopefully fix that soon(ish)
PostmarketOS using Waydroid for the neccessary apps, anyone has experience to share?
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Sadly iOS is not much better
But is it even slightly better? It's debatable. Both are completely awful, but I guess iOS is just terrible in different ways.
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F-Droid is a decent replacement for the play store. Lots of FOSS and less-enshittified apps available.
Tried to rely fully on F-droid several years ago. That experiment went just fine until I needed up update the apps. Turns out, there wasn't a simple one button solution to that. I had to manually update each and every app one by one. Is it any better these days?
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Unfortunately the Android experience is getting more and more bloated and users' freedom to tinker with their phones or sideload apps is getting more and more difficult. The Play Store is riddled with more ads than useful content. Just try searching for something, and oftentimes more than half of your screen is ads.
I've been with Android since the start and I hate what Google is reducing it to. It pains me that the only viable alternative is Apple and I feel trapped.
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 is 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.
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Tried to rely fully on F-droid several years ago. That experiment went just fine until I needed up update the apps. Turns out, there wasn't a simple one button solution to that. I had to manually update each and every app one by one. Is it any better these days?
Unattended updates for everyone, 1.19 is here
https://f-droid.org/2024/02/01/twif.html -
Unattended updates for everyone, 1.19 is here
https://f-droid.org/2024/02/01/twif.htmlThat happened in 2024? About time! Sounds like F-droid is actually becoming viable.
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Still use my Windows Phones with Windows 10 Mobile as my daily drivers. Best OS to date.
one of the best products Microsoft ever produced. I absolutely LOVED my old Lumia. great phone, the OS was perfect, just an awesome all around phone. wish I still had it.
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Tried to rely fully on F-droid several years ago. That experiment went just fine until I needed up update the apps. Turns out, there wasn't a simple one button solution to that. I had to manually update each and every app one by one. Is it any better these days?
Try the Droidify app. I find it better than the main FDroid app.
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That happened in 2024? About time! Sounds like F-droid is actually becoming viable.
I could be completely wrong as it's outside of my areas of competency, but my understanding is that the functionality was harder to achieve because of some technical reason due in part to Google/Alphabet fuckery. So another day ending in "y".
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i have oneplus12r this my first non-pixel phone, you might want to visit the oneplus sub to look for other peoples experience. if you are looking for good deal on phones, online stores like swappa is a good start. i like the battery life of it. midsize cost, if your looking for budget , you can go motorola series, i did consider it at first.
Motorola is full of bloatware. Can not recommend.
The hardware is fine, though.
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MS keeps making Windows worse but that is not a problem because Linux is great on PCs. The reason is that PC is made out of standardized plug&play components that you can make generic OS image for.
There is no such thing in smartphone world. Each chipset is it's own Linux fork that gets only most crucial bug fixes while in warranty. Same is true for ARM SBCs where I believe the only board that supports generic image are new RPis.
Both ARM itself and Linux for ARM has been standardizing a fair bit recently. But not to the extent to be fully generic, mostly just enough for portable bootable kernels - and after that you still need all the same custom drivers and configurations to make proper use of a SoC, but it's not nothing.
EBBR spec to bring standardization to embedded Linux boot process
At Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Arm’s Grant Likely explains how an emerging, UEFI-based EBBR spec could standardize embedded Linux firmware bootup behavior using standard bootloaders like U-Boot.
LinuxGizmos.com (linuxgizmos.com)
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Unfortunately the Android experience is getting more and more bloated and users' freedom to tinker with their phones or sideload apps is getting more and more difficult. The Play Store is riddled with more ads than useful content. Just try searching for something, and oftentimes more than half of your screen is ads.
I've been with Android since the start and I hate what Google is reducing it to. It pains me that the only viable alternative is Apple and I feel trapped.
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.