Chewy
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The Samsung Galaxy S5 mini has a IP67 rating and a removable battery.
It’s possible to produce water resistant phones with removable Batterien, but manufacturers would rather sell new phones instead of batteries.
“On skippable ads, the button appears after 5 seconds into playback, as always.”
They aren’t hiding the skip-button, they are hiding the not-being-able-to skip-button.
I guess the advantage for Google is that users can’t know whether they’ll be able to skip, so they might watch more of the ad with expectations that they might be able to skip it.
My banking apps lock screens consistently aren’t recognized by Bitwarden Android.
Some websites/apps only show the email field at first, then add the password field afterwards. This also sometimes makes it not being detected as a login form.
Sometimes a password field is detected only on the first filling in (which is annoying when choosing the wrong entry).
On desktop it’s great, but I really don’t know why some apps have to do custom login screens.
The Fennec F-Droid build isn’t maintained by Mozilla, but by someone else. They link to Mozilla for donations and source code, but the issue tracker for Fennec on F-Droid links to their own repo.
K-9 Mail on F-Droid is maintained by the K9-team, which works for MZLA/Thunderbird. Thus I’d guess it shouldn’t take to much work adding Thunderbird to F-Droid.
from the page it looks like they’re working on getting the beta in fdroid though, so here’s hoping.
https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/blob/master/metadata/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid.yml
Yes. Looking through K9’s blog, “recently” is more than two years.
K9 didn’t have a stable release for 3 years, until a previous contributor raised enough money to sponsor his work for a year or so. (Which I was happy to donate to, because K9 was starting to get really outdated UI-wise).
After that money ran out, they started working for MZLA Corp/Thunderbird more than two years ago.
Yes, but that argument can be made against TOTP too.
SMS 2FA is less secure than TOTP, but still better than no second factor, since most criminals with access to a password database aren’t able to take over your phone number (on a large scale).
With most services allowing some kind of password reset over SMS, I also prefer no 2FA over SMS 2FA. I already lost an account because I changed my number.
This DRM is built in to Play Integrity, and GrapheneOS only passes the basic check, so apps using this DRM won’t work.
Spoofing Play Integrity works with rooted phones, although it breaks from time to time.
Adding to that, there’re builds of LineageOS with microG preinstalled, which should be relatively similar to CalyxOS.
You’re right, thanks for correcting me.
You’re right, my apologies for confidently spreading misinformation and thank you for pointing it out. Material You colors are available on LineageOS and GrapheneOS, probably CalyxOS too.
With Android 12 GrapheneOS and CalyxOS choosing different colors was not possible, maybe because they didn’t implement something at first, but with 13+ Material You works as intended.
I’ve edited my parent comment accordingly.
Google has always been able to remove installed apps remotely, although I believe they only use it for malicious apps, not for apps that simply get removed from the Play Store.
But I’ve also been mislead by the headline.
Clickbait makes me appreciate my preferred small tech news outlet, which has been doing serious journalism without sensationalism for over 25 years. The authors even interact in their forum, which is still active because of how the site actually cares about the community.
My mental list of sites I try to avoid is longer than the list of actually good sites. Sadly those thrash sites get pushed up in rankings of Google News and similar aggregators because clickbait clicks well.
It’s important to note that Android ≠ AOSP (Android Open Source Project). Most of the actually interesting features advertised in a new Android release won’t be available to you if your not installing Google Services.
E.g. heavily advertised features like Android 12’s “Material You” adaptive themes aren’t even available on AOSP and thus GrapheneOS, CalyxOS or LineageOS.
New privacy features often already existed for years on custom ROMs like LineageOS.
This is why since around Android 10 I’m not even following new Android releases, at least not beyond reading glancing over an article. I didn’t even notice my phone updated to from 12 to 13 (GrapheneOS) until I noticed the new background apps menu, which is pretty much all of the changes.
Edit: Being able to set a language per app is a great feature of Android 13.
Edit 2: As pointed out in comments below, my Material You example was wrong.
A better example are heavily advertised translation and image editing features, which are sometimes locked to Pixel and definitely locked to installs with Google Services. Same is true for apps like “Digital Wellbeing”, which don’t work on AOSP but its features are advertised as Android features.
tl;dr
Android updates are even more uninteresting if your using a custom ROM, because most features won’t even be available in open source Android.
As a former LineageOS for microG user I’m happy to say that it’s no longer necessary to use it instead of official LineageOS because they finally added signature spoofing to upstream LineageOS [1].
As far as I understand, this allows microG to work perfectly fine with any app on official LineageOS, without any patching of the ROM needed.
I haven’t tried it and there’s no reason to switch of LineageOS for microG, but I’ll definitely give it a shot on a future device.
[1] https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_frameworks_base/+/383573
The 13T Pro, as well as the standard 13T, come in two versions - dual-glass design and glass front with vegan leather back, both featuring plastic frames with matching colors and metal-like finish. [1]
The Xiaomii 13T Pro is available with a vegan leather back (plastic) which won’t break from a drop. Instead vegan leather likely deteriorates in look and feel over the years, but I’d prefer it over broken glass.
Huaweii’s HarmonyOS is also based on Android, just like other manufacturer’s Android reskins.
They might’ve hard forked AOSP without incorporating newer changes and over time farther deviate from upstream AOSP, but at least three years ago they basically just replaced all mentions of Android with Harmony.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/harmonyos-hands-on-huaweis-android-killer-is-just-android/
Banks were able to create their own NFC payment app, which can be set as default payment provider.
I’m not sure what else Google Wallet is able to do, but I guess this might be about being able to have a default wallet with tickets for events and similar.
Hopefully there’ll really be open-source wallets. With banking/nfc pay this isn’t possible for service ands security reasons.
Doing the dishes while listening to podcasts with low battery makes me wish my wireless earphones didn’t break so soon. The amount of times I took my phone out, put it on a table and walked away to tow it off the table is staggering. Or forgetting to turn down the amplifier before unplugging just to get blasted with static noise isn’t something I miss.
Not having to bother with reconnecting bluetooth headphones and instead plugging in a cable is great tho, so I understand everyone who still likes their wired headphones.
Yes, third party app stores were a pain for a long time, until Google allowed other stores to update apps unattended. A user having to comfirm each individual update was a terrible user experience.
Google and other pre-installed app stores circumvented the issue by being installed with system privileges to install any app unattended.
Any third-party store who’d want to do the same would either have to pay other manufacturers to be pre-installed, or require their users to root their phone. Or they were annoyed by updates and use the Play Store instead.
Yes, since Android 12 app updates doesn’t require user confirmation for updates through the store which installed an app originally. This came at a similar time as the Epic lawsuits, so it might be a concession to prevent losing a lawsuit about their anti-competetive behaviour.
Google did pay manufacturers to not include third-party app stores [1], but I they can’t force other stores to pay them any fees. It’s bonkers to me that Apple wants to charge other app stores for providing apps to their consumers, who paid Apple to own their device.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22632806/google-epic-premier-device-program-lg-motorola-hmd
Most emulators have patreon or other forms of monetization. The rulings which set the precedent that emulators are legal were about commercial emulators.
I really don’t think this was about the money, instead it was about how open yuzu devs were talking about piracy and distributing copyrighted material in their discord.
I believe money wasn’t even mentioned by Nintendo. Additionally, Nintendo shuts down projects regardless of whether they make any money or are just small fan-projects for decades-old games.
The features weren’t exactly paywalled, as the source code was always available. They merely provided beta builds to patreons, that were also available free of charge by someone else [1].
~~[1] https://github.com/pineappleEA/pineapple-src/releases~~
Selling emulators is legal, as far as we know (been a while since the last ruling). If it’s true what others have pointed out, that yuzu devs were distributing copyrighted material in their public discord and talking open about privacy, then Nintendo has support for their argument that yuzu was intentionally designed to circumvent copy protection and purposely facilitates piracy.
The hardware attestation feature is part of the Android Open Source Project and is fully supported by GrapheneOS. SafetyNet attestation chooses to use it to enforce using Google certified operating systems. However, app developers can use it directly and permit other properly signed operating systems upholding the security model. […] Direct use of the hardware attestation API provides much higher assurance than using SafetyNet so these apps have nothing to lose by using a more meaningful API and supporting a more secure OS.
https://grapheneos.org/usage#banking-apps
My banking apps work on GrapheneOS, so I guess they are using hardware attestation instead of SafetyNet. LineageOS won’t pass hardware attestation because it doesn’t support locked bootloader.
Altough features like Top Shot (short video while taking pictures) and face retouching are available in the Pixel Camera app (from Play Store), they can’t be configured unless Google Photos is installed. For advanced editing features (magic eraser) GPhotos has to have internet permission.
The pre-installed GrapheneOS Camera isn’t as good as official Pixel Camera, but Pixel Camera works without any internet permission.
Imo there’s no point in using GrapheneOS while using Google’s internet-assisted editing features.
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It’s not possible to change the name for services independently. I’m either with my real name in a phone game, or with a pseudonym in Messages…
What a terrible idea.