Thanks! Couldn’t be bothered to look it up :)

Cuphead will now be renamed to whatever the cup from Beauty and the Beast was called.

I’m not one for simple and quick games, so I’m the wrong one to ask.

I enjoyed Polytopia, Minecraft, Conspiracy (a Diplomacy clone), Bomb Squad and Star Realms a lot. But none of them are exactly simple. Maybe Conspiracy, but that’s also not quick at all.

Do you only want free ad-free or is it ok if you can pay to remove ads?

Free ad-free is kinda limited. Can’t think of anything there right now.

Paid ad-free, there are lots of options. Most games offer an ad-free version/in-app-payment for a few Euros.

Alternatively, you can get rid of ads using NetGuard (only the versions from F-Droid and Github can block ads, the one on the play store cannot due to Googles restrictions).

NetGuard filters ads locally without sending leaking metadata to some ad-blocking DNS services.

And contrary to a Pi Hole it also works when you are not at home, since it runs directly on the phone.

Sorry, mistranslation. I meant violations. Over here we only split into violations and crimes.

Violations cover most things done with a car/in traffic without actively harming someone.

Well, no. Blocking traffic is no crime. It’s just a misdemeanor (Verwaltungsübertretung).

The difference in regards to a conspiracy charge is that you don’t need a conspiracy behind it.

In Germany, there are actually 18 different laws regarding this, since that part of the law is federated. So each state of Germany (plus the federal police and the federal criminal police) has it’s own law regarding under what circumstances they are allowed to arrest someone before they committed a crime and for how long.

Originally, these laws had two purposes:

• Stop someone from committing a serious crime
• Stop someone from doing harm to themselves

And as such, these laws used to have tight limits on when they can apply and for how long people are allowed to be arrested.

A case could be made for these laws. E.g. if someone announces online that they are going to shoot kids at a school, it would be totally justified to quickly bag that guy before he kills children. Waiting for a court order might not be fast enough to save the would-be victims.

But then they started to expand the reasons why someone can be arrested and for how long.

In Bavaria, for example, it’s enough that someone carries items that can be used for criminal purposes. And there they can jail people for up to two months without a charge.

There have been cases where someone was put in jail for two months for carrying items like crowbars or ropes in their backpacks.

Nope, it’s actually only that the police has reason to believe that they might commit a crime.

No need for them to be prior offenders or anything. The police can arrest anyone at any time if they believe you might commit a crime. And even comparatively minor things like blocking traffic counts.

Sometimes X is also used to abbreviate Crossmas.

Tbh, that different understanding doesn’t matter much if you have enough reviews since it averages out.

If you compare two products with one review each, then yes, it hugely matters whether the one reviewer considered 5 stars as “expectations fullfilled” or “the best thing that happened to me ever”.

But if you got >1k reviews, both sides will get equal amounts of both reviewer groups and it will average out so that both products will be compareable based on their stars.

That’s a big misunderstanding many people have in regards to reviews. Many people are also afraid that unfair reviewers will skew the score. But since these unfair reviewers are usually spread equally over all products, it averages out as soon as you have a couple hundred reviews.

And that’s also what that article criticises. It’s much more important how many reviews an article has than the exact value. It’s easy to get a straight 5-star rating if you have only a single review. It’s much harder to do so if you have 10k reviews.

So the information value is: <100 or so reviews, the rating means little to nothing. >1000 reviews it can be usually trusted.

Amazon thinks useless ratings are what makes Aliexpress successful.

The main differences with Star Citizen are that it’s

• Funded in advance
• Funded by people who have no say in how the product/company should work
• Massively overfunded

This means, CIG has no pressure to ship soon or even at all (if the project fails, they have no liability). They also have nobody telling them what to with the money. They have already made their profit.

I am not knocking CIG for this situation, but if you put it like this, it’s easy to see why for each CIG out there, there are tens of thousands of games on crowdfunding sites that either

• Failed to raise funds
• Failed to get a decent company/legal structure running with the money they raised
• Failed to actually ever deliver anything in an usable state
• Are just pure scams

So as a general business model rather than just an insane stroke of luck, I don’t think this is a good option.

A business model that only earns money after release (like the classic publisher-funded development model) is bad for the obvious cash-grabby and buggy reasons, but at least it consistently delivers games. Contrary to the “earn money before you start development” model that is enabled by crowdfunding, which in general does not deliver games.

In my (not very educated) opinion, early access is probably the best middle ground. You start off with little initial funding required, but by the time you turn to the crowd, you already have a working prototype and company structure. That makes it much more likely for the game to eventually be released in a full version. This option obviously comes with its own downsides as well, but many of my favourite games have been small studios or even individuals who use early acces to fund development.

Yeah, but some of us oldies still remember the before times when we just had 35 Sims 2 expansions.

Microtransactions come with specific challenges. Specifically, you have to give the players a reason to pay them, and that’s usually done by making the game purpously worse for those who don’t pay.

And then you need someone to foot the bill for all that. Preferrably ahead of time.

That’s kinda how lucky Star Citizen got, but that’s not a business model you can replicate a second time.

Imagine getting 18% extra battery life each year. That would be something to write home about.

UT99. To this day one of the best shooters. Can’t play it like I used to, since I don’t have anyone who’d play it with me. Also, only LAN parties are the real deal for games like that.

It’s crazy, the difference! Didn’t expect it.

But, what would you need a foldable phone for that purpouse? You can do the same with a regular phone in portrait mode.

“This goofy fridge has a really clever design. It’s also kinda terrible.”

63 minutes long, and still super enjoyable.

Oh, I so want that!

You are totally right, there is a boatload of shovelware free2play/pay2win games on the Play Store. They all sound the same, they probably all are the same. I get the feeling that these games are auto-generated. Just have the same base game and swap out strings and maybe assets, autogenerate a new title and publish it.

How else would all that free2play garbage always be ranked at the very top.

Sounds plausible to me.

Well, if he decides on Sunday night that the logo will be changed on Monday morning and he’s not taking no for an answer, that leaves pretty little time and wiggle room for his employees to actually get permissions and stuff in time.

At some point Musk will get arrested. For what I haven’t decided yet.

Well, it’s not the biography of whoever is going to play him either, hence the only authentic choice would be him being played by himself.

Sure, but for the not super popular ones it’s mostly about whether there’s some random dev who owns that phone and wants to keep it alive.

The Droid 3/4 for example where kept alive for much longer than their popularity would suggest.

Usually yes, if you want it to.

By default, though, a device with a custom ROM or root (basically anything but an unmodified stock ROM) will not have SafetyNet or Play Integrity API certifications. This means, apps that check for that (e.g. banking apps) won’t run on the device.

There is a tool (Universal SafetyNet Fix) which tries to fake these certifications and will give you full SafetyNet but only partial Play Integrity API status.

(Play Integrity API is split into MEETS_BASIC_INTEGRITY, MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY and MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY. Depending on how lucky you are, you’ll get basic and/or device, but you will not get strong).

With Universal SafetyNet Fix I have yet to encounter an app that doesn’t run, but theoretically apps could be checking for MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY and then there is nothing you can do to get it running (short of modifying the app itself).

You are totally right that it is mightily impressive that basically some randos on the internet are able to better support old phones than manufacturers are willing to do.

Sure, with custom ROMs you can carry phones much farther than intended, if you are lucky enough that your phone gets updated custom ROMs.

But I wouldn’t equate 3rd-party support with 1st-party support.

Also, custom ROMs that provide newer Android versions than the original 1st-party support often don’t upgrade everything, e.g. the kernel is usually not upgraded, which can cause issues in some circumstances.

But yeah, it’s pretty great that there are people who spend their spare time to get newer versions of Android on old phones. Should be standard, that phone manufacturers are doing this themselves, sadly it’s not.

That’s some long-term support. If your iPhone doesn’t get OS updates, it almost instantly turns into a brick. Android doesn’t get updates for nearly as long, but you won’t lose apps and stuff nearly as fast.

I really wonder how well these concepts work. I feel like both durability and haptics would be an issue.

Ok, there is no point in arguing with you. You haven’t read up on the backgrounds, you haven’t tried to understand, and you are arguing from fundamentalist viewpoints.

No point in talking with fundamentalists. It just goes in circles.

Um, what? Last I checked, Firefox was the only mobile browser that supports extensions, including the all-important uBlock Origin, without which the web is basically unusable.

Kiwi Browser gives you all desktop chrome addons. Yandex as well, if you prefer Russian surveillance over US surveillance.

Even Samsung’s browser offers addons.

And Vivaldi has about everything I need (including an uBlock compatible adblocker and dark mode for websites) integrated directly into the browser.

If a website doesn’t work in Firefox, there’s a problem with that website, not with Firefox. I’ve done my share of web development. I had to deal with IE6 compatibility for years. Firefox is a dream come true compared to what I’ve been through. I test my work in all three major browsers, and I suffer no excuses from developers too lazy to do the same. Especially now that there are only three of them.

That’s good of you, and as a dev I also test on FF (contrary to many of my colleagues), but that’s not what everyone does. And thus, as a user, I frequently stumble over stuff that doesn’t work on FF.

What in the world are you talking about? I’m writing this comment in Android Firefox. It works fine. It’s my daily driver. I only use Chrome for testing.

If everyone felt like that, don’t you think FF on Android would have a market share higher than 0.48% on mobile?

If a website doesn’t work in Firefox, there’s a problem with that website, not with Firefox.

That, again, comes down to maket share. If FF on Android was alcohol, it’s market share could be legally called “alcohol free” (at least over here).

No market share -> no financial incentive to fix websites for that browser -> broken websites -> reduced market share

That’s the real problem. That’s illegal, by the way; Microsoft got sued for bundling IE with Windows. Pity the courts these days don’t care about upholding the law.

It actually isn’t. Microsoft got sued in 2001 (so 22 years ago, and that matters), and they only got sued to open up their OS so that users could replace the browser if they wanted to. They were actually not prohibited from bundling IE with Windows.

And putting ad-banners on their own website to market their own browser (like Google is/was doing with Chrome on the Google search site and on Youtube) was never part of anything like that.

Unfortunately, maybe, illegal no.

Just to make sure, we are talking about Vivaldi on Android, correct?

Seeing Vivaldi’s feature bloat if a bottom bar with infrequently used buttons that blocks viewing space

What buttons do you mean? The only two buttons that I see added from Firefox are the history and the adblocker control. Both pretty useful. I also don’t see how they block viewing space. What else do you want to view in the bottom bar?

and a completely unnecessary tab bar on mobile that wastes space

… that can be turned off if you don’t like it. Also it’s an absolute killer feature and one of the main reasons why I chose Vivaldi over FF. If you don’t like it, you can turn it off. I much rather have the option to enable/disable a function than to not have the function at all.

I tried Vivaldi, don’t really even see a difference between the tab drawers.

Try to drag-and-drop a tab. In Vivaldi, it works exactly as expected.

On FF it first goes into the multiselection mode and only if you drag it over its stubbornly clingy dead zone can you rip it from its position. ~1/4 of the time the whole screen jumps to a random position, especially if you have many tabs. If you drag too early, the tab doesn’t get moved at all, but instead the whole screen moves.

Other than that, I see that they fixed some of the jankiness that it had a year ago when I last seriously used FF on Android.

when these single press buttons can easily be moved to gestures or condensed. You know, like modern UX design.

Gestures are one of the dumbest UX decisions possible, because they lack affordability in most cases. Stuff like swipe to reload/go back/go forward is pretty dumb because you trigger it accidentally a lot.

Like a third of my screen is just gone because of of redundant buttons and UI. Reminds me of Internet Explorer days with Yahoo toolbar.

What kind of screen size do you have? On my screen, the bottom bar and the tab row take up maybe 5% of the screen real estate. And again, if you don’t like it, disable the tab bar and make the bottom bar auto-hide.

You just kinda listed bad website compatibility like 5 times. That’s not even true lol, it’s very rare there’s a compatibility issue, and it’s also very rare that websites refuse to support it. Can’t think of any right now actually.

Happens often enough. Just the other day I tried to watch something on joyn.de (a TV streaming service) and the videos just wouldn’t play on Firefox. Had to actually switch over to Chromium to get it working.

Most of the issues is because Chrome actually incorrectly adds something, or has a bug. Then for compatibility sake, Firefox has to actually match that broken buggy implementation so the end result is the same. This is another big reason why a chromium monopoly is bad.

That’s a frequently stated topic that’s suspiciously always lacking any sources. Also, if you have >50% market share and if your engine has >75% market share, is there something like “incorrectly adding” something? Incorrectly as stated by whom? By the makers of a browser with <3% market share?

This is another big reason why a chromium monopoly is bad.

Well, if everyone is using Chromium, there is no such thing as an engine that has to implement someone else’s stuff.

Tbh, I really don’t miss the early 2010’s when web development meant you had to test on 10 different engines

Also the Android UX being bad is just funny to me. I find it by far the best, and you should absolutely not be speaking for other people. Would like to know what actual browser you think has better UX? Considering it’s been so long since they changed the UI, I think you must’ve forgotten how truly bad it was before. Also that they added support back for some missing stuff people wanted, like grid list for tabs.

Just to check, I reinstalled the old version of FF and the UX is amazing compared to the current one. It really is. If you want one that is closely comparable, checkout Vivaldi. FF feels like a student’s hobby project compared to it.

I don’t keep a log of websites that don’t work on FF. The last one I came across is joyn.de, a TV streaming site. They don’t tell you that it isn’t working on FF, it just crashes when trying to play a video.

For simple stuff not supporting FF is really asinine, but for deeper stuff, like hardware accellerated video streaming, it’s not quite as easy. Especially if you are, for some reason, stuck with old frameworks or in-house developed stuff.

Actually, the application that I work on (b2b software) frequently has FF-only bugs, because the frontenders in my team refuse to test every commit on FF. It’s just me finding the bugs randomly.

The thing with free and open source is that it’s not free to develop. Mozilla still needs to pay the development. Even though the source is open, 99% of the development is done by full-time (and obviously paid) Mozilla employees. Being open source doesn’t really help Mozilla bring down the development costs at all.

I don’t even use chrome… But apparenty I found the Firefox fanboy who gets butthurt whenever someone says anything about the difficulties of the thing they fanboy…

Sadly, this kind of attitude makes it really hard to (a) actually leverage constructive criticism and (b) drives people away from using the product the fanboy is defending.

But yeah, if it makes you feel better to hurt Firefox and it’s community, it’s your call.

And in basically every instance a FF desktop extension that wasn’t made for the new FF on Android will not work on it.