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Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

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Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

#191

Post by thewebguyd »

embedding-shape wrote: post #86
codedokode wrote: post #76

Think how bad the market got. Today we have preinstalled garbage apps like LinkedIn, garbage apps mandated to be preinstalled by the government, ads, cloud accounts, notifications spam, telemetry. This is not only Chinese smartphones, for example Samsung also plays this game. I assume there are Chinese backdoors, American backdoors and national government backdoors on almost every phone. And there seems to be no way…

Not sure what timescale you're referring to when you're talking about "how bad the market got" and "today", but back around 2012 I got my first and last Samsung smartphone, must have been a Galaxy 3 or something, that had all of those problematic things too. It seems like this starting to happen as soon as apps were installable on phones, even iPhones came (and still comes) with a ton of apps you cannot remove regard…

My OG moto droid was pretty clean back in ~2009 or so, but even then there was plenty of sketchy carrier installed bloatware. Even my blackberry before that, feature phones even before that, had the carrier crap on it.

Part of why iPhone was such a breath of fresh air at the time it released. There was no carrier bloatware. Apple didn't allow it. Verizon turned down the iPhone because they would not agree to the no carrier branding and did not want to give Apple control over updates.

It's only gotten worse since then, but yeah its always been a thing.

At least with iPhone, there's still no carrier bloat, no facebook/meta, no linkedin, etc.

I'm not sure why Samsung continues to allow it either, they are also big enough to bully the carriers they could just as easily pull an Apple and kick all the spam off their phones, at least for the flagship models.

Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

#192

Post by thewebguyd »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #113
embedding-shape wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what timescale you're referring to when you're talking about "how bad the market got" and "today", but back around 2012 I got my first and last Samsung smartphone, must have been a Galaxy 3 or something, that had all of those problematic things too. It seems like this starting to happen as soon as apps were installable on phones, even iPhones came (and still comes) with a ton of apps you cannot remove regard…

And operators preloading questionable stuff is a much older practice than post-iPhone smartphones. If you had a feature phone in the 2000's, the operator would have customised it one way or another. The iPhone was revolutionary in how much Apple forced the network operators to relinquish control.

> The iPhone was revolutionary in how much Apple forced the network operators to relinquish control

And if AT&T wasn't as desperate to gain market share, we could have had a different story. Both Verizon and Sprint refused the iPhone because they didn't want to give up control. The bloatware was an important piece, but Apple also mandated control over OTA updates which the carriers did not want to relinquish either. The carriers were also opposed to the phone being sold in Apple stores.

Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

#193

Post by Larrikin »

ofieiehdiehe wrote: post #190
Larrikin wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time we will go to the professional baseball stadium across the street instead.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want this stop, you gotta stop using these services, even if it means sacrificing a hobby. If, on the other hand, you care more about your hobby than these quirks annoy you, than by all means, go right ahead.

I'd rather try and get the executives, product managers, and engineers who implemented it fired and elect politicians that will make policies like that illegal.

I could go to a baseball game last year and have been able to for decades. The march to enshittification isn't inevitable. Otherwise there will be no hobbies in the future, and I'll be hoarding my money to just sit in my house doing nothing.

Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

#194

Post by ezst »

eskori wrote: post #137
merryocha wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest obstacle to de-Googling is the GBoard keyboard of all things. There's really no good open source alternative that even comes close.

I was in the same boat until a year ago or so. FUTO^[1] finally provided a good text prediction/correction pair + that simply better feeling the Gboard has^[2]. [1]: https://keyboard.futo.org/ [2]: I never investigated this, so I always assumed that GBoard predicted what key I wanted to press when close to two letters. With FOSS keyboards, with a physically identical layout, I tended to make way more mistakes.

I find GBoard to remain superior in multilingual typing, futo just can't seem to be able to switch to other languages consistently, even with the multilingual option enabled,

it's also not as good at "recovering" from typing too many letters (Gboard sometimes adequately completes with likely shorter words)

Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

#195

Post by plagiarist »

xethos wrote: post #170
lightedman wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to quit frequenting places that abuse you like this. But it seems you LIKE being abused.

It's not necessarily enjoying it. OP evidently just thinks the trade-off is worth it. Some people like baseball more than researching which phone they can buy, which one has an unlockable bootloader, and which is supported (even unofficially) by LineageOS. That's fine. They don't have to. Their solution can be calling their local representative and complaining that the stadium their city is paying for, is locking the…

I had forgotten that we are paying billionaires to own stadia. Cannot find funding for schools or libraries but we can sure pay someone who doesn't need the money so they can build a monument to their own ego.

Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

#196

Post by Hizonner »

Larrikin wrote: post #193
ofieiehdiehe wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want this stop, you gotta stop using these services, even if it means sacrificing a hobby. If, on the other hand, you care more about your hobby than these quirks annoy you, than by all means, go right ahead.

I'd rather try and get the executives, product managers, and engineers who implemented it fired and elect politicians that will make policies like that illegal. I could go to a baseball game last year and have been able to for decades. The march to enshittification isn't inevitable. Otherwise there will be no hobbies in the future, and I'll be hoarding my money to just sit in my house doing nothing.

> I'd rather try and get the executives, product managers, and engineers who implemented it fired

How has that been working out for you? Apparently you have some avenue to apply pressure for that, other than the obvious one of not buying the tickets.

Why should anybody fire them, given that their actions have caused no actual harm to the bottom line? Obviously the ticket buyers don't care, so why should management or owners care?

> and elect politicians that will make policies like that illegal.

Sounds great. Who do I vote for?

Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

#197

Post by [deleted] »

GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #53
londons_explore wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is a rogue employee who hopes they can get away with this stuff for years till caught... That employees cousin probably does social media for Abboud...

No matter how you turn it, that doesn't build trust in the Motorola brand, if a single employee can push that (hypothetical) code.

[deleted]

Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

#198

Post by y0eswddl »

futune wrote: post #165
VortexLain wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although you will have to buy a used phone in order to pay less than 250$, it seems like GrapheneOS is the best solution for that problem. Not optimal, but the best among what we have.

I was thinking the same. But it worries me that these news about Motorola in particular doing shady shit. I was looking forward to the upcoming GrapheneOS/Motorola partnership :(

graphene will still be a separate OS outside of Motorola's control.

GrapheneOS team is helping Motorola build secure phones to spec. but Motorola won't have some special bloated flavor of GrapheneOS installed

Re: Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

#199

Post by dredmorbius »

embedding-shape wrote: post #86
codedokode wrote: post #76

Think how bad the market got. Today we have preinstalled garbage apps like LinkedIn, garbage apps mandated to be preinstalled by the government, ads, cloud accounts, notifications spam, telemetry. This is not only Chinese smartphones, for example Samsung also plays this game. I assume there are Chinese backdoors, American backdoors and national government backdoors on almost every phone. And there seems to be no way…

Not sure what timescale you're referring to when you're talking about "how bad the market got" and "today", but back around 2012 I got my first and last Samsung smartphone, must have been a Galaxy 3 or something, that had all of those problematic things too. It seems like this starting to happen as soon as apps were installable on phones, even iPhones came (and still comes) with a ton of apps you cannot remove regard…

And before it was (smart)phones, it was PCs. The New York Times was running items on spyware and nagware on PCs in the early aughts.
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