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Android 10

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Re: Android 10

#281
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got ten year olds who love texting their relatives, and I'm not willing to send my kids into the Facebook meatgrinder yet.

You can be signed up for Messenger without being signed up for Facebook, I think. (Or, at least, you can deactivate a Facebook account and still use Messenger.)

Sure, but that's still Facebook.

I don't want Facebook having any level of access to under-13 minors' devices.

Re: Android 10

#282

Can they PLEASE get Android Auto to work over bluetooth? I want to wirelessly charge in my car and wirelessly navigate too.

AA will never work over Bluetooth because BT isn't a technology capable of reliably streaming a video stream AA requires.

There is a wifi version though, but due to regulation and unreliable drivers, it's not widely deployed.

Re: Android 10

#283

Interesting. Some of these improvements are great, others are more of a mixed bag. To point out some of the latter: > heif support A shame they didn't put their weight behind avif for this one. Maybe there are some "lobbies" at play? > Live caption I love it for accessibility. I loathe it for privacy. Local, self-hosted, or bust. Same for Live Transcribe. Awesome and scary. > Family link It was about time google shar…

> Live caption

>I love it for accessibility. I loathe it for privacy. Local, self-hosted, or bust. Same for Live Transcribe. Awesome and scary.

Uhhmm... Live Caption is running on-device speech recognition model. So it's local only.

>Smart Reply

>Some commenters here wrote that this was done locally. I would like some source on this (is training also done locally? Nothing is sent back?). If so, this might be interesting. Otherwise, that's plain scary.

No, the model is built ahead of time from other sources then downloaded and applied locally. Data isn't sent anywhere.

>Everyday Android strays further from the GPL. The way forward should be to help manufacturers play nice (use a few persons full-time for support, promote "mainline" devices to the public as the ones that will always receive updates). I haven't looked into the details, but this sounds like furthering their "trebble" HAL to run (and update) closed-source blobs on an outdated kernel (but who cares, right? because they put less and less stuff in the GPL'ed kernel).

It didn't work for last 15 years, why do you think it'll suddenly start working now?

Re: Android 10

#284

The way they show and demonstrate gestures, along with the UI at the bottom, strongly suggests that they intend to eliminate the semi-"hard" buttons in favor of gestures. That would save space, give people a bit more control over fullscreen apps, and provide a less "modal" UI where the same gestures always work even if the buttons aren't available (such as when playing fullscreen video). Also, "Get security updates f…

> The way they show and demonstrate gestures, along with the UI at the bottom, strongly suggests that they intend to eliminate the semi-"hard" buttons in favor of gestures. Yes, that's the case. When you're using gesture navigation the only visible UI left is the horizontal bar at them bottom. Apps adjusted for gesture navigation will also draw behind that line. Gesture navigation is still an option which might not b…

Their own charts/graphs on that page show that the new approach is WORSE (by their own metrics) than the 3 soft buttons.

I hope there remain ways to hack the buttons back (in 9.x there was):

  #install a 3rd party launcher (nova)
  pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.google.android.apps.nexuslauncher
  settings put secure gesture_swipe_up 0
  settings put secure system_navigation_keys_enabled 1
  reboot

Re: Android 10

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how 'swipe from the left' can be used as a universal back gesture. Isn't it the case that most apps use that gesture already to open a menu? Then again I still miss having physical back and home buttons since I upgraded to a newer android phone. It would be nice if manufactures added more buttons to the side of the phone so the other fingers have something to do.

> I don't understand how 'swipe from the left' can be used as a universal back gesture. Isn't it the case that most apps use that gesture already to open a menu? That's also discussed in the blog post I linked. tl;dr: Only a small subset of users (3-7%) uses a swipe gesture to open these menus (all others use the hamburger menu) and these users have to adapt now to do different kinds of swipes for opening the menu an…

Android has 1.3 BILLION users. 3-7% is tens of millions of users

Re: Android 10

#286

I recently bought a Nokia 2.2, which in in the Android One program. Two main reasons: a removable battery and OS updates for two years and security for 3. At this point, there's very little difference between the hardware of flagships and commodity, especially considering the real-world use of smartphones. I mean, is anyone compiling programs on these things or doing anything particularly intensive? Not really. So gi…

I wouldn't mind the lower power that much, but camera is one of my main use cases for phone. Pixel is just so damn good at taking pictures. The cheap phones do have considerably worse cameras, no way around that.

The Pixel 1 XL has a good camera and you can buy a used one for under $200.

Re: Android 10

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram is the best compromise imo

Please stop advocating for Telegram: https://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-stop-using-telegram-right... https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/987372998935105539 Signal is definitely the more secure choice, but Whatsapp is still king of the network effect at least in my neck of the woods.

Signal requires a phone number as well as Telegram.

Re: Android 10

#288
> So, if a friend asks you out to dinner, your phone will suggest you text "". Then, it’ll also pull up directions right in Google Maps.

"Smart reply" sounds like a privacy nightmare. Now just opening a text causes unsolicited connections to made to Google's servers and other websites containing the contents of your messages. I hope this is something you can easily disable.

Re: Android 10

#289
post #76
post #5

> Android’s new Dark theme uses true black to keep your battery alive longer. None of the screenshots around the caption seem to use "true black", though!

I wonder if any of the Google apps will support a dark mode. Maps / Gmail are harder to use with all of the white

Neither Maps or Gmail is using Dark Mode for me on the Pixel I updated this morning. Hopefully it'll be added in an update.

Re: Android 10

#290

I recently bought a Nokia 2.2, which in in the Android One program. Two main reasons: a removable battery and OS updates for two years and security for 3. At this point, there's very little difference between the hardware of flagships and commodity, especially considering the real-world use of smartphones. I mean, is anyone compiling programs on these things or doing anything particularly intensive? Not really. So gi…

I bought a Nokia 3.1 as a lower end test device, which also belongs to the Android One program. The device is so slow to respond to input in every way that it's become the device I use to test our apps absolute worst case performance on. Even knowing it was meant to be a lower end device it routinely gets frustrating to use for even the most simple tasks, such as Chrome tab switching, keyboard response and even just…

> We have had similar, but not as bad, reactions to other low end device we use for testing

Let me guess -- Nexus 5X? I use one as my primary phone, and the slowness is noticeable but usually tolerable.

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