TheGrandNagus

@TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world

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TheGrandNagus,

Do they? Presumably they’d open source and upstream their firmware or at the very least provide longer software support if that were the case.

TheGrandNagus, (edited )

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.

TheGrandNagus,

It’s “open” except for the proprietary stuff Google layered on top, and that the only RCS implementation Google has allowed on Android is their own, and a couple of derivatives of their own, where they had to sign an agreement with Google.

So in actual practice, not open. Even if the standard technically is.

Right now, if you want to make an RCS app independent of Google, you’d also need to make a new OS. Or fork Android and do major work on it.

TheGrandNagus, (edited )

Relies on people actually using Signal, which is an immediate non-starter unfortunately.

Over time, the amount of signal contacts I have had went down, not up. IMO the Signal foundation has made multiple bone-headed moves that have stifled their growth and discouraged using Signal.

TheGrandNagus, (edited )

Americans on Lemmy/Reddit always say this, but it’s not easy.

WhatsApp is essentially SMS. If you don’t use WhatsApp, you’re gonna have a bad time. You won’t be contacted by friends or family, you’ll struggle to make friends or get dates, you won’t receive 2FA codes for a load of services, in some places even government stuff is done via WhatsApp.

WhatsApp is about as optional as having an email address. You basically need it unless you want to live as a hermit.

TheGrandNagus,

No, it’s not a feature, it’s a missing feature. When your backup and restore system only works sometimes, despite being set up correctly, then that’s a shit backup solution.

Also. Who the hell uses Ios?

Everybody who uses an iPhone. Which is a metric shitload of people. What kind of question is that?

TheGrandNagus, (edited )

Cool story bro, but your feelings don’t change the facts: signal’s backup system isn’t fit for purpose.

A backup system that can’t effectively back up and be restored is a flawed system.

TheGrandNagus,

Not really an opinion.

And I know you didn’t ask, I was just correcting what you wrote.

TheGrandNagus,

It is a discussion point, since it’s here being discussed. And also, apologies. I didn’t realise I was dealing with such a badass.

TheGrandNagus,

I don’t think you’re following. We were discussing the state of backups on Signal, then you suddenly decided not to talk about it, but to keep talking about nothing in particular.

TheGrandNagus,

Nobody said it wasn’t.

TheGrandNagus,

Shit, look at VAG if you want to see an extreme example.

They have the likes of Jetta (chinese-only, not to be confused with the VW Jetta car model), Skoda, Seat/Cupra, leading up to Volkswagen, then to Audi, then the likes of Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini, and finally to Bugatti and now Rimac (sort of… there’s a weird and complex ownership structure going on there).

TheGrandNagus,

Sony phones are hands down the best android phones I’ve used. The UI has for a long time been mostly stock, with nice additional touches.

Plenty of options in the settings, and almost all have a good explanation of what they do without dumbing it down too much. Giving actually helpful information to the user instead of treating them like infants.

The fact that they’ve stuck to offering 3.5mm jacks and SD slots is great, they stuck to dedicated camera shutter buttons for ages too (even with a two stage focus function when you pressed lightly). No notches. Two front facing speakers.

They’re also very dev friendly, going as far as publishing bootable AOSP builds on their GitHub.

I like how, despite them being a small player, they their code contributions to AOSP is beaten by only Google themselves. Many of the sleep/battery optimisations we’ve seen over the years were actually a Sony contribution.

There’s a lot to like about Xperias. That said, there’s also some stuff that pisses me off.

  • The naming is dreadful. What comes after the Xperia 1? Why the Xperia 1 II of course! I swear only their console division is capable of clear and sensible naming.
  • They often announce a new phone then don’t release it for another 2 months
  • They’ve fallen seriously behind in software support. This will be mitigated by EU legislation forcing longer support, but it’ll still be behind Samsung/Google.
  • They overcharge for their phones, get blasted in reviews for it, then drop prices a couple of months later, but by then the perception of the phones costing too much has already taken root - stupid!
TheGrandNagus,

Yeah, I know. But expecting smartphone users to be versed in one product range of your company’s camera division is kinda crazy

TheGrandNagus,

We’ve heard your concerns about Microsoft Teams, and we have developed a solution: clicking links in Teams will now open the webpage in Microsoft Edge, rather than your default browser. You’re welcome.

TheGrandNagus,

I’ve seen people fly into a frenzied rage over this, but I think it looks better.

I think the neon green accents is a little too much and it should instead go with the same green as the logo, though.

TheGrandNagus, (edited )

Stop comparing it by screen size. Bezels are waaay smaller now than they used to be.

I see a lot of people saying “small?! How could this be small, the screen is X inches! My phone from 2014 was only Y inches!” while completely ignoring that slim bezels mean the phone is about the same size.

Comparing the S24 to the S5 from a decade ago, the S24 has a frontal area of 10,437mm², and the S5 is 10,366mm². The newer one is marginally smaller.

You wouldn’t think that comparing screen sizes, though. You’d look at the screen size and say “Omg it’s over an inch larger, this phone must be MASSIVE!”

Granted, if you go back to like the iPhone 4 era and earlier, phones genuinely were smaller. But phone sizes haven’t really changed much at all in the past decade, yet people act like they get larger every generation.

TheGrandNagus,

They don’t have wireless earbuds anymore and haven’t for quite a while.

TheGrandNagus,

It’s so bizarre.

Sony used to have the best software support outside of the Nexus phones (at least on their flagship devices, anyway), then, despite releasing fewer models, it went down to how it is today.

Now, granted, some of that is actually other OEMs picking up the slack as opposed to Sony actually doing worse, but Sony’s software support has definitely deteriorated.

Good to see they’re sorting it out. The Xperia phones I’ve had have all been very good. I used to develop a ROM for some Sony devices and they were extremely dev-friendly too, promptly releasing kernel sources and even putting full, bootable AOSP builds on their GitHub.

TheGrandNagus,

Yeah, but it’s not like a typical Linux installation on a PC would be. You can’t just install a Flatpak application or anything like that. It doesn’t use many of the GNU core utilities that most other Linux distros use, and doesn’t use a mainline kernel.

People that ask for Linux phones know Android is Linux.

It’s just a lot more concise to say than “I want a phone with an open bootloader and hardware fully compatible with a mainline Linux kernel. I want to have a phone that can run a Phosh/Gnome Mobile/Plasma Mobile UI and on the backend work in a similar way to how desktop Linux would.”

TheGrandNagus,

Plus it looked like Web Apps were gonna become huge.

I know the words “web app” send some on Lemmy into a frenzied rage, but they’d be amazing from a platform agnostic perspective.

Imagine if the biggest barrier to entry for new smartphone OSes (app support) was gone. It’d be huge.

But seeing it as a threat to their business models (don’t get that 30% cut if it’s not through the App/Play stores), Apple and Google have had pretty shitty support for them.

If a Linux phone was out today and had good hardware and software, it’d still fail just like Windows Phone and BlackBerry OS did. WebApps would give it a strong chance though.

TheGrandNagus,

And even the kernel itself is a fork of an ancient version with shitloads of changes to it, plus a bunch of proprietary blobs.

TheGrandNagus,

I’d they need to update it and validate it anyway, there’s virtually no reason not to update it everywhere.

TheGrandNagus,

Ublock origin on Firefox works fine for me

TheGrandNagus,

Modi trying not to be an authoritarian POS challenge (IMPOSSIBLE!!)

TheGrandNagus,

If you like NewPipe, there’s also Tubular, a fork of NewPipe with sponsorblock integration.

TheGrandNagus, (edited )

You need to talk about the overall phone size, not just the screen size.

In the real world, this phone is barely bigger than a Galaxy S5, yet the screen is a full 1.3 inches larger due to the much much smaller bezels.

In 2024, that’s definitely compact. We’re not going back to iPhone 3GS dimensions.

That said, I’d still never buy a Xiaomi product, no matter how good the reviews are.

TheGrandNagus, (edited )

It’s still significantly bigger than the zenfone 10 or the iPhone

Umm… sorry for bringing facts into the discussion but…

Xiaomi 14: 153mm x 71mm (10,863mm² frontal area)

iPhone 15: 148mm x 72mm (10,656mm² frontal area)

Zenphone 10: 147mm x 68mm (9,996mm² frontal area)

It’s less than 2% larger than an iPhone, which you purport to be compact. Is 2% larger really “significantly bigger” to you?

It’s about the same as a 10 year old flagship phone. Stop looking at screen sizes and thinking “wow this phone must be HUGE!”

TheGrandNagus, (edited )

Mate come on you’re moving the goalposts now. First an iPhone is compact now it’s not? Make your mind up!

The iPhone mini is long gone and the Xperia compact series is long gone too. Nobody bought them.

And no, the 6.3" screen doesn’t make it lose meaning. If the bezels shrink and the screen grows but the phone is the same size… then the phone is the same size.

My laptop, thanks to modern slim bezels, has a 14.something inch screen in a space that traditionally would’ve had a 13 inch screen.

Is it less compact because the screen is larger? Your argument is that the laptop has grown, despite the dimensions staying the same.

TheGrandNagus,

It’s 2% larger than a phone you happily called compact.

Stop moving goalposts.

Bezels do matter. Their shrinking has allowed for large screens on phones without increasing the size. Comparing compactness of phones by their screen size rather than actual size is misguided.

TheGrandNagus,

So not a phone from 10 years ago, one from earlier.

Similar in size to a Nokia 3310 from 2000? H: 113, W: 48 therefore diagonal size is 123mm or 4.8/4.9 inches.

To me it seems like there’d be a severe usability penalty there, but if that’s what you want.

TheGrandNagus,

I’m sorry I hurt your feelings by bringing facts into this :((

TheGrandNagus,

Android isn’t about choice, that’s just something android fans touted.

Google has been giving less choice/enforcing a more closed ecosystem for a long time now.

Android was about taking market share and stamping out other phone OSes, once they achieved that Google started tightening their grip and ramping up data collection.

Data harvesting is now what Android is supposed to be about. Everything else is secondary.

TheGrandNagus,

I hate how these headlines are always phrased as “Google/Microsoft/Apple to let users XYZ”

No. They’re not the ones “letting” it happen. They aren’t the ones calling the shots here. The EU told them to do something and they were forced to comply.

Remember that companies aren’t in charge. They can be put in their place if there is widespread political will to do so.

TheGrandNagus,

Someone wants to make a small step to protect their privacy and you’re basically calling them an idiot and doubting their credentials for it.

Is it really so hard to believe that he just has different priorities than you? That he doesn’t want to trust Google with everything?

TheGrandNagus,

Also it’s an Android related community, not !privacy or !grapheneos ffs

Well firstly, this being an Android community doesn’t mean privacy is an off-limits topic.

And secondly, that’s irrelevant, seeing that he’s not the one posting here anyway.

And no, downvoting you because you mocked someone for not giving Google his address book, pretty much saying it brings his IT credentials into question, is not “toxic zealotism”.

TheGrandNagus,

Bear in mind the law isn’t for replaceable batteries in the way you describe, it just has to be easy enough for a person or a repair shop to do without too much risk of damage.

It’s unlikely we’ll see every phone having a back we can just pop off and pull the battery out.

Even then, there are exceptions. If the phone still retains 84% of battery capacity by year 3, and I think 80% by year 4, it doesn’t have to be user-servicable.

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