191–200 of 257 posts
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I have 5 years old iPhone SE2020 that is relatively cheap having in mind that is 5 years old. None of Androids served me that long. Only Motorola tried, but water killed it. Water has not killed iPhone when my son threw it into pond. Which Android is that good, practically speaking?
My wife uses a OnePlus 8t (about as old as your phone) daily. It's survived drops, tubs, etc.
Regarding users creating new accounts on phone setup: Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices. So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts. Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsa…
> Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber. Telegram, due to not being e2e encrypted, is trivial to transfer, a new login does it.
It makes things a lot easier yes but you do give up a lot of privacy too.
Regarding users creating new accounts on phone setup: Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices. So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts. Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsa…
With Viber I don't know, I've never used that.
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I tried it, Graphene isn't really a good alternative because the built in apps are so bad that you end up needing to install the Pixel/Google versions anyway. If I have to install Google Messages for RCS, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Pixel Camera (which forces you to use Google Photos for basic functionality), … where is the benefit? If I have to turn Graphene into a Pixel to make it usable, and I did, there’s n…
I replace Google Messages with a FOSS version precisely because it doesn't bug me about RCS.
I think it's because they got blamed for not warning everyone with the Valencia floods last year but it's really ridiculous now. Now they blow up everyone's phone just when there's going to be a bit of wind.
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> “Android phones” is the key missing piece. iOS/macOS is no better. My wife kept getting weird errors on her iPhone. Turns out, her photos were only in the cloud and, quelle surprise, she had run out of room in "The Cloud(tm)" in spite of having almost half a terabyte free on her phone. All the companies want to hold your data hostage.
who do you think gets in trouble if her phone dies and all her stuff is gone storing things in the cloud is responsible
I don't even use a Google account on my phone. Most apps don't need it! There's only a handful that do, in particular ChatGPT that really insists you have a Google account logged in (why they force you to make an account with their direct competitor is beyond me but they do)
But perplexity is much better anyway so I use that.
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Exactly what I was going to say. I don't use iPhone because, well, it's iPhone. And until, like, this year, it was strictly more prohibitive than Android. Also, it was honestly just worse of a device than some Android flagships, and the tradeoff is only worth it if you are a lazy USA-ian, who doesn't use any "sketchier" non-mainstream apps, has an Apple account and owns a bunch of Apple devices anyway. Oh, and all yo…
I have 5 years old iPhone SE2020 that is relatively cheap having in mind that is 5 years old. None of Androids served me that long. Only Motorola tried, but water killed it. Water has not killed iPhone when my son threw it into pond. Which Android is that good, practically speaking?
Is there a comparably usable 9 year old android?
None of those problems exist on GrapheneOS. In fact i regularly do a clean wipe and am up and running again in minutes.
How do you back up and restore things without root? I've found that even with root, these days many backups are useless thanks to using hardware-backed encryption...
Giving an Android phone to elderly/non-technical people is asking for trouble imho. They will eventually tap their way into installing suspicious apps, adware or even straight up malware. It's inevitable, they are not aware of what they do and how to avoid the many risks of the digital world. I remember having the same struggles of OP when setting up a cheap android phone for my grandma, the amount of bloat, adware a…
But I thought sideloading wasn't a real problem and Google is just locking it down because they're evil :-)
It's not all good or bad, there's a security issue with side loading, as well as shovelware on the play store. However, there is no world where I would argue that these justify limiting consumer grade hardware to walled gardens.
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To be fair, setting up a new iPhone (without restoring from backup) is a pretty long-winded process these days. You have to make about 50 decisions on various features, tap through numerous info screens, set up Face ID, Apple Pay, voice recognition, etc. etc. It feels like every team at Apple wants something in the onboarding flow.
And Apple sometimes re-asks you with minor point releases a selection of those questions even though you’ve already answered.