I’ve worked in the industry for the last 11 years, and my experience is that the industry has changed dramatically.
In 2012, there were still huge niches in smartphone software that has not yet been filled. There were also almost no barriers to entry - a team of <10 people rapidly expanding didn’t have to think about Cookie Banners or Google Play store delisting. Finally, there was the promise of a huge payout - the win condition for a startup was to BE the next Google.
In 2023, dominant players have captured all aspects of the software experience and when a new idea becomes popular (Snapchat in 2016 is a good early example), big tech has the lawyers and developers to simply clone it with a higher budget (e.g. Insta & FB Stories, Youtube Shorts). Because of scale, big companies can more easily afford to deal with regulation and can even sometimes regulate their competitors (Play Store). Finally, big tech is guaranteed high payout for developers - these days, the win condition for a startup isn’t to BE the next Google, its to be acquired by Google.
The eventual end of all this is Google continuing to strangle open & free Android by buying/shutting down any new ideas and extracting more and more rent from its platform.
The only way to opt out is to move to non-Play AOSP alternatives.
Do you have any non-Play AOSP suggestions that run on less popular devices? Everytime I hear about a newandroid distro it'sostly for Nexus phones and a few other popular phones. I have e. g. a Wiko Power U30 thats okay (and mostly cheap) that I would love to use with something better.
You don’t. But, people do complain about the weight and thickness. Personally, larger batteries(above 5000mah) which also charge super fast(120w) is the way to go.
No one complaint about the thickness and if you were to put a ratio on it, I’d say for every twenty people who I hear complain about battery life, one complains about weight.
That’s being generous. I’ve never (unless you count this one) had a conversation with anyone who has complained about a phone weighing too much.
Batteries lose a minute amount of capacity each charge cycle, and a bit just from “time”. If they put a battery in your phone that could start off lasting two days of pretty heavy use, then the charge cycles would reduce (less battery wear) and the usable life (even at half capacity it would still last an entire day) would significantly grow. So the real reason Apple or Samsung doesn’t give you a big battery is because the planned obsolescence would go from a few years to like five years, and they want to sell you more phones than that.
Look! The strawman stopped arguing their point, did not concede their point, and instead started making up all new arguments about things completely unrelated to the original complaint.
Next they’ll start trying to argue that it’s actually totally relevant to the original point. Lol
Google removed “Ok Google with the screen off” (made the toggle disappear, replaced with the option to allow its use in apps) on my Moto Z Play via Play Services updates and later advertised it as a Pixel-exclusive feature. (this was when the Pixel 1 was new)
Their support threads were ended curtly with statements of the phone not supporting the feature which I guess was technically true now that they changed it. (but no, the hardware always supported hotwords)
Never got that feature back and I bailed. For the ups and downs, I’m glad Apple doesn’t do that, instead omitting or handicapping new features for older devices. Of course not the best but yeesh, at least I don’t have to worry about “Hey Siri” being pulled to promote the iPhone 20 yet…
that’s generally how computers work though? Updated OS is more resource intensive and require upgrades after some time. My current iphone launched like 6 years ago and is running fine - yes there have been generation bumps that were rough for iPhone but is it supposed to last 10-15 years?
I have a deep hatred for companies that used to create responsive software pivoting info feature bloat over time. Discord used to be blazing fast. It proved that you could design software based on chromium without it being slow and unresponsive.
What happened? It’s just as crappy as everything else nowadays. Every new feature that gets added reduces performance by less than 1% so nobody gives a shit?
Same for apple. They don’t care that all those cool iOS additions keep making the phone slower. But I do and that’s why I prefer custom OS. Nobody will decide that this feature is worth x amount of memory/battery/whatever but me.
that’s generally how computers work though? Updated OS is more resource intensive and require upgrades
That’s not how computers work unless you have an OS that intentionally creates that situation. Devices with Linux on them don’t get any slower over the years. Sometimes an old device even gets faster with OS updates because the OS isn’t being written by a corporation intent on driving you to new purchases incessantly.
I agree with you,I use FOSS software and old hardware all the time. I should have specified better but my point is that this is something that generally happens in the consumer electronics world. it doesn’t make sense as a dig against Apple in this context (comparing with competitors), given that iPhones don’t have a particularly short life cycle against competitors
I feel like that’s just a longer way of saying “they all do it, so why bother mentioning it”, which is a lot more defeatist than I think we ought to be. Pointing out anti-consumer behavior is worthwhile for more than merely a simple dig.
Honestly I’d disagree. Past the iPhone 4S, my iPhone 8 was fine through it’s life before being replaced with a 13 mini a year or two ago when it suffered a naked gravitational incident at my hands. My parent’s generally had hand-me-downs or used models and dad’s 6s is still kicking and performing alright and even got a security patch a month ago.
They had that battery snafu which I will absolutely fault their lack of transparency for (good ol’ hide-the-workings-from-customers Apple) but I did encounter the issue it sought to trade performance for preventing in the past. (a worn battery causing random reboots on my 6s)
Now my BlackBerry Priv? I miss that phone but I did not miss it’s combination of slowing down with age plus updates running out at 6.0.1. Worst of both worlds but I miss sliders and Blackberry’s additions. (not the size though)
Similar in age (2015 models) but I doubt dad would be as tolerant of how it performed even a few years ago.
No combined notification+ringer volume control? No non-dismissable notifications?
both of those can be seen as a plus for some people, also you always can change the launcher to one without bottom search bar, did people forgot how to customize their android?
Sadly yes. It's especially evident to me whenever LineageOS is mentioned as THE way to install a non-standard OS. Not that long ago there were dozens of options for each device and Cyanogenmod (the grandpa of LineageOS) was just one of them, albeit a quite large one.
yeah, but i’m talking about such minor things like using non stock launcher, custom keyboard etc., anyway custom roms are harder now, OEMs make unlocking bootloader harder, also developing is harder itself with non snapdragon SoCs
Yeah, unfortunately been a thing since the gesture navigation was implemented. Somewhat recently I’ve gone back to the three button navigation so I could use Nova but I’m using Pie navigation so I can have the swiping to go back and also gives me some customisability to do some additional actions while swiping.
There used to be an extra switch for linked or unlinked notification+ringer volume. You could use whatever work for you. Now they force you to use separate, which I believe is worse in every way.
Yeah, you can change the launcher, but unfortunately no Android 14 launcher supports smooth gesture navigation or Quickswitch module.
It is an open standard. The end-to-end encryption is not an open standard, nor are the stickers, those are both proprietary to Google Messages but the rest is open.
I’m as excited by cellphones as I’m excited by underwear at the supermarket: I need it, it needs to fit me, but I’d rather do something more interesting than shopping for new underwear. And just like underwear, no amount of gimmicks makes them more exciting: at the end of the day, it’s just a locked down computer loaded with spyware that you need to live a normal life.
FairPhone 4 running CalyxOS. It’s not cheap but the repairability factor is important for me, it runs a deGoogled OS which is even more important, and I stocked up on spare parts to make it last as long as possible.
As long as it serves me, it’s the most exciting phone I can think of and I already own it :)
Thanks! I’m actually thinking about getting a Fairphone and a dedicated point and shoot compact camera to take pictures. Camera seems to be the main marketing factor nowadays, so cutting that would allow me to use older devices without missing out.
This is exactly where I am. 15, maybe even 10, years ago I was excited by phone releases that had significant upgrades. This is no longer the case. Screen size ratios have maxed out, cameras are far better than anything I need them for, most flagships have (or have the option of) adequate storage.
Gimmicks like the foldable don’t really excite me. I find them interesting, and could see myself owning one in the future if they become commonplace and affordable. But they’re really not that interesting.
Ultimately, I use my phone primarily for messaging, emails, listening to music/podcasts/audiobooks and browsing the internet. Nothing on the Horizon is going to significantly improve those experiences for me.
I previously had a OnePlus 7 Pro and ran that until the Pixel 7 came out, as my battery life had significantly degraded. I don’t see myself upgrading from this phone for several years at least.
The only thing that would change that, as far as I can predict, would be some startling innovation to battery technology that allows me multi-day battery life.
Edit: I would also jump ship onto a Linux based phone if that were to pick up and become a serious contender.
Small phones are great but unfortunately we have become a niche. For companies to make products for a niche, they will have to charge them a high price or push them to different products.
The only small android phone I would consider is the Asus zen phone. And even that is +£700.
The problem is not that they are expensive. The problem is that even though they are expensive, they are still lacking basic features! Why can’t the s24 have 45w or the pixel 8 have thermometer sensor or the video boost thing? Like, no reason at all
Exactly, artificially limit the phone touch you to bigger phones.
Mind you, once you have many phones sharing the same hardware(for example the same 6.7inch screen), it becomes a question of adding or removing features (fast charging, AI, etc).
It makes commercial for companies to standardise on as many parts as possible.
On a nice technical level, heat and space. On a sales level, upselling. Larger phones dissipate more heat. Heat is bad for computers/phones. A 45w quick charge (which is dumb to use, fyi. Fast charging degrades batteries faster) has a larger amount of circuitry in the phone that takes up space to regulate and monitor the charge.
Beyond that, there’s a nice little formula used for how fast you can safely charge a lithium battery, and that formula directly ties into battery size. Essentially, for every 1000 mah worth of battery, the battery pack can handle about a 1 amp per hour charge (roughly). So the bigger the battery, the higher the wattage and amperage you can somewhat safely go. This is the main reason the s24 won’t have 45w fast charging. It has a 4,000mah battery. It’s too small a battery to even use the 45w fast charge without degrading the battery too fast. The s24plus has a 4,900 mah battery. That’s big enough to handle a 45w charge (though again, if you want your battery to last as long as possible, you want to disable it in settings.).
Now aside from just up selling, smaller phone= smaller parts needed. Your thermometer needs the hardware inside to support it and that has to go on the main board. Your smaller phone has less open space to fit it on there.
Then things like video boost while may be just an upsell, could also be because recording very high quality video is an intensive task on your phone so it causes more heat and drains your already smaller battery faster, which generates heat as well, and your smaller phones can’t get rid of that heat as quickly.
Next, I had seen you mention 1440 screens. That means across the whole screen there would be something like 2,960 pixels/dots of light in one direction and 1440 in the other. The more dots, the more resources (processor use etc) you need to power them, so your battery drains faster and phone heats up more. But the smaller the entire screen is, the less dots you need to make it look the same to you from the one or two feet away from your face you hold your phone. Smaller screens don’t really need a 2960 x 1440 screen. You can’t tell much of a difference on a screen that size and it would just make the batt drain faster for almost no reason. I have a large screened Note 20 Ultra that has a 1440 screen and I don’t even use it. I turned it down to 1080 because even on my larger phone the viewing quality wasn’t enough of an improvement to trade off from how long my battery would last on a charge.
Ram is mostly a money grab, but each ram chip does also use more battery as well.
In summary, for some things it’s a money grab, for others, there’s good reason it’s that way. But it’s also become a niche market for people who want the high end stuff in a smaller phone. You’re a minority. Cramming all the things in a smaller space is harder and therefor more expensive. There just aren’t enough people who are willing to pay a premium price to get the highest end phones that want a small phone, so no one makes them. There isn’t enough money in it. I believe you said in here you wanted to buy a phone for around $750, while top end phones are double that price, so not even you are willing to pay $1500 to get a 6" phone with all the best stuff packed inside.
I can accept the faster charging thing, that makes sense. They could have a bit bigger charging though, like 30w. Anyway. I suppose you don’t know about pixel 8 pros video boost. It’s really annoying cause it actually happens on the cloud. It’s not on device processing. Plus what about uwb? Or bigger storage? Anyway, they should at least be cheaper
Just read up on video boost. So a 1080p video gets upscaled and tweaked cloud side. What a gimmick. Looks like the exchange of paying more or an 8 pro is what gets you the server compute time for your video editing.
As I said, there aren’t enough people interested in paying more for a small phone to warrant a manufacturing run for bigger storage. They don’t think the amount they sell would be worth the fab costs or logistics.
Google wants you to handle all your storage needs through Drive and Google Photos, where they are in control, can scrape more data, train models on your photos, and push you onto paid storage plans.
I can’t really see the benefit to Google in having an excellent local file manager with wide archive-file support. It doesn’t profit them in any way that I can think of.
Thankfully the workaround isn’t too bad, just installing an alternative file manager.
Do you have access to a computer with an sd card reader? I believe the best and safest thing to do is to connect it to a computer, create disk image from it and try ro use a data recovery tool in the image file.
Edit: if you only have the phone, maybe you could try looking for apps to copy a disk image from the sd card and to recover data or try using some terminal emulator or one of those apps that install a linux distro inside android to use the dd command and then use testdisk and photorec tools. I recommend the second option, because the tools are open sourc and well tested
Definitely this. The data is not likely gone, but before doing anything that could make things worse, try and get a full copy of the SD card somewhere. From there you may safely try repairing the partition or data carving tools.
syncthing is an extremely valuable piece of software in my eyes, yeah. i’ve been using a single synced folder as my google drive replacement and it works nearly flawlessly. i have a separate system for off-site backups, but as a first line of defense it’s quite good.
Yeah they were probably the last great small Android phones. The “small” phones of today like the Zenfone and base Galaxy S series are noticeably larger.
EDIT: Just want to add that both the XZ1 Compact and the XZ2 Compact are still being maintained. The XZ1 Compact supports both iodéOS and LineageOS for microG, while the XZ2 Compact is an official LineageOS device. Obviously not a perfect solution for everyone but they are still viable if size is a key issue for you.
I prefer Kbin. It has the latest features (magazine collections, an aggregate view that combines threads and microblog posts, more options, etc.) , and I really like the developer @ernest. Aside from just being cool, he posts frequent updates over on @kbinDevlog.
Something worth noting is that Kbin doesn't have many instances. Kbin.social is the main one, and the only other decently up-to-date one I know of is kbin.earth, run by the creator of the Interstellar app for Kbin. On the other hand, Mbin has more instances, as most established Kbin instances switched to it at the time it was created (during which Kbin development had been inactive for about a month). Also, Mbin has a more community-oriented development system tmk, whereas Kbin development is closely managed by Ernest.
Hey cool I'm replying to myself via my brand new kbin account! Your comment about having an All Content option combining maga and micros made up my mind for me!
Welcome! Yeah, the All Content view is great — probably my favorite feature added in the past few months. I have my home page set to Subscriptions (All Content), and it's the best. I see threads from my favorite magazines and microblog posts on tech & fediverse stuff.
Image uploading on microblog posts should be fine. Right now, Kbin's image uploading UI doesn't actually give any visual feedback when you click the upload file button, but it does upload.
In general, Kbin (and by extension Mbin) is quite early in its development, so you'll run into a good few bugs and odd UI issues. They should be resolved in the near future, and as I mentioned earlier, you can go to /m/kbinDevlog to follow progress.
Kbin.social has just had some big issues recently and still hasn't fully recovered (which is why development is currently stalled), so it's absolutely possible you'll run into more issues currently than usual. Not sure if what you're experiencing there is part of that though.
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568 Since you seem to be much more acquainted with the ins and outs of Kbin, can you tell me if there is any way to see the pictures contained in the posts in their full size from the get go or a single click? I click the thumbnail to get to the post, and then have to click it again because the picture in the post is the exact same size as the thumbnail. I know it's not a huge problem, but even having a peek feature like reddit does would go a long way.
The image icon in the bottom left corner of image posts can be clicked, showing the image at a larger size (i.e., what you'd get if you were to enable "Auto Media Preview" in the sidebar). There are a couple of userstyles that make this more button-like, such as kleanbin and (my own userstyle) idkbin.
kbin.burggit.moe
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