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Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back

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Re: Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back

#71

Post by figgis »

colordrops wrote: post #47
muks wrote: post #16

After my Samsung Galaxy S7 phone started having hardware issues, I looked to see if a phone running open source software was available, one that also could run the Android apps I currently use. I've had sucess with LineageOS 15.1 on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro (codename "whyred"). Unfortunately the phone's LTE bands don't support every country, but it works fine here in India. The phone hardware costs USD 210 and buys…

LineageOS was working great for me on my Oneplus 3T for about 6 months, but something has gone wrong with recent updates. It has started slowing down to the point of being unusable and I have to reset my phone several times a day. There have been about 6 updates since I started seeing the issue and it hasn't been addressed. I loathe going back to Oneplus's stock ROM as they modified it to kill background processes to…

Please consider generating a log file and create a bug report for them to look at:

https://wiki.lineageos.org/logcat.html

https://jira.lineageos.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa

They do look at them. But I would suggest taking a quick glance at those logs and see if you notice anything familiar. It may be something you recognize.

Re: Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back

#72

Post by propman »

Off topic, but Google is getting killed this last week. I was pretty ticked at them ignoring Senator Warner’s request the other day and I think the hearings are usually a public circus. Google is just the most powerful lobbyist in Washington. They face no repercussions for anything.

In 2016, Trump (probably his admin he didn’t know anything) wanted to appoint the most badass anti monopoly czar in America. Probably the most momentous position in recent memory in terms of the future of society. Sounds like I’m exaggerating, but free speech, monopoly, hate speech, income inequality, spying, tracking everything, face recognition, Orwellian themes, and potential usurpation of nation states in favor of data harvesting multinationals was on the line. Google used all their lobbying capital to shut it down. Threatened to nuke every bipartisan bill and every conservative judicial appointment with the congressmen in their pockets. The WSJ had a great expose about this.

In the end the one man who scared the hell out of even Google and was poised to take down uber monopolies like att&t, Disney etc. was passed over for a pushover.

Re: Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back

#73

Post by sometimesijust »

kkarakk wrote: post #23
ardy42 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> That is unsettling that they can remotely manipulate your phone without your permission. > Did you even read the post? It was a bug... They do A/B testing and experiments all the time. What's up with hackernews and going full technopanic at the smallest most benign things. It's not like someone at Google hacked into your phone and turned battery saver off. I'm sure he did read the post. For Google to perform A/B e…

obvious iphone user - google play services has full control of your phone. find your phone on android works because of this. if you don't trust google you CAN use the phone without google play services(you have to jump through some hoops like with everything privacy related)

You don't even need to uninstall it. The permission to modify system settings etc can be set to not allowed in the Google Play Services app info page. So it isn't even surprising that the service can do what it did.

Re: Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back

#74

Post by comboy »

mikejb wrote: post #58
mbrumlow wrote: post #4

This happened to me today! I was using my phone and then it went all weird with no haptic feedback when typing. I finally figured out that battery saver was on and disabled it... This really bothers me... I am starting to think we need a truly open source phone. That is hardware and software. like GNU/phone or something. We must have full control over our hardware and software! Viva La Gnu! (no clue what this actuall…

The primary issue here though isn't open source vs not, it's how updates and changes are rolled out. What you're actually looking for is a phone where you manually initiate updates, and where it's guaranteed that change in behavior (e.g. theough experiments) can only be controlled through the device and not remotely. With OS it's more likely to get that, but not guaranteed.

It won't happen, IMHO. That's because we have a whole pile of.. technologies, that are making good security nearly impossible. So if they want to avoid half of android users getting owned at the same time, they need to be able to push live updates.

Bugs are part of it too (smaller I think), everything is moving fast enough that early reporting mostly took place of extensive testing.

Re: Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back

#75

Post by scns »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #66
mbrumlow wrote: post #4

This happened to me today! I was using my phone and then it went all weird with no haptic feedback when typing. I finally figured out that battery saver was on and disabled it... This really bothers me... I am starting to think we need a truly open source phone. That is hardware and software. like GNU/phone or something. We must have full control over our hardware and software! Viva La Gnu! (no clue what this actuall…

I'd love something like the Fairphone[0] running a proper Linux distro. That would basically be my dream phone right now. (I have no experience with that phone or whether it's good, just found it mentioned recently and very curious about it in general) [0] https://shop.fairphone.com/en/buy-fairphone2-2/

It is designed to be easily repaired by yourself and there is an official LineageOS build for it.

Re: Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back

#76

Post by de_watcher »

Tharkun wrote: post #62
mbrumlow wrote: post #4

This happened to me today! I was using my phone and then it went all weird with no haptic feedback when typing. I finally figured out that battery saver was on and disabled it... This really bothers me... I am starting to think we need a truly open source phone. That is hardware and software. like GNU/phone or something. We must have full control over our hardware and software! Viva La Gnu! (no clue what this actuall…

We've had several FOSS based phones. The problem is that no one buys them, their finances dry up and the whole thing goes down the drain.

Phone developers need to have a lot of money in order to get the permission from major services to write an app to connect to those services.

That was the story of the Ubuntu Phone.

Re: Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back

#77

Post by Twisell »

okonomiyaki3000 wrote: post #53

I think Apple remotely activated battery killing mode on mine. The battery was already in bad shape but since this morning it's been ticking down like a clock. It's much worse than yesterday. Anyone else? Am I just paranoid? Seems like an odd coincidence.

This is more like an App (or a JavaScript website on safari) has gone havoc and is draining a lot of power. Look for statistics in power setting to identify a potential culprit. If nothing suspicious an it keep doing after a reboot contact apple support, they have a recall program rolling for some models.

Re: Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back

#78

Post by snorremd »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #66
mbrumlow wrote: post #4

This happened to me today! I was using my phone and then it went all weird with no haptic feedback when typing. I finally figured out that battery saver was on and disabled it... This really bothers me... I am starting to think we need a truly open source phone. That is hardware and software. like GNU/phone or something. We must have full control over our hardware and software! Viva La Gnu! (no clue what this actuall…

I'd love something like the Fairphone[0] running a proper Linux distro. That would basically be my dream phone right now. (I have no experience with that phone or whether it's good, just found it mentioned recently and very curious about it in general) [0] https://shop.fairphone.com/en/buy-fairphone2-2/

The Fairphone runs Ubuntu Touch, which is now managed under the UBPorts Foundation. https://ubports.com/ https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/

Re: Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back

#79

Post by hardwaresofton »

Tharkun wrote: post #62
mbrumlow wrote: post #4

This happened to me today! I was using my phone and then it went all weird with no haptic feedback when typing. I finally figured out that battery saver was on and disabled it... This really bothers me... I am starting to think we need a truly open source phone. That is hardware and software. like GNU/phone or something. We must have full control over our hardware and software! Viva La Gnu! (no clue what this actuall…

We've had several FOSS based phones. The problem is that no one buys them, their finances dry up and the whole thing goes down the drain.

I'm a broken record at this point, but I'll say it again until I'm convinced I'm wrong -- FirefoxOS did great but was tragically mishandled. I'm 100% a FFOS stan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_(person)#%22Stan%22_fans) but it absolutely could have (and did) work -- they just fumbled the execution and 0 executives took responsibility (as per usual).

While I appreciate Mozilla's recent exploits like the IoT Gateway (https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/), they should have put all their non-thunderbird non-firefox effort into FirefoxOS, it was a strategic bet.

Re: Google activated battery saving mode on multiple phones, then rolled it back

#80

Post by comboy »

tempestn wrote: post #46

Clicked on this expecting it to be something about making sure people's phones didn't die while they were evacuated due to hurricanes or gas explosions. Now I'm curious how the response would have differed had that had been the case.

Great point, I think the response would be very different. It's pretty clear that Google owns android phones with play store and can do as they please with them, you can install new apps using their website ffs, or erase all data on the phone using android/find.
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