91–100 of 147 posts
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The PinePhone (Pro) and its ecosystem looks promising, no? I'd say we're closer than ever to it being a capable daily driver, certainly by the next iteration.
Or Librem 5, whose software is developed not by volunteers but by a company.
F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
Further, I disable notifications for nearly everything, so that point doesn't matter to me either.
I'm definitely relieved that the most-upvoted comment critiquing F-Droid doesn't raise anything of concern for me! I was worried I was about to read something that might push me away from making a de-Googled Android device my next smartphone... haha
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How many apps do you need installed (and why)? I feel like I'm a pretty heavy user, but if I forget to update for a week at most I have 6 apps to manually click through. It seems likes an insignificant gripe considering the other alternatives (Play Store, Amazon, Huawei, etc)
These are the apps on my phone that have updated in the past 7 days: Subway/public transit app (see how much money I have left on the cards) Grab (an Uber competitor where I live) Facebook YouTube Google Google Maps A bank app Signal Google Calendar GMail Android Auto Agoda, a hotel booking app Dropbox Netflix Instagram AirBnB A second bank app A boardgame helper app Uber TripIt Microsoft ToDo Shopping app for the ba…
But user accounts helps reduce spam, save profiles and enable cross platform syncing.
Sure you could do something like have a user account-like process, which involves unique ids and all that jazz. Except, at that point, you're making a user account with 10 more steps.
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These are the apps on my phone that have updated in the past 7 days: Subway/public transit app (see how much money I have left on the cards) Grab (an Uber competitor where I live) Facebook YouTube Google Google Maps A bank app Signal Google Calendar GMail Android Auto Agoda, a hotel booking app Dropbox Netflix Instagram AirBnB A second bank app A boardgame helper app Uber TripIt Microsoft ToDo Shopping app for the ba…
From F-Droid? Are you not choosing Aurora store? (Yes, I know what those apps are, I'm in the same region and time zone as you)
If I don't have a laptop or desktop, why wouldn't I have a lot of apps on my phone?
F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
I also haven't had issues with update flow. When was the last time you used F-Droid for a prolonged period of time?
I tried something like this once and it worked surprisingly well, even for a UGC site. Years back we were doing something that included users documenting TV shows. We had a big meeting where people put every feature they wanted on index cards. We laid the cards out a founder's dining room table. The host got their change jar and each person got a certain number of pennies to mark features they thought were vital for…
What's been professionally frustrating me for years as a developer is how much of the engineering and operational budget for a project is tied up into identifying and tracking users. The first time this happened to me we had some idiot who insisted that we needed to display exactly how many logged on users there were on every page load. There was no point in doing so, and we had proven that it was at least ten percen…
Software always starts by appealing to discerning customers. The early adopters.
Once it is fairly widely adopted, often the early adopters have adopted a newer, better thing.
So now you are making features for a crowd of people who are there mostly because of platform intertia.
They don't even appreciate or use new features, because anyone who actually deeply cares about your product niche doesn't use your product.
I tried something like this once and it worked surprisingly well, even for a UGC site. Years back we were doing something that included users documenting TV shows. We had a big meeting where people put every feature they wanted on index cards. We laid the cards out a founder's dining room table. The host got their change jar and each person got a certain number of pennies to mark features they thought were vital for…
What's been professionally frustrating me for years as a developer is how much of the engineering and operational budget for a project is tied up into identifying and tracking users. The first time this happened to me we had some idiot who insisted that we needed to display exactly how many logged on users there were on every page load. There was no point in doing so, and we had proven that it was at least ten percen…
To add onto this, as a security-adjacent person, it's sad how much people think user behaviour data will be worth to their company. From the well-intentioned "we must pave the cowpaths" to the harmful "harvest the data and sell it", the attitude appears to have cropped up in the past 15 or so years as a mainstay of what apps should be doing and it's absolute insanity to me.
My only victories in convincing teams are where I could demonstrate their ROI was never actually going to materialize, especially when the investment part required enough development hours that other features that might sell more apps would have to be delayed. And even then, it's been about 40% of the time, with the other 60% being met with, essentially, "we have assurances it will be profitable" hand-waving.
The painful part of this is that unless certain privacy regulations start to get much more painful economically for companies, there's basically no incentive not to do it.
It's the entire "Data is the new Oil" run amok.
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>So it's manual clicking for each update. You need to install the F-Droid Privileged Extension, or use a ROM that has it pre-installed. That way it can update apps without user interaction.
Ah, but it looks like that means you need to be rooted?
I've been thinking a lot about this for https://www.diffdiff.net . After convenience, privacy is the core of the value proposition - the text to diff doesn't get sent to the server. On the other hand, though, if you want to publish/share a diff, then, you know, privacy is the core of the value proposition , so you probably don't want to share it with the whole world, much less let the whole world edit or delete it! I…