Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

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Abishek_Muthian

I agree that the hardware omissions are blatant copy from Apple as the way to have more markup and revenue from accessories, software services but I like to differ on the OS front.

Android's power user ecosystem couldn't be matched in iOS. Even without root, Tasker can automate every single aspect of the OS - Want to send and receive WhatsApp messages over email?[1], Want better accessibility e.g. Voice summary of news?[2], Want a butt triggered pomodoro timer?[3]. Termux runs a Linux container and it can run complete Linux distribution inside it with PRoot[4]. Best of all, Tasker & Termux can communicate with each other for endless possibilities.

Of course Google can mess it up with their policy/API changes for Playstore, but that's where 3rd party app stores like f-droid comes in and can ensure open-source apps like Termux can be published without hurdles. Not to mention the privacy focused apps on f-droid.

And if one doesn't want anything to do with Google, LineageOS has proven itself to be a viable replacement for stock android.

[1] https://abishekmuthian.com/send-and-receive-whatsapp-message...

[2] https://abishekmuthian.com/voice-summary-of-news/

[3] https://abishekmuthian.com/butt-pomodoro-a-butt-triggered-po...

[4] https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/PRoot

> Even without root, Tasker can automate every single aspect of the OS - Want to send and receive WhatsApp messages over email?[1], Want better accessibility e.g. Voice summary of news?[2], Want a butt triggered pomodoro timer?[3]. Termux runs a Linux container and it can run complete Linux distribution inside it with PRoot[4]. Best of all, Tasker & Termux can communicate with each other for endless possibilities.

Does anyone actually care about any of these things? I'm a long time Android user and I've installed both Tasker and Termux. Never found anything useful for them and uninstalled them.

I work in a software company, with lots of people who experiment with home automation etc - the kinds of things where this could be useful.

Instead everyone uses RPis, and controls them with apps from their iPhones.

I'm sure there are a few people who actually do this stuff. But in my experience they are the kinds of people who enjoy working around barriers, so would find a different way to achieve the same things anyway.

> Does anyone actually care about any of these things?

On HN, sure. The other 3.6 billion smartphone users out there? No. The top voted opinions on HN are niche and don't represent the general population in any way. You can see this effect on other threads. Here are a few classic examples.

- Everyone on HN hates Facebook, and yet 2 billion+ people use it every day.

- Privacy is a paramount concern on HN, more important than anything else, and yet billions of people don't care as long as their dick pics are safe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRWxk7o-QlI).

- HN users hate ads and would happily pay for the privilege of eliminating ads. In the real world? Youtube has 2 billion monthly active users, only 1% of whom pay to eliminate ads.

- The ideal HN smartphone is one that has software support for years, is rootable, can have it's OS changed on a whim, can install any app from any app store. Hardware should be modular, with a swappable battery, camera etc. So Fairphone, basically. Units sold - 200k in 5 years. iPhone, the exact opposite of this in every respect (except software support) - 1 Billion in 5 years.

What I've said is so obvious it's self evident. But now and then people do get surprised and maybe annoyed when they find the world doesn't reflect the gospel truth preached on HN. At the time of this writing, your comment is actually downvoted ... for implying that the general population might not be Tasker-Termux installing, life automating power users.

I agree about the HN bubble, but not every comment has to reflect the larger market; The comment is about the power users and it reflects the significant portion of HN. Just like content on Computer Science is preferred on HN, it doesn't mean just because not everyone is a CSE/Computer Scientist in the real world, CS content is not valuable.

The problem with this logic is that with millions of people, everything can happen.

When someone says "never/no one" in a casual conversation, they don't mean "it's physically and mathematically impossible for this to happen, I'm sure the chance of this is 0%". They mean: "the vast majority of people".

Techie communities can be tiresome with all the nitpicking.

I swear that if I posted a comment saying "nobody puts their dick in the vacuum cleaner shaft" while discussing the best vacuum cleaner design, somebody would feel the need to object and say they did it.

https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html

The issue is not that HN users have different preferences or that they signal those preferences. The issue is when they are surprised and annoyed that the ordinary folks in the real world don't make the same superior choices that they do. Why do they keep buying iPhones instead of Fairphones? Why do they keep using ad supported services instead of paying for it? Why do hundreds of millions of them eat at McDonald's?!

This lack of understanding of the general population is the issue.

My argument is more subtle than that.

I'm arguing that Tasker/Termux users aren't really your normal power users at all. Instead they are hackers, and would be satisfied by any form of stitching bits together to accomplish some task.

If Tasker/Termus didn't exist they'd be equally happy accomplishing the same things with custom hardware sensors or carrying a RPi around or whatever. They aren't actually doing anything useful with the software that couldn't be accomplished slightly less conveniently in other ways - the joy of the hack is the accomplishment.

When you view it like this, the market satisfaction argument looks different.

I agree, but I think this case is even more extreme.

I'd be surprised if there are more than ~10 people (even on HN) who use the ability of Tasker and Termux to communicate with each other - and I bet those 10 people would be equally happy using some other solution they hacked together.

I think it's the act of hacking a solution together that they like, rather than it being a truly useful thing that can't be accomplished equally well in other ways.

The Fairphone has really crappy specs otherwise. Abysmal camera, low RAM, etc. That is an important reason power users don't buy it. Instead one could have some old phone with good hackability which is better and even cheaper. I see too many posts like yours here, so I do not imagine most of the HN think like you describe. Unfortunately.

Yeah, I hate this part on HN. People with horse blinkers that don't even seem to realize they have them on :-)

What's wrong with working around barriers? I find Tasker useful for fixing things I don't like about my phone that are otherwise beyond my ability to fix. For example...

1. By default my phone remembers the last media volume level used with headphones. This does make some sense, but it is easy to accidentally get maximum volume blasted in your ear. I use Tasker to automatically reset the volume to a safe level when I plug in my headphones.

2. I find that the automatic screen brightness on my phone doesn't work well at all. In a dark room, it would not set the brightness to its minimum level. It also would not turn the brightness to maximum even in direct, bright sunlight. I prefer to just set the brightness manually, and avoid the poor guesses of the automatic brightness algorithm (which is claimed to be "smart" and aware of my preferences). The only problem with manual brightness control is that it's common to end up in bright sunlight with a very dim screen. It is impossible to use the phone under such conditions. So, I used Tasker to add a gesture. If I shake my phone relatively hard, twice, in an up and down motion, it sets the screen to maximum brightness. I use this all the time.

Your comments are interesting in terms of the iOS/Android comparison: both of those are things which just work on iOS without needing to find and configure a separate app. This dynamic shows up constantly in these discussions because HN is full of people who enjoy tinkering as a hobby and have strong opinions about things should work whereas from the perspective of most normal people it’s easier to pay $400 for a noticeably faster iOS device rather than spending time puttering around trying to find the right combination of apps to compensate for an unmotivated device vendor and hoping that you didn’t just install malware in the process.

That is true. I prefer an experience that's more fiddly and annoying overall, but that can be customised to fit my preferred usage if necessary. I would not be happy on an iPhone, stuck with what they have chosen. I like to install my own launcher and such. That's why I use GNU/Linux on the desktop, and Android on my phone. Both of these ecosystems are very fragmented as well. For example, my old Android phone had neither of the problems I mentioned.

To be clear, I think this is entirely legitimate. I used Linux on the desktop for years, drove a car with a manual transmission, etc. so I totally understand being in a spot where the broader market is moving in a different direction. I feel like we’re losing something with less control over our devices but totally understand the security & support dynamic which got us here.

does ios remember the volume for every bluetooth device though or is it just headphones? i have tasker set a different volume for my car's bluetooth than my bluetooth headphones.

another thing i have tasker do is write down the hours i work every week by detecting the bluetooth tv in work and then the times my car stops in the morning and starts when i head home. then on friday if there are any hours that haven't been sent, tasker puts them into an email and i review it before sending.

i often think about switching to an iphone for the camera or some other reasons, but then i think about all the stuff ive made in tasker and how i probably won't be able to replicate it all on ios

I haven't tested that many Bluetooth devices but it seems to be per-device — e.g. my wired headphones are different than either of my Bluetooth speakers or the built-in speaker.

Apple's Shortcuts app supports a number of automation scenarios — for example, I would implement the feature you mentioned with a rule which tells Toggl to start an entry when my location is within a certain radius of work and stop it when I leave. You can also create or add to a note, send emails, etc. Since I have the Pythonista app, that could even extend to running arbitrary code.

You got downvoted but you speak the truth.

Termux is on their way out as they refuse to implement in Java the requirements of newer Android versions, not exposed as NDK APIs.

Did you mean way out of Google Play Store due API 29? As that's why I mentioned f-droid and f-droid doesn't require API-target restrictions. Termux is being updated only on f-droid because of those changes.

If you meant Termux on Android 11, Here's the quote from the developer-

>"Most of things work on Android 11. Only few packages have issues (including zsh) and restricted /proc/net which renders network information utilities like netstat unusable without root. Rest seems working correctly unless hit by some known issue not related to Android 10+."[1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/termux/comments/mj142i/whats_the_fu...

Yes, standard Android, I don't care about deviations like f-droid.

Some of those issues are manageable when making use of Java APIs, naturally not all of them, and even less if one refuses to touch Java.

> Some of those issues are manageable when making use of Java APIs, naturally not all of them, and even less if one refuses to touch Java.

What do you mean by that and how does it affect not being invoke exec() in android 10 without making changes to SELinux?

You don't call exec(), rather the Android Java APIs, that is the whole point that they don't want to change, more Java and less C POSIX.

Sorry that doesn't make any sense. The whole point of Termux is to make GNU/Linux tools available on Android without root by compiling it for the Termux environment, to run those packages from the user directory it needs exec(). You seem to suggest that it rather be android packages, for that you don't need Termux in the first place.

It makes perfectly sense, Android OS is not GNU/Linux, the Linux syscalls never were or will ever be part of the public API.

The public API is based on Java and a couple of NDK APIs, clearly enumerated by Google as stable APIs.

They can either adapt themselves to this reality, make use of those APIs in a mingw like way, creating wrappers, or die in their faith that Android is Linux, alongside countless attempts to GNU/Linux phones.

So they can either put in a monstrous effort to end up with a worse product or not be on the Play Store. I know what I'd choose. The kind of people who want Termux are capable of downloading an APK, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

APKs are deprecated, replaced by Android App Bundles, adapt or die.

You keep saying that, but I don't see Termux dying unless Google straight up disallows fork() for all apps, even old ones.

Given that fork() isn't part of stable APIs list, it might end in seccomp list.

But there is hope, just like with mingw, termux can use the OS official APIs to launch processes.

With the governments waking up on big tech, it is very possible that you won't even have to root to have the Google Play UX with fdroid, like automatic background updates.

Used to be you had to jump through hoops to get other stores at all and now it's just a few clicks away.

The amount of work & installs you have to do for all that is laughable though.. assuming you can get a jailbroken iPhone.. the terminal app is easy to install.. small install & full on posix compliant terminal is right there w/ a more normal pkg manager to boot. I dunno shortcuts & a jailbroken iPhone is equally powerful & there’s far less tinkering involved imo. But I’m sure you’ve not used an iPhone enough to realize that.

>assuming you can get a jailbroken iPhone.

And the security tradeoffs therein.

>But I’m sure you’ve not used an iPhone enough to realize that.

Was that ad hominem necessary? I've used iOS devices regularly w/o Jailbreak since 2010 until last year. I've spent several thousand dollars personally and my business money on Apple products. My comment was purely regarding the technical nature of the OS and was not directed against any brand. I know people are religious about brands, but private businesses don't deserve such dedication and I feel it's unhealthy overall.

Having to jailbreak an iPhone is what makes the iPhone more work -- Termux is a single install and works on stock Android, and comes with a package manager

> assuming you can get a jailbroken iPhone

This is a massive assumption.

Well like I said, assuming lol. But generally speaking if I am on the terminal of iOS vs the terminal on Android I feel more confident that I can bring in whatever packages I want as it was really designed to be a full desktop class citizen underneath it all. Android in contrast is extremely locked down in other ways that simply require you to use abstraction layers to run pretty much anything.

To me it's the difference between installing a full linux OS on a chromebook vs running it in chroot (crouton) or google's new virtualized method. They both have their trade offs while running a full linux OS pretty much has 0 trade offs. That's all that I was getting at. Of course there are pros to having a more locked down model at the expense of performance or being able to run something directly on metal at times. iOS is a strange combination of either being insanely secure or not so much, but in either case the raw performance and stability is almost always there in comparison.

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