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Setting up phones is a nightmare

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Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#241

Post by LtWorf »

skybrian wrote: post #238
Paria_Stark wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always crazy to me to see this kind of smug takes defending huge corporations as if they're your friends. 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.

It's less about defending and more about being annoyed with all the over-confident, uninformed opinions people frequently post in reaction to any news article on the subject.

You could start by taking a look at your own comment then.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#242

Post by pdimitar »

recursive wrote: post #115
II2II wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use proprietary stuff like Apple for these parts of my life. A new Apple device is usually a non-event: charge it, authenticate, wait for the back to restore while you go about your business. Most of the author's criticisms were centered on avoiding account creation and third-party apps. I'm not sure I would give Apple the benefit of the doubt here since the motivations are different: Apple is far more interested…

I've used Android phones for a long time. A couple of years ago I got an iPad to run an app only available on iOS. Getting that iPad running was more painful and frustrating than any of the dozen Android devices I've set up over the years.

You should do a blog write-up on that, many would find it fascinating.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#243

Post by bsder »

winterbloom wrote: post #166
bsder wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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

And who gets in trouble when her iCloud account glitches itself and loses everything? Or when the network is dead and nothing works?

Local copies should always be primary and cloud copies secondary.

But you don't get to extract rent in that case which is why none of the big companies want to do things that way.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#244

Post by recursive »

pdimitar wrote: post #242
recursive wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Android phones for a long time. A couple of years ago I got an iPad to run an app only available on iOS. Getting that iPad running was more painful and frustrating than any of the dozen Android devices I've set up over the years.

You should do a blog write-up on that, many would find it fascinating.

Believe me, I wish I had documented it. I didn't realize that this would be surprising or controversial until I described the experience later to others. Some people basically didn't believe me.

The basic flavor was that I spent at least an hour getting a working apple account and getting signed into it, and I used at least two other devices to achieve that.

I do vividly recall that whenever I performed the final successful account verification, rather than seeing a success message, I saw a page or webview that just had a huge XML document in it. I only knew that attempt worked after I just tried logging in again. But that was one papercut out of dozens from my hazy recollection.

If I ever set up another Apple thing, I'll take photos, but it will probably work perfectly then. Oh well.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#245

Post by recursive »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #236
recursive wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Android phones for a long time. A couple of years ago I got an iPad to run an app only available on iOS. Getting that iPad running was more painful and frustrating than any of the dozen Android devices I've set up over the years.

That sounds like Linux users complaining about Windows Server or vice versa. iPad is trivial to get running but it is not the same as an Android tablet, and if you try to use your Android experience you will have issues.

Not so trivial that I didn't struggle with it for an hour. I'm not an Android power user. (I think?) I'm not even particularly a fan of Android. It's just the (hot take) least bad option I've tried.

More to the point, it seems reasonable to design for onboarding brand new users. That was never a strength of Linux, which most Linux fans would probably acknowledge. What ever happened to "it just works".

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#246

Post by lnrd »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #96
lnrd wrote: post #24

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…

If your relatives are significantly tech illiterate, I'd skip the smartphone entirely and go for a locked-down Linux desktop + feature phone. The most dangerous apps are big legitimate ones. If you do go for a smartphone, my experience tells me that there's no difference between Android and iOS. The biggest sources for shady apps are the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Shady stuff on the web can be easily defe…

> If your relatives are significantly tech illiterate, I'd skip the smartphone entirely and go for a locked-down Linux desktop + feature phone. The most dangerous apps are big legitimate ones.

You know, they are adults and have free will and do want a smartphone like everyone else to use Whatsapp, read the news, search things on Google, etc.

Hell, my 95 year old grandma convinced a nurse to install TikTok on her phone because she saw her using it and also wanted to try it. It's not like we can isolate them from the world

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#247

Post by celsoazevedo »

71bw wrote: post #219
celsoazevedo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, as someone that uses Android, sideloads apps, and is the "tech guy" for some older people, I went "yep, Google's own Play Store is full of shitty apps". I recommend getting an Android phone (there are cheap Google Pixels out there) and try to sideload an app. Also browse the web a bit without an adblocker. I'd be surprised if by the end of the experiment you thought that sideloading is the reason their grandma…

Off-topic, but thanks for hosting all the gcam ports for all these years.

You're welcome! :D

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#248

Post by krick »

drnick1 wrote: post #163
krick wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely, it depends on your particular vendors, but don't you have any problems with banking apps and such? I honestly just don't know, didn't try messing with firmware in a while. Do you use Revolut or something similar?

The GrapheneOS community maintains a list of banking apps compatibility. In a nutshell, most banking apps that haven't been infected by Play Integrity work just fine.I have yet to find a US app that does not work, but some European banking apps no longer do. If switching banks isn't an option, my suggestion is to keep an old or cheap "certified" phone for that purpose. Most of us have old hardware lying around so tha…

Wow, thanks, didn't know about that. I am actually surprised how broad the list is. I was even about to say that it appears to cover everything I care about right now, but then it occurred to me, that Revolut (unlike some other banking apps) doesn't have its own NFC interface implementation and relies on Google Pay for that anyway, so it's a huge "fuck you". Because it's pretty much the primary reason to have a banking app installed at all for me.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#249

Post by socalgal2 »

daliusd wrote: post #188
socalgal2 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> relatively cheap relative to an iPhone Pro, yes. Relative to many other phones, No. It shipped at $399. You can buy 4 to 12 android phones for that price. I'm an iPhone user but my sister and her family are Android.

I doubt I would get the same quality and reliability. Good Android phones are equally expensive and it is very hard to know which are actually good without doing research. As well I had bad experience with some Google Pixel model.

That is always the excuse people bring up to ignore the point. You can spend $1000 on a fancy chefs knife, or you can spend $30 on an Ikea chefs knife. Sure, the $1000 knife is higher quality. Yet, millions of people are still doing just find with the Ikea knife.

A cheap car will still get you to/from work over an expensive "higher quality" car.

Lots of families don't have money to buy an iPhone for every member of the family but do have enough to buy an Android for every member of the family.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#250

Post by wolvoleo »

deng wrote: post #211
wolvoleo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did it only a few weeks ago. They are indeed encrypted but it seems to retrieve the key from WhatsApp itself. They wouldn't be much good as a backup if there was no way to read them of course.

I tried the exact same thing a few weeks ago with a de-googled phone and it did not work. I had to transfer the /data/data/com.whatsapp folder as well via root access, then it restored the chats (the display of the old phone was dead and hence I couldn't initiate any kind of account transfer to a new phone).

Weird, for me it worked fine. I didn't need to transfer the root parts. Nor did I do anything else on the old phone. I just signed in on the new one with the backups in place.

I don't use Google services or an account either, though I do have Google play installed.

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