Also, i am so tired of renting phones - give us the root account by default. If i would buy a new device, i will want to gain control of it.
> If i would buy a new device, i will want to gain control of it.
You should be interested in GNU/Linux phones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinephone and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5.
(see comments in another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24411568)
Such a thing implies you have to have a capable monitor and a bluetooth mice/kbd. Adoption will take significant time, but it will come either from current OSes or a newcomer. Remember how Nokia was the definition of reality and Apple came with their smartphone and turned the industry around overnight? Same thing will happen once someone introduces a true universal and responsive device that can seamlessly adapt to all kinds of use cases. It's just a question of when.
They had to can the part of it that would let you boot an Ubuntu image though, due to restrictions in Android 10.
On iOS you can’t side-load apps. You can only run native code if it has been manually approved by Apple and acquired via their special App Store. There are a handful of exceptions but they have their own limitations.
Android is at worst as closed as Windows, but not more. Some perspective is called for.
And it's always been possible if you have a developer account (and I might be wrong, because I quit mobile development to focus on cloud but I think you don't even need a paid developer account to build and load an app from source code anymore -- but I could be wrong).
Meh. Load LineageOS or GrapheneOS onto a phone without Google Apps, you won't get the same map functionality or on-device voice-to-text. But it's still android and 100% open source.
It sucks they are adding cool stuff to the GApps side, but pretending like this makes the OS as closed-source as iOS is absurd.
"If you haven't used an app in a while, you may not want it to keep accessing your data. So Android will reset permissions for your unused apps. You can always turn permissions back on."
"Give one-time permissions to apps that need your mic, camera or location. The next time the app needs access, it must ask for permission again."
I use Bouncer [1] for that. Been using it for many years.
Although it doesn't revoke permanent permission after a while of non-usage, I'd argue it'd be better to revoke the permission if the permission itself (for that specific app) hasn't been granted for a while.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston....
I think (?) most people experience Android on low-end / underpowered devices and I wonder whether with these upgrades those devices are left behind.
So, even if my vendor didn't stop releasing updates so soon, a less patient user would've tossed the phone right after Nougat was released.
(BTW, fuck you Asus, I'll never buy from you again)
In the end, users with high-end Android phones will mainly be running apps that are not designed to take full advantage of the capabilities of the device.
(Cue KaiOS eating away all the low end market.)
Fiddling with quite minor things, while breaking the ability to backup your device even more. Backup is a major black eye in the Android ecosystem for regular users.
What's missing is better media management for third party apps like WhatsApp and Telegram so important photos and videos are backed up while unimportant ones are ignored and even discarded regularly. Every single family member's phone I've had to deal with has had this issue ("why is my phone out of storage when I barely have any apps installed?!" Meanwhile, WhatsApp is storing 20GB of funny videos).
Google contacts.
, passwords,
Google app passwords.
> wifi settings,
Because you can't not use Google's app for it.
> browser settings,
Google Chrome settings.
> photos,
Google photos.
> etc.
(As long as it's in a Google app.)
> it's astonishing how quickly you can set up a new phone by simply logging into your Google account.
After ten years or so of using Android I finally bit the bullet and enabled Google backups to transfer stuff to my new phone a few months back, and I was astonished at how fucking nothing gets backed up that isn't already in a Google cloud synced app. What's the point? Every single other app I had to manually figure out how to transfer and restore, because all Google doing is to "helpfully" prevent me from backing up my data for "security" reasons.
The big problem is game data backup. The market has bluntly rejected Google's opt in system, and something needs to be done.
Users care far more about the stuff that isn't backed up in Android, not the stuff that is. And far too much backup is hidden behind opt-ins that regular users just skip during backup. It needs to be on by default and opt out.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
Option two: all these features encourage people to rely on their phone to manage their notifications/conversations instead of keeping their distractions at a minimum - humanly manageable level.
"you can pin conversations so they always appear on top of other apps and screens. Bubbles keep the conversation going—while you stay focused on whatever else you’re doing. Access the chat anytime or anywhere." — Yo dawg, I heard you like distractions...
It's not a critique on Android 11 per se. Just a general aimless rant about the direction we're going with our technological lives.
But I know enough from a decade of using Android to see all kinds of segments of the interface that have their own special context behaviors and features, with new menu layers and questions and assumptions that I will need to train myself to figure out.
I don't know if that means Samsung doesn't get to decide when you get updates or if it means "we're delaying security updates from being pushed to AOSP so you better have Google Services installed if you want your vulnerabilities patched in a timely fashion"
Just as Project Treble separated out the low level device drivers (CPU, modem, camera, etc.) provided by the hardware manufacturers from the OS itself and allowed for monthly Security Updates that didn't require an entire OS update, Project Mainline is separating out almost everything in user space from the lower level parts of the OS so that the former can be updated directly from Google Play rather than from that monthly Security Update.
If you go to Settings->Security, you'll see both "Security update" and "Google Play system update" as two separate entries and corresponding dates, reflecting that.
Edited to add: Project mainline was originally released in Android 10 and there were 8 modules that could be updated via Google Play, Android 11 expanded that by adding 12 more modules for a total of 20.
which was already the case since ... android 8?
so i'm very confused
Does it get more oxymoronic than this?
Previously, if an app like FB wanted a bubble, they'd draw a screen overlay via `WindowManager`. That's the same API often misused to draw invisible layouts over your banking app. Providing a purpose built bubbles API lets Android close the door on the riskier API.
1) Now, if you do like bubbles - At least it's all in one bubble rather than multiple apps doing their own thing.
2) If you don't like bubbles - you can disable them all at once.
I've looked at their source, looks to be a <div> which upon scroll updates the --root-vars (whcih is then used for the transform/scale css ruules)
--component-position: 0px;
--shape-position: 714px;
--image-height: 712px;
--offset-image-wrapper: 1248px;
--offset-middle-image-value: 219.667;
--scroll-position: 530px;
--opacity-value: 0.507736;
{'small': {'easeShape': 0.005}, 'medium': {'easeShape': 0.002}}
I'm just curious if there's any libraries which handle all the breakpoints,animations, style updates without needing to reinvite. For something so face-value trivial, the Google implementation sure has a lot of edge cases I can see they handle in their "setAnimations_" code.
Also important: Record with sound from your mic, your device or both.