My bet is “because historic reasons”.

I remember my Nokia 3220, which was the paradigm of phone personalization at its heyday. You could personalize almost everything of it - from its back cover to getting another chassis and/or keyboard with different colors, to its wallpaper, how things showed up in the “home” screen (wether if a list or a grid) to the ringtones and the light patterns they showed when the phone rang. You could even personalize said light patterns doing some dark magick with MIDI (I did one with the opening riff of Metallica’s “Hit the lights” back in the day). Frankly that phone was the tits and imho everything regarding fun but useful phones has gone downhill from there.

But about the font? No, you could not set a different one. There was no other different font, and am pretty sure it was the exact same typeface as the one in the 1100. It was hardcoded.

Same story with a Motorola Rokr Z6 I had the chance to have - you could personalize almost everything from it (it ran Linux under the hood!) except its font.

I’d say Android dragged those concepts from those old phones, and it was just like a couple years ago or so they went “oh! shit! oh! shit!” and remembered about the fonts - all we had meanwhile was the Roboto font in Android 5, which imho was a huge downgrade from the ol’ good Droid Sans family - so now they did some cheap ass effort to try to catch up. And meanwhile typeface formats have evolved a lot - not just bitmap fonts, not even just TrueType fonts, but OpenType fonts (I recall reading somewhere they’re Turing complete?) and now variable fonts. Supporting all of that stuff doesn’t seem easy, and it’s not like AOSP or Google like to put effort in stuff people actually care - they’d spend some time or it or they can choose a subset of all of that to make their lifes easier. If they want to, that is.

And not that in iOS things are better, though - I recall having to do some weird shit with mobile iTunes or something to set my mum’s favorite ringtone because it won’t allow custom ones that easily as we can in Android.

I mean, that’s great, no? You don’t have to use an account and on top of that you don’t get that ai bs.

Once I read somewhere it was because it made possible for them to make phones thinner.

This is absolutely great! Thank you so much for sharing. It’s my launcher now

K9 is Thunderbird

Seems you didn’t even read my comment - but no, at least for the moment K-9 is not Thunderbird…

Been using K-9 for a time and tried Thunderbird - it feels kind of smoother and there are some visual overhauls but ended uninstalling it because it was hard for me to tell which mails were unread (and which ones not) in the main mail list while in dark mode. I guess I’m not the only one who felt that way and surely they will fix it but this also left me the sensation that there’s not much sense in switching to Thunderbird if you’re using K-9.

Yeah, no. Pretty bad argument.

When you buy a phone you know it will have calls and SMS - it’s what you bought the phone in the first place. You bought them because of that. RCS is still just a fancy alternative.

Barring that, the EU’s DMA is forcing the most important chat apps to interoperate at the very least, though full support (including calling and such) isn’t mandatory until somewhere in 2027.

And you’re missing the point again - a company doing a multi IM service app, like Beeper Mini, is not the same that a group of volunteers doing a multi service IM app, like Pidgin. They’re still going to be closed source and they will not guarantee to give support for platforms people need. Beeper mini on desktop? Beeper mini on Linux/BSD? Forget it.

I think they mean it more as it’s not only gonna be Google but Apple who are going to be shoving RCS down their throats of people wether they want it or not by shipping it as default.

On the other hand, the era when corporations cared even the tiniest bit for open standards in instant messaging was gone long ago. Now all instant messaging is a complete mess, we users have to deal with a myriad of apps and protocols that in the end are doing the same thing for the sake of “privacy”, and RCS will not fix that. Nor Signal, truth be told.

I yearn the glory days of multi-protocol IM apps like Pidgin and Trident on Android (though +IM seems to still be a thing) - when you could use whatever you wanted without “missing features” or risking to be banned.

No need to thank me, I’d like to contribute by coding but I have no idea about Java/Kotlin/Dart/etc so… I hope you keep with it though - I’d try it again in the future to see how it’s going and hopefully move to Ion. Again, the fact it its FOSS it’s a big plus.

I mean, iOS is not doing better in that sense. They both are already mature systems and I think it would be great if they concentrate in polishing and perfecting what they already have (and hope AOSP doesn’t fall into the AI crap) but I guess that’s just me.

Kinda like it, and mostly because it’s FOSS, but will keep using “Home Launcher” (app.homelauncher, 28.0.28):

• Allows to tie gestures to certain actions, though it still can’t bind double tap on an empty area of the screen to turn it off. I wish either one had this option
• Won’t distort the icons in any way besides their sizing, as Ion Launcher does
• Lets to set another icon for any app
• Can hide apps from the drawer

I got a 1ii and though LineageOS works great compared to stock, it still has its downsides - on the top of my head screen mirroring is lost and since LOS21 can’t make Magisk w/ zigisk work.