181–190 of 245 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unless you live outside of the US [...] and they all use WhatsApp This is such a ridiculously incorrect over-generalisation. China, Japan & Russia are obvious counter-examples, plus many others.
In China WeChat is the dominant messaging platform, SMS is only used for delivery notifications, spam, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I play videogames and I can tell the difference between 60 and 120herz screen. Always amused me that a so called premium device had worse hardware than a flagship killer. Apple apparently finally caught up with their latest phone?
Almost anyone can tell the difference between 60 and 120 Hz. Seriously, if you haven't upgraded your desktop PC to a higher refresh rate screen yet: It's the biggest "feels like a new computer!" upgrade since we swapped HDDs for SSDs and the days when your new CPU was 2.5x as fast as the old one. There is no turning back after having experienced the buttery smoothness, and the impact is IMHO higher during regular usa…
It's an impactful and noticeable upgrade in addition to everything else being awesome, but for me it doesn't come close to being the the most important. If all else was equal or better, and I had to pick between 6k resolution or high refresh rate, I'd have a hard time picking refresh rate, but I'd prefer both.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In China WeChat is the dominant messaging platform, SMS is only used for delivery notifications, spam, etc.
I understand that. My point was that the original comment was grossly overstating the supposed 'dominance' of WhatsApp.
Android was really cool for the first couple years, but now it's optimized for brand presence and ad delivery. Every Android device I've purchased for the last 10 years there's been a common expectation of the manufacturer trying to totally capture, record, sell, and leverage my digital experience in ways you never wanted. The only escape was LineageOS, and the technical barrier was plenty hard to make it work just r…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are completely different. One of them lets you have the sexy blue text boxes in iPhone group chats, and the other makes everyone see you with the green box of shame.
Unless you live outside of the US in which nobody gives a damn and they all use WhatsApp. After moving, I only get sms messages from the doctors office and my friends back in America.
They've got a billion-strong userbase and yet the Android app still dumped literally every attachment I received into my camera roll until I manually added '.nomedia' files in the right places.
And, oh man, the API for businesses is a Kafkaesque nightmare. Maybe it was good before it got Zucked, but I had to fight with their support for over a week to get an automated ban-hammer overturned... only for it to get auto-banned again two days later. We hadn't even deployed the damn thing yet!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand that. My point was that the original comment was grossly overstating the supposed 'dominance' of WhatsApp.
The real point of the original comment was that outside the US iMessage is not dominant and so nobody cares about what color a chat bubble is.
Why I think I (over) reacted is that it was, to me, an example of only partial escape from US American insularity. They understood that ppl outside the USA don't use SMS much, but only suggested a US American messaging platform as what was used instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So one of the giants will build their version of microg and it will be like with wine, proton and steam os.
Except that attestation (Play Integrity) exists, and its usage by the apps on the Play Store seems to be increasing exponentially (if I'm not mistaken it only takes enabling a switch now to have it in your app).
GrapheneOS actually explicitly pushes for services to switch away from Play Integrity API or SafetyNet API towards the Android Attestation API for that reason.
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
And notably, long term if Google becomes an unreliable maintainer for Android, the other major Android providers are likely to coordinate a list of "approved signing keys" so that apps can use those with the standard Android HW Attestation API.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not true at all. This effect is pretty common in countries outside of US. It makes sense. WhatsApp is just another messaging app thats popular depending on a local whim. Where as iMessages get sent automatically between iOS users.
I'm sure there are dozens of people in Germany who actively prefer iMessage but I haven't met one yet. Whatsapp achieved pretty much total market capture here back when SMS still were costly and the network effects that arose from that are among the strongest I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure if someone was to do a survey, almost everyone would say Messages is for SMS only and I think most of them wouldn't know it can…
WhatsApp seems only to be used by the elderly/old in my circle of friends lately.
The transition has been gradual; started during the pandemic, I'd say.
I hope they make it closed source and make us much money out of it as possible for shareholders that is their job and their duty, why are they giving this away for free they have already captured market share by claiming opensource and building a community now all they have to do is make it proprietary and the old opensource version slowly wither and become unstable, then they can charge money for the operating syste…
As much as I - a Pixel 7 (GrapheneOS) user - would hate that, doing so would essentially put Android on equal footing as iOS and would give me a serious reason to consider switching to an iPhone. Apple's hardware is just so much sleeker, faster, and better than Google's mediocre Pixel line.
No it wouldn't. Google as an org is bad at product and the fact AOSP exists is not why.
I've built AOSP based products multiple times over the years, and closed source Google Play Services has spent years picking off ever increasing swaths of the user-facing functionality covered by AOSP. I mean the writing was on the wall with Doze, but we don't even have a calculator anymore last I checked.
Google just can't make good products like Apple can.
Apple's worst products come from moments where they act like Google (becoming developer driven with weak top down direction), and vice versa. Fortunately for iOS users, neither org defaults to acting like the other.