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Android 10

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271–280 of 518 posts

Re: Android 10

#271

The website assets are optimized in a rather strange way. The total page weight of ~20MB is huge for mobile. The images are heavily compressed using WebP lossy with quite noticeable blockiness and washed out textures and fine details, but squeezed into 1MB, yet the videos are only lightly compressed, and make up most of the page weight. Had they been compressed with libx264 at good quality, the page weight would be m…

They got to somehow justify the need for better hardware I guess... And it appears that the trend is to make everything more and more bloated. Take browsers for example, we used to browse the web just fine on devices that were as powerful as raspberry pi 2 for example, but nowadays we can barely launch a browser on such devices, let alone use it for real.

Re: Android 10

#272
post #44

As a recent iOS user coming from Android, this almost makes me want to go back. I really do miss the Smart Reply and native Google Assistant features. But alas, iMessage pressure is real in my friend's group.

> But alas, iMessage pressure is real in my friend's group. Man, in my extended family SMS text group, this comes up once every couple weeks. One of us will note they aren't getting a random message, or someone will send a video and the quality will be crap, and the iPhone users will all mention how if we all had iPhones, this wouldn't be a problem. Cue a few of is getting kind of triggered because it's only Apple's…

> I can't wait for RCS messaging. I'm honestly wondering it Apple will support it, or try to segment the text messaging market even more.

I mean, RCS is practically dead (at least in the USA). But even if it does come it'll basically replace SMS with something slightly better. I don't see how it addresses the iMessage stuff. iMessage will likely still send much higher quality images and videos and RCS, AFAIK, can't do some the same features like showing who's typing.

RCS is cool but I don't think it's going to be a game changer in any way. I think it'll just be an incremental update, if it even comes to the USA.

Re: Android 10

#273

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 wish they made something like that in an iPhone SE size. Every phone is just so huge these days.

Re: Android 10

#274

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…

Camera on the 1k phone will be better than the 200 phone. Somewhat relevant to the instagram generation...

Re: Android 10

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung DeX (or similar) is a very interesting use case for more powerful hardware. But if that's not something you'd use, then I fully agree with you.

I am setting myself up on DeX as a full blown Intellij IDEA multi language environment but their locked down Linux distro makes me very uneasy...

I am on iOS but if that happens I might migrate! Is this something available today?

Re: Android 10

#276

The website assets are optimized in a rather strange way. The total page weight of ~20MB is huge for mobile. The images are heavily compressed using WebP lossy with quite noticeable blockiness and washed out textures and fine details, but squeezed into 1MB, yet the videos are only lightly compressed, and make up most of the page weight. Had they been compressed with libx264 at good quality, the page weight would be m…

The images are awful (at least in Firefox). They are compressed even worse than Google Developer Insight usually recommends. The text in screenshots is barely readable.

The dark theme is uncomfortable for my eyes (ok, maybe it's fault of my poor quality TN matrix, but anyway I don't want to see it). I doubt anyone wants to read white text on a black background.

The letters are gigantic and are optimized for hi-resolution monitors.

Also, as I understand despite new release Google still haven't solved the problem of apps and Google itself siphoning all available data from the phone.

Also I hate how Google manages updates. I had to install a Hangouts app. First, it copied the Google Account details I entered into it, into the phone and now all other apps can access them which I never wanted. Luckily I was smart enough to make a separate account for this purpose. Second, sometimes when I start it it says that it is updating Google Play Services (so I have to humbly wait until Hangouts does its important business) without even asking if I want that or not. Why does the messenger takes a work of a package manager I cannot understand. Probably, because they need to install new telemetry modules even if the user didn't activate Google Play. Very unpleasant impression.

Re: Android 10

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, in most countries (and outside the US especially) WhatsApp has already won the network effects battle, and it's the default messaging app in any smartphone. Even people with iPhone will all have WhatsApp installed.

In western Europe maybe, not in Asia for example

What part of Asia? I'm guessing you mean China/Korea/Japan. Whatsapp is by far the dominant messaging platform on the Indian subcontinent, extending as far the Middle East.

Re: Android 10

#278
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal dev here. Just wanted to make it clear that the GCM/FCM we send are completely empty. It just wakes up the app so we can fetch the encrypted messages, at which point we decrypt them and show them to the user.

Could you please explain what's happening here then, in terms of how Google is reading our Signal messages to provide "smart" replies?

Smart replies are provided on the OS side after notification is generated using on-device ML model.

They show up on all apps that provide messaging.

Re: Android 10

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 and invoking the back gesture.

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