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To be fair, giving a company that’s been failing to get themed icons to work on Android for almost four years now less than a month to make a significant change to a core part of their software is… quite weird?
Like, the EU usually gives companies at least half a year to comply with smaller demands than this, because companies with such a huge bureaucracy load wouldn’t even be able to change an app logo in such a short amount of time.
Just FYI, this seems to depend on where you get the Pixel from - if bought directly from Google, it should be offline-unlockable out of the box. The carrier-sold Pixels are a different story because the carriers demanded it.
Of course check this is true for the specific model you’re buying before you actually buy it, but for me the unlock was never greyed out on my 7a.
Pixel - varies by manufacturer
That was the Nexus line, Pixel phones are all made by Google. Although Pixel 5 series and older use Snapdragon SoCs, while 6 onwards use Google’s custom Tensor based on Samsung’s Exynos. The major downside is IMHO the awful modem efficiency - if I want to keep mobile network on so that I can receive calls, my 7a is limited to 2 days of battery life if I’m lucky (and that’s with barely using the phone, just a few pictures).
Edit: and I forgot to mention that all Pixels have great third party ROM support, except if you want GrapheneOS, in which case you need to go for the recent ones that are still supported by Google.
Nah, this development version is way worse than both Android 12+ design and Android 11 design - it just has random unlabeled tiles for system settings where you have to guess the meaning by the icon.
In Android 11, this was only used for the six quick settings you could access when you were looking at the notifications, and they would get labels when you expanded the settings side. In 12+, there are no unlabeled settings anywhere. But this redesign introduced unlabeled tiles for settings you don’t use often, which just seems insane to me.
Wow, first time I feel strongly about a quick settings update. It looks awful, taking the worst parts of the Android 12+ redesign and combining them with the worst ideas from the older design, like unlabeled icons.
It looks like there are unlabeled icons in the expanded state? Wtf? If I’m expanding the quick settings, that means I’m fishing for the less used settings, so there’s no way I’m going to remember that for example the weird circle with a small segment cut out means “Data saver”. It will just be a mystery icon that does some mystery action - that has nothing to do in a modern OS.
It looks like this design is heavily sacrificing usability for people who don’t spend hours every day mucking around with quick settings in order to please some hypothetical user who feels more slowed down by swiping over one or two screens than by having to find the one setting they currently need in a big matrix of poorly designed icons.
Edit: also it looks like the home screen is visible under the quick settings - I’m not a big fan of that, I really like the current design where the notifications are pretty much their own separate screen without distracting app content, but that’s just my subjective taste. Unlabeled icons are objectively bad.
manufacturers can put it where your hand naturally rests, meaning that you can unlock the phone BEFORE you have even taken it out of your pocket.
Idk, my “unlock” finger naturally rests wherever the fingerprint scanner is on my phone. When I had a rear fingerprint scanner, I used to have my phone’s bottom right corner planted into my palm near the thumb and used the index finger to support its back near the scanner, so I was always ready to unlock it.
Now that I have an under-screen scanner, I use my pinky as a “shelf” for the phone’s bottom side, ring finger to hold it on the far side and index finger along the near side (which makes me suspect this grip would work for in-power-button scanners too), and that makes my thumb naturally rest exactly on the spot where the scanner is. With (one) tap to wake, I have no problem unlocking the phone while taking it out of my pocket - literally just a quick double tap. Although it’s true that you can’t unlock the phone directly in the pocket like this, because the proximity sensor should prevent the tap to wake from working.
I used to have a phone with a scanner in the power button too, but I can’t remember how I held it - I don’t think it was the same way as now, because I’m pretty sure I never used to rest my thumb on screen like this.
So now I’m looking at that kind of parasitic situation with this FRP bypass lock. It’s almost as if the manufacturer wants phones to be thrown in the garbage so users are forced to buy from them rather than aftermarket. Noooooo. /s
It’s a theft deterrent, so it would be kind of pointless if there was an intentional way to disable it other than to log in with the owner’s account. The people providing the tools to bypass FRP want their cut of the stolen goods, that’s all.
I’m not saying that your specific phone is stolen (although if you got it in this state… yeah, it most likely is, FRP triggers when you do a factory reset from the recovery instead of going through settings), but you have to understand that what you want is exactly what a thief would want, and the proce of the tools reflects that.
Google definitely has the ability to do that, but I don’t believe it’s currently happening. First, it could get them in pretty big trouble in parts of the world that have the concept of consumer protection if anyone ever got ahold of any proof (and Google seems pretty terrible at keeping secrets). Second, have you seen ANY negative review of a phone? Every time I was researching which phone to buy, all the reviews were always very positive and avoided talking about its weak spots.
For example, my old Nokia 5.3 - every review I found, both in English and in my native language, made the phone sound like it is an acceptable phone for its price - nothing terrible and nothing outstanding. I doubt most of them even tried using half the features, because the rear fingerprint scanner was completely unusable (it got a nice 50/50 success rate if the air was dry and I had perfectly clean non-sweaty fingers, and plummeted down to maybe 10% success rate if any of these conditions wasn’t met), the touchscreen had ghost touch issues in even slightly humid air (meanwhile other phones work fine even with droplets of water on the screen in light rain), the camera app took 5 - 10 seconds to be able to take a picture from cold start (and Nokia/HMD didn’t bother to keep it in memory like other OEMs).
The last point might not sound like much, but it actually made me pretty much stop taking photos because anything that moves at all was simply a no go unless I had quite a bit of time to set up. I took a grand total of 732 photos and 28 videos over the three years I had that phone, which is ridiculously few compared to the over 6k photos I took with my previous Xiaomi phone. (talking about the 8k photos I took in a single year with my current phone would be cheating, literally any phone camera would look like a technical miracle to me after Nokia’s shitshow).
(edit: also, after one of the updates, the camera app would often get killed after taking a photo and the photo would be lost - so if you really wanted to take a photo of something, you would often have to try several times until it actually saved it. This was never fixed in the later updates, and the final update even introduced a fun feature where factory reset is now guaranteed to irreversibly brick the device in case you wanted to sell it. This is confirmed by HMD to be a wontfix because the phone is now EOL)
Oh, and the promised updates (it was Android One ffs) were all about a year late and generally very poor quality (also security updates were sparse), but that’s not something a reviewer could tell at the time.
Sorry about the rant, my experience just made me really hate HMD/Nokia. The main point is that all the reviews were incredibly positive even for a crappy phone and a brand that doesn’t seem to be paying off the reviewers - even tiny local reviewers who couldn’t have possibly be on HMD’s radar were way too excited about it.
And my last point: we’re not talking about reviewers here. This is about “#TeamPixel”, Google’s “organic” marketing campaign. They get a phone and hype it up, they’re not even meant to compare it to other stuff.
The Quick Share option missing is weird - Nearby Share/Quick Share is supposed to be available on every Android 6 or newer device since roughly 2020. And it’s supposed to be able to automatically figure out a reasonable way to connect the devices (LAN if they are in the same network, Bluetooth or WiFi Direct otherwise).
It’s not about Lens, they just used it as the preview image for some reason. The built-in QR scanner should be accessible through quick settings tiles (you might have to edit your quick tiles and add it), and when I launch it and go to the recent apps screen, it doesn’t have any app icon, so it is at least somewhat special and not just a regular part of some other app.
I get that, but my understanding was that you want to be able to see the map after the trip, not necessarily during it. Which is pretty much what I do with OpenTracks - record my trips and then import them to NextCloud where I can see a big map of all of them combined or look at some specific ones. And there’s plenty of Android apps that can import GPX to do the same.
But if MapMyDrive works well for you, then it’s a moot point - enjoy what works.
Haha I didn’t even notice it. But you made me realize how incredibly inconsistent the feedback “button” is in the used-to-be-AOSP apps
- Clock has it in the three dot menu on the main screen AND in the three dot menu in settings
- Phone only has it in the main three dot menu, but it’s completely missing from settings (oh and the Settings->Accessibility screen ignores Material You colors for some reason)
- Contacts has a decoy three dots menu that only contains Select and Select all buttons, the feedback option is hiding in the account switcher (and is once again missing from settings)
- Messages once again hides the feedback button in the account switcher, but it doesn’t have a three dots menu so it makes sense. No feedback in settings
- Calculator has it in the three dots menu and doesn’t have any further settings
- and finally, Camera: tap the quick settings button, tap More settings, scroll to the bottom and boom, the feedback button.
I know this is completely useless information, but I was curious and thought it would be a shame to just forget my findings 5 minutes later
I had a similar opinion when I was buying that phone - pretty much every phone had a fingerprint scanner and people generally didn’t complain about them, so decent scanners should have been mass produced and cheap - but HMD/Nokia managed to make me reconsider that opinion.
For context, Nokia 5.3 is a 3 or 4 years old model, so it definitely doesn’t disprove your statement, but I remain sceptical.
If a thief knows your PIN (by watching an earlier unlock), Android is now requiring “biometrics for accessing and changing critical Google account and device settings, like changing your PIN, disabling theft protection or accessing Passkeys, from an untrusted location.”
Sounds great for Pixel 6 series with their reportedly highly reliable fingerprint sensors /s
Honestly, I’m not sure what to think about this - extra protection against unauthorized access is good, but requiring biometric verification with no apparent alternative irks me the wrong way.
Maybe that’s just because of my experiences with Nokia 5.3 and its awful rear fingerprint sensor with like 10% success rate. But then again, there will eventually be phones with crappy sensors running Android 15.
Well, feel free to click on this link then: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode.en
(it’s just a link to Google homepage - the point is that you really shouldn’t trust the link text lol)
Honestly, I’m kinda surprised that the live translation in Google Camera wasn’t dependent on other Google apps before - I thought all Google apps were developed with the assumption that the apps mandated for Android certification would be available, and that losing functionality if the user starts disabling stuff is fine.
As to why it isn’t very common: Android conditions users to think of the apps as fully self-contained units. There’s no way to have Google Play suggest installing app B as an optional dependency when you install app A, and asking the user to install it during the first launch would go against common user experience wisdoms. The current best practice is to get the user up to speed as fast as possible, with every extra tap they have to make increasing the possibility of them leaving for another app.
But there are definitely apps that do use this. For example OpenTracks, a GPS tracking application, has no integrated map to show captured routes and instead expects the user to find another app that supports its API. Or GadgetBridge, an alternative companion app for many smart watches / fitness bands - it is common for these devices to have some weather forecast widget, but one of GadgetBridge’s design goals is to not to have internet access (to help with trust). So it has an API for weather provider apps to make this work.
Edit: First paragraph is toast, I misread the OP
That just uses normal fast charging to get to 80%, then stops the charge and finally resumes charging about an hour or two before the planned “charged by” time. No slowing down.
Oh, and it also has (or had on Android 13) a cool bug where it just stops charging if it fails to reach 80% by the time it wants to resume charging (for example if you put the phone on a slow charger late at night - that’s how I woke up with 60% battery after 4 hour sleep).
So I just gave up on the idea of using a slow charger to better preserve the battery because the phone clearly wasn’t expected to be used that way.
They seem too small and consistent in size to just be bundles of system apps that got security fixes
Correct, just one note here: system apps (both APK apps and APEX system modules) are updated through Google Play like all other apps, the monthly security patches are a layer below that - it updates the base OS files like firmware and kernel modules. More info about APEX
Are they like differential patches or something?
Yes, that’s exactly what they are. Small differential patches (often called delta patches / delta updates) to the files.
Btw apps are also getting delta updates through Google Play for at least a few years now (5-ish?)
And what happens while the ‘finishing system update’ notification is shown?
Android Runtime (ART) works by compiling the Java bytecode in apps to native code before running them - it’s called “ahead of time compilation”. This compiled native code is specific to the device, OS and system modules, and some of the modules probably changed during an update - that means the OS has to recompile all the native code against the new updated modules, and that takes some time to do for all installed apps. There can also be updates to the ART module itself that improve the way ART compiles code, and that also requires recompilation to have effect.
as far as I can tell the phone remains unlocked while updating, so why do they need it to be booted to finish the update? Is it just to turn on the phone faster?
There’s a mechanism called A/B partitioning where there are actually two copies of the OS installed. To update, you copy the current OS into the other slot, then apply all the updates to it and finally mark it as the active slot. When you boot your phone, the bootloader looks up the active slot and boots it (and switches the primary slot back if it fails to boot a few times in a row).
The OS can be updated during a reboot and that’s how some vendors still do it, but the downside is that the phone cannot be used during updating. With A/B partitioning and background updates, you can use your phone like usual and then reboot as quickly as any other reboot to apply the updates.
That requires just unlocked bootloader, not root. In the distant past before full disk encryption you could often use root to replace the bootloader with a new one that doesn’t verify what OS it’s booting (so you could say that rooting was part of the process of changing ROM), but nowadays it’s very rare to be able to do that.
Now you either get a tool from your OEM to unlock your bootloader (and then you can flash ROMs to your heart’s desire), or you’re screwed.
Minor nitpick: I’m pretty sure USB Video Class is not an alt mode, just a standardized interface for sending video over USB (like HID for keyboards and mice or mass storage for flash drives). Alt modes completely dump USB (except the USB 2 link which is always available) and repurpose most of USB-C’s pins for a different protocol.
They would have to sign another contract for another 24 months to get it, nobody was getting an upgrade on the existing contract because it’s just a bundle of Google services (One, YT Premium etc.) and financing on the phone. And if you don’t care about the services, Google’s two year financing is cheaper than this bundle.
See, it’s pro-consumer. Lol