Pfhortune

Also true on my 2020 RAV4 and 2025 Tacoma.

I tried a 2025 Ford Maverick for a year before I traded it for the Tacoma. All the AC/Heat/Etc controls were on the screen. Couldn't stand it. Put me off of ever considering a new Ford again.

What difference does that make, exactly? I'm fairly certain there was only one finger on that trigger...

Taking my technician test tomorrow! Wish me luck!

Not only am I pursuing this because I want long-range emergency comms in case cell networks go down (like what happened with Verizon recently), but also because I see a very notable contraction on what communication is allowed to be done on the internet, especially in the last year. Censorial regimes around the world seem to be accelerating and I don't want to be cut off from communications because I am not of an "accepted" identity.

And yes, I'm aware that states police the amateur airwaves too. But I see it more like how getting a driver's license doesn't mean I can't flee a country with my car... Learning to drive, or operate a radio, is still a valuable skill to learn and practice.

[citation needed]

I run GrapheneOS and use several US-based banking apps. I'll not name them since I don't really want my HN account associated with my financials in any way, but I've got a mix of well-known national bank apps and smaller local credit union apps working.

I'll admit there is a single institution's app I've found that doesn't work, but that is just one of several that I use.

This is why every device should be bootloader-unlockable (with legal enforcement). There's billions of old phones and IoT devices out there locked to outdated software. This has to change.

If it can't be unlocked, it can't be sold. That should be the law.

Pretty much the same setup here. Pixel 9 Pro GOS + iPhone 15 (USB-C everything!). The iPhone is a Canadian model that retains the SIM slot.

Most of my banking apps work fine on GrapheneOS, but I've adopted this because I'm confident they'll eventually break. And access to Apple Pay is nice.

Carrying two phones is annoying, but, agency over my main computing device is worth the price.

I'm making a subjective comparison here, true. But spend fifteen minutes with each company's watches and you'll see what I mean.

> Hard to say this is true when Garmin watches are far more successful than Pebble.

A company's success != UX efficacy. That's like saying Apple's products had terrible UX in 1997 because they were flailing up against their Microsoft counterparts of the same era, despite the fact that Apple's UX guidelines of the nineties are regularly raised here as a rubric for UX evaluation, even against Apple's own modern products!

> The better Garmin comparison is the Venu series which only have two buttons

I'm not sure you've ever used a Pebble, but Pebble OS is entirely button-driven with four buttons, whereas the Forerunner and Instinct have five. I've never used a Venu, but isn't it primarily touchscreen-driven?

(yes, the upcoming pebble watches do have touchscreens, but I believe that's just for use in apps and watchfaces, not navigating the system)

Exactly this. Pebbles feel like they were built from the ground up to be a watch, whereas the Apple Watch and Android Wear feel like they started from a phone and stripped things away until it became a watch.

Separately, it baffles me that Garmin, despite them having also built a watch OS from the ground up, never understood watch/limited-button UX. Their Instinct and Forerunner watches have all sorts of wonky, hidden and arcane interactions with buttons (long press this to X, press this here to Y). Pebble proves that a simple, shallow, and linear menu system works great!

This is a popular thing to say, but is an oversimplification...

Call it anec-data but all my banking apps work in GrapheneOS, and I have several installed. There is one that reduces functionality if SafetyNet fails (have to do the 2fa flow every time I restart the app, can't set as a trusted device and notifications don't work) but it still works to access my account.

That said... I haven't tried to use NFC payments and do carry around a secondary iPhone 15 as my "business phone" these days that pretty much just has payment/banking apps on it, just in case one bank or another decides to suddenly nuke their app on my main phone...

It's great to see the app open-sourced! Hopefully this can be distributed on F-Droid one day soon!

And the ability to choose app repos is also a wonderful development. Nothing against Rebble at all, but more choices and more openness is always better!

Thank you for all your work on this!

I know it's not your focus, but what's your take on the Core app frontend being closed source? I know libpebble3 is open and has the important bits, but it still feels bad to be unable to build an APK or grab that from F-Droid.

I had initially assumed it was because of some kind of dependency redistribution issue, but I think I read somewhere it was to stymie clones being developed and using the app. But that's part of an open ecosystem, no? That anyone can integrate into it?

This whole thing is presented a bit hyberbolically on both ends.

Rebble has valid concerns about the ecosystem surviving beyond Core. Their concerns about the closed-source parts of what Core has developed is valid (WRT the Core app frontend) and Eric positioning himself as a "benevolent dictator" is a reasonable red flag to raise. The next dictator (in case of acquisition) may not be so benevolent.

But while their stewardship of the app store and continuance of services is laudable, they can't really justifiably cry foul when someone "scrapes" their archive of mostly-scraped (from the original store) content.

Hopefully this teaches both sides that an open ecosystem means operating in the open. Which means making all source available not hiding vital components, and also not squawking about someone scraping the store.

Can you elaborate? I am hesitant to support a sleazy company, and am not aware of the behavior you suggest.

Amazfit is closed, Pebble is open. That's reason enough for me to avoid the former.

As enshittification encroaches on every corner of the technology ecosystem, a company putting out products in 2025 in a way that embraces its community and works in the open is laudable.

Maybe Pebble will turn evil one day, but at least the watches we have today will still work until they physically wear out, not when the company decides they should die.

> "They sold cheap" as soon as they encountered some hardship

Nobody is perfect, and running a small hardware startup is difficult. I'm not saying Eric and co are perfect, but it seems like he's been fairly forthright about the mistakes made at Pebble[1] and what Core aims to do better.

Shit happens, people make mistakes, Apple/Google decide to compete with you and/or lock you out of parts of their garden.

[1] https://ericmigi.com/blog/success-and-failure-at-pebble

They shipped hardware! They successfully open sourced a beloved platform and embraced the community ecosystem that sprung up around it. What more do you want?

At last! I really enjoyed my time with the Oculus Quest 2, but could not stomach having Meta in my house/on my network. I sold it and resolved to either wait until I could get a good deal on an Index or Valve came around with something new, and now I can look forward to VR again!

> “You know we have cameras in that town. You can’t get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing"

What a thing to say...

Attention to detail is at odds with the pursuit of infinite, quarterly growth. Why take time to get it right when you can get something out the door for your next review? The quality of which doesn't matter because it's in the past, a quarter that's already closed.

> but eventually there's always a tipping point where things go upside down chaotic and I don't feel like we are that far away from it now.

The members of the billionaire class with any foresight are making a calculated bet that they will be in control of sufficient technological measures to suppress any kind of mass uprising by the populace. Look at all the resources going to Anduril and Palantir. Foucault's boomerang is on its way back towards the US populace right now.

That said, even that cadre far overestimates what technology can do. Adaptation is a fundamental pillar of the human condition.

> and new Pixels will not be able to run non-Google-certified operating systems :)

I haven't heard about this. Source?

I think there has been much _speculation_ around this, but no proof that I am aware of.

That would be possible in a sane world, but in this world, we have DRM

Which groups? What violence?

Finally! I can play Peggle with a wheel again, as god intended!

I really have to applaud the preservers on this one. The installation method is really quite clever! I had thought these games lost forever due to DRM, but happy to get to play them again, even with the bizarre controls!

I wanted to love the Tangara... The dearth of actual buttons killed it for me. I have shelved it in favor of modding up my iPod 5 with BT + USB-C (with the moonlit.market kit).

Based on my usage of Jira over the years, I believe all the annoying parts of Jira come from _within_ the walls of Atlassian HQ...

Ah, fair enough. Showing my ignorance on that one. I know little about their tech stack and was under the impression they had some secret sauce.

It has been so tragic to see the unforced downfall of this company. Arc is such an amazing browser that really did some new and interesting things. They clearly have some phenomenal talent on the team, having managed to get their swift-centric development working on _Windows_. That's a huge and difficult undertaking!

And they threw it away to work on (probably) the CEO's new fixation and threw Arc away like an old toy. And now they're selling to Atlassian and I would bet money, will just evaporate. Nothing they ever built will mean anything to Atlassian in the long term. Nobody wants to use an Atlassian browser.

I love the idea of this. Not so much for myself; I want a system with tons of games that I can play at my leisure. But for a child or someone less savvy who wants to break free of the modern miasma of gaming towards something simpler, this would be awesome. No BS, no license checks, no choosing a Proton runtime. Just plug in a game, turn on the system, and go.

Really interested to see where this goes and wish the team the absolute best!

I know this feels useless, but if there is any hope engineers within Google will see this, please make an attempt, and try to appeal to those who give a damn about free and open computing. This move is going to continue the shift towards closed and centralized computing until everything is DRMed, from the bootloader all the way up.