15 Years of Android Memories
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2023: pushed out Android 14 update, removing access to any additional profiles used on the devices. TBF they still have time to deal with this one, but their response so far has been terrible.
And yet I still buy the damn things because there's no suitable alternative for me (ios doesn't have fdroid, netguard, non safari browsers etc.).
Also you still can’t call emergency services due to some other bug?
One year they forgot December existed in the Contacts app.
Also wasn’t their permission model terrible from the start vs. iOS’ fine grained prompts?
SMS messages stop getting received suddenly at least once a quarter usually when I'm in the middle of fucking nowhere and need to so a 2FA bounce requiring a reboot.
And that time it destroyed the filesystem on an SD card resulting in the loss of two weeks of irreplaceable holiday photos in Australia.
Travel advice for Android users:
1. Take a DSLR/mirrorless and use that. Or upload all your shit to OneDrive or something at every available WiFi hotspot.
2. Use actual debit/credit cards rather than rely on Google Pay.
3. Write down all your bank details and credentials on paper using a simple cipher (shift left/right a few digits / alternate).
Still I'd rather travel with an Android device because I'm less likely to get beaten over the head and getting it stolen because it's 3 months' salary where I am travelling.
0. This may be an unimaginably reckless contribution to techno-totalitarianism, but just get an old iPhone. They just work.
I bet something that looks like iPhone 5/5S/6 in 2023 isn’t that attractive to steal, even compared to modern Android phones.
But if we stay on the subject of travelling, I would definitely took _at least_ two phones, an iPhone for stability and an Android for functionality.
As for the iPhone, they mostly just work yes. For a price. Even the old ones are overpriced.
That was on Microsoft – not Google, though.
>Also you still can’t call emergency services due to some other bug?
FUD.
>Also wasn’t their permission model terrible from the start vs. iOS’ fine grained prompts?
If you want someone to tell you (read: decide for you and leave zero room for choice) what permissions are Good and which are Bad, then yes, iOS is much better. If you want to decide which permissions are Good and Bad, then no, Androids are much better.
Okay, I've decided that arbitrary network access is bad; how do I remove it from most applications on my Android phone?
Now as a MS customer it would not surprise me. But data makes arguments.
There's Android 4.4's FUSE migration which setup a generation of Android devices to just randomly turn to crap over time, the iOS-ification of the OS by blocking things like log access behind non-standard permissions, there was Doze marking the official start to "important things can live in closed source Google Play Services", there's the death of the AOSP apps so now there's not even a maintained calculator app for Android proper, there's SAF bungled launch with 11 that made I/O for apps 10x slower (not sure they ever even fixed that)
I owe a lot to Android in some ways, my early career was putting together embedded Android deployments, and eventually I even lead a team that launched an Android based consumer product, but my phone is an iPhone, and that's not changing any time soon for a reason.
I’m still on Android 8, with my Nexus 6P that happened to be lucky and have no bootloops. Curiously, it still covers everything I need, has a quick charge, nice stereo speakers, and is updated with everything (all the apps, including built-ins), but the OS. Even the camera is great for my use case. A have an old Pixel camera mod, back from those early days.
I want to upgrade to a Pixel, but I have nothing else to do with my Nexus, so I try to keep it as much as I can.
Complete loss of data. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/android-14s-ransomwa...
Back up your data while you can.
(And yup, I'm using work profiles and all that.)
Or avoid rebooting somehow (if it's not automatic) in the hope they somehow fix it...
But I agree, I had a Pixel 6 briefly when my S23 was in repair for a week and it was an incredibly buggy experience in comparison, although it was quite pretty.
Tim Cook: No, we have non Safari browser at home.
[Non Safari browser at home: WebKit logo wearing a wig]
I usually compare my situation with my iOS colleagues. When I find a bug or documentation issue in a Google library that is still maintained properly, after creating a bug on their issue tracker, you usually get a real person to properly analyze your issue within 1 month, maybe it's even fixed in that timeframe if you are lucky.
Sometimes you think a library is maintained and officially it is so, but they say development has stopped because of other priorities. Or "basic" features take years to be implemented. If you know the right person on Twitter you might be able to get it moving internally.
My iOS colleagues can submit private bug reports but chances are super low someone is ever looking at it. There's no community around it, it seems.
I don’t understand why Apple has chronically been so terrible towards developers. They need them!
Yet if you try to do computing on Android, you hit a wall: file access is absymal from a user point of view (virtual folders ?). Text editors are terrible. The only thing existing are some BASIC interpreters, terrible to use.
Combine this with the unaccessible GUI (small scroll bars, widgets too big or too small) and everything tells you to go away and never look back.
Android is a computing device, in the same way your microwave is a computing device.
Also, if you call that GUI inaccessible, you write from a place of privilege: mobile platforms absolutely beat the shit out of any desktop computer on accessibility count, hands down, any people with some kind of disability will tell you as much.
There are negatives, but also, all around mobile OSs are a newer generation of OSs, that fixes many problems of their forefathers. To not call them computing devices is just unreasonable.
Either you are using it wrong (su) or you are describing the exact same behaviour as Windows and MAC. Is it perfect? No. Is it worse than any other mainstream product? No.
>Also, if you call that GUI inaccessible, you write from a place of privilege: mobile platforms absolutely beat the shit out of any desktop computer on accessibility count, hands down, any people with some kind of disability will tell you as much.
Really? A thread on HN a few weeks (months?) back about this did absolutely not show any such consensus. Many loved Apple products for accessibility, but even more commented that Windows was by far the best product available, far ahead of Mac and iPhones.
That's why everyone is pushing for development in containers..
Back when I cared, I would root my phone and install custom roms and had basically a fully functioning Linux environment. iptables worked and I would block network access to certain apps.
It's been a long time since I used to mess around with this stuff, but file access was fine. I'm not sure what the case is now, but it was possible to access pretty much all the files on the phone. Apps had their own folders mounted in /data/ and you could mess around with their files easily.
Android is much more of a computing device than a microwave or an iOS device.
It is quite unfortunate that they’re no longer publicly accessible :(
One example is Verizon's Droid campaign, which was so successful that "Droid" became a genericized trademark for any Android phone for a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Droid