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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

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Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still make calls with your phone?

Of course, amazingly that's one of it's best features, enabling you to actually speak to a real person. (it's a type of personal connection that fleshy robots have, for some reason, derided.) But I digress, excusing your bad form of answering a question with a question, I am interested in your opinion of the possible conundrum of the two phone idea.

My bad, I didn't knew you wanted a serious answer, I should have known that some people would seriously consider having three separate phones for texting, calling and everything else.

For a serious answer then: Rather than segregating phone calling vs the rest, if you want to go to the hassle of maintaining multiple phones, I would put sensitive apps (i.e. bank apps) separated from the rest.

But ultimately it depends on which threat model you are trying to mitigate. Most people would worry about protecting their financial information. If you are worried about possible backslash from a fascist state, you shouldn't use normal phone calls at all and switch to a privacy app.

OTOH, a dedicated phone just to make phone calls makes sense if your threat model is your significant other.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#492
post #417

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Moderation is one of the huge Achilles’ heels of Reddit. I’m confused why Reddit thinks a monarchy with no term limits will work on a website when it has never worked in human history. There is no voting whatsoever where users can give feedback on how they think the moderation or the subreddit is going. You get entrenched subreddits like /r/movies and their obsession with movie posters instead of movie discussion or…

The nice thing about reddit is that no one is forcing you to follow such broach subreddits which appeal to the common denominator. In my experience, any subreddit which has more than a few millions members is going to be pretty terrible. Find a more niche subreddit like /r/ running (although location subreddits fall into a similar trap) or /r/longdistancerunning and you'd probably find them to be more interesting sim…

> Find a more niche subreddit like /r/running

Maybe that works in the US, since half of all reddit users seem to be from there, and for very general topics like running.

But for discussing local LLMs, you have just about one place to chose between, and if the moderators somehow are silencing discussions there, there doesn't seem to be much you can do about it.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't want any text to be selectable. I don't want pull to refresh on every page. I don't want the left-swipe to take me to the previous page. Strange. This inability to select any text has always felt like one of the most hostile things developers could ever do. It feels like pure vandalism. Another thing that causes massive productivity degradation is not being able to keep multiple pages open so you can come ba…

Also, if my memory serves, native MacOS apps by default support selecting most text that isn’t part of a clickable element like a button.

No, that's absolutely not the case, and it would be very odd and disturbing.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#494

I still, will never understand the need for native "Apps". To this day, I have never seen an "App" that couldn't simply have been a website/webapp. Most of them would likely be improved by being a webapp. The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need. Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept intr…

This makes me wonder if Google would let rot creep into (or possibly already has) to encourage people to use apps and also encourage developers to build on their platform.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#495
post #293

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The question is: Who is the beneficiary of the app sandbox? Is it you, the user, because no malicious processes can taper with your apps? Or is it the corporations, because they prevent you from modifying their apps – which makes you a pure consumer? I think, for the tech-savvy, the latter is more accurate and I think it is very important to be able to crack open these sandboxes and tinker with processes. Be it to in…

> I think, for the tech-savvy, the latter is more accurate and I think it is very important to be able to crack open these sandboxes and tinker with processes Anyone tech-savvy that wants to mod their Android (like they'd mod Linux distros), should consider purchasing Android devices (like Pixel) that support ownership transfer (that is, unlocking then relocking the bootloader), and flash CalyxOS/GrapheneOS usereng/e…

Undortunately the trend set by google is becoming extremely antagonistisc for modders. It's becoming a tradeoff between security and convenience, arguably that was not the case back in early android version, actually it was nearly the opposite. i remember hiw CyanogenMod features were surpassing the state of Pure Android at the time, it was fun to see the innovation happening in that space. Then came the ostracization of modders, from GApps restrictions to Play Integrity, all of those made it nearly impossible to have an android OS built to your taste, while able to run useful apps like banking and payments. It's sad that I have to carry 2 devices with me because Google took the greedy way.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, if my memory serves, native MacOS apps by default support selecting most text that isn’t part of a clickable element like a button.

No, that's absolutely not the case, and it would be very odd and disturbing.

I think it's an accessibility option that also makes navigating with the tab key more useful.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#497
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rationale from the core developer [1]: > I'm sure there are plenty of system APIs providing this information too, and I don't just mean APIs designed to directly provide the information. > It's not useful to prevent directly getting a list of installed applications without preventing detecting which applications are installed, so this specific feature request has to be rejected. It would have to be part of a larger…

I get what he's saying, but still seems like blocking the easy way of getting a list of apps, while certainty not perfect, would prevent most privacy abuse.

Would it? My understanding is that most fingerprinting is done by a few large companies, in their own proprietary libraries that are shipped with third-party apps. If you block this method, they will quickly find another one and ship it everywhere, because that is their core business.

With browser fingerprinting, the ad companies are already regularly pulling many shenanigans; I don't see a reason why this would be different.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#498
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the features you mentioned can also be achieved by a well developed PWA. Of course, minus the widgets or some deeper system integration (like controlling phone calls etc.)

Try to build a more or less serious music synth in the browser that won’t kill your battery.

Of course, I'm not saying that one size fits all.

There are cases like media apps, camera apps, videogames, terminal emulators, clipboard managers etc. that won't become Web apps any time soon.

Either because they need to operate closer to the OS, or for performance expectation reasons.

But I've just had a quick scroll through the apps on my phone, and I can confidently say that 90% of them are basically HTTP clients that interact with an HTTP server.

And even those that do more could probably be wrapped into a WebAssembly artifact with comparable performance in a near future.

The reason why they are not PWAs, and why engineers are often expected to do triple work (iOS, Android, Web), and why there aren't more products released as PWAs, keeps eluding me.

Sure, you have to tell folks how the "Install/Add to home screen" process works from a mobile browser, but is it that really that much more friction compared to an App Store paradigm to justify the abuse of native apps that either reinvent the wheel multiple times, or are just unglorified Web browsers running an Electron app just to show you the discounts at the supermarket near your house?

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't want any text to be selectable. I don't want pull to refresh on every page. I don't want the left-swipe to take me to the previous page. Strange. This inability to select any text has always felt like one of the most hostile things developers could ever do. It feels like pure vandalism. Another thing that causes massive productivity degradation is not being able to keep multiple pages open so you can come ba…

On modern mobile and desktop operating systems, you can always copy that portion of the screen to the clipboard and it will recognize the text so you can paste it anywhere.

No you can't.

Even if you could (which you can't, at least on my, modern, phone), it would be a workaround, not a solution.

A solution would be allowing free selection like in the browser or, better yet, ditching "native" apps for web apps, as the person above suggested. As a bonus, this "exodus" will force browser makers to iron out any UX issues very quickly.

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