That’s their hope. The administrations of some governments are purposely doing moves to embolden terrorism, embolden racism, embolden hate. Then when someone with the wrong skin color does something terrible, they can say, “see? War were declared.” Let the wartime profits rain in!

Jewish people are great, the people of Israel seem to be smart and clever, their engineering seems first-class. Their government? Up there with the USA Federal government on the list of terrible things that need to go away.

Another route one can go that takes a bit of work is Obtainium. Hand-pick the apps you want to show up and feed their GitHub, F-Droid, etc. links to manage them. Since F-Droid has some issues with how they build packages, it can be used sparingly but not avoided then.

Go app by app until your dependence on the Play Store goes away. Then disable or uninstall (probably can only disable on most phones, I’ve seen anyway) the Play Store completely. Slow way to gain independence from crapware. You can then export your Obtainium config to a JSON file to import on future phones/other phones so you don’t have to duplicate the work.

Some bonus points, the non-Play version of one app I use shrinks from 120MB to 30MB when all the Google dependencies are stripped. You also gain back functionality like full filesystem access and other things Google forces apps to remove from the Play Store flavor.

More freedom. Faster apps. Less overhead. Less Google crap. Not a big scary transition.

They probably also likely removed it, because if you open your browser’s debug window, it identifies clearly that T-Mobile is the backing carrier, not “the big three carriers” like they claim. It’s T-Mobile’s classic MVNO coverage map, if one is familiar with it (which will include possible roaming on other carriers, so they’re not “lying”…)

That coverage site is also running on a very old system, IIRC, so good luck finding an engineer that still works there and knows how to fix it to “update” the gulf.

(Cell nerd deets, Mango-Mobile is using Liberty Wireless as their backing MVNO, which is an MVNO on T-Mobile’s infra. Liberty was also already terrible. MVNO’s are virtual cell carriers that live on real ones. It is NOT using Verizon, AT&T, or even Dish, except possibly in the case of roaming agreements.)

T-Mobile also use Muskrat’s Starlink as their mediocre sat-to-cell service, and they also leveraged Mango’s position in his first term to push through M&A’s to acquire 5G spectrum to artificially accelerate/cheat past the others. John Legere fans, cover your ears, he actually went to Mango’s FCC quite a bit to get this going.

tl;dr: probably a good idea to add T-Mobile to the boycott list next time one’s looking for cell service. (As well, any T-Mobile MVNO like Mint, MetroPCS, etc. Here’s an MVNO List that can be sorted by host network.)

He gained access to a trove of government data that he Starlinked back to his lair. He got more government military contracts and he got the FCC to revisit a bunch of hardline fiber broadband that will now end up going to Starlink or T-Mobile home broadband, as T-Mobile seems to be pretty ingrained in his money camp. Why give America fiber when you can deploy wireless affected by all sorts of extra physics problems? He also likely got a pass to keep poisoning communities with his AI datacenter running on a fleet of unfiltered backup generators.

He wanted money and access, and to feel special, like all of their types do.

That is also the first thing that popped in my head.

While this was an inevitable move, it makes me curious if they are hitting a point where Gemini is becoming so integrated in all their software stacks and they’re just insanely paranoid about any precious “AI” code leaking that they just decided to close the gates early.

Probably for the best long-term. Having this weird dependency on the generosity of a corporation was always a liability. Whatever comes next can hopefully avoid it.

Hopefully someone like the EU, to combat ewaste, eventually requires all hardware manufacturers to sell their mobile hardware with bootloader/firmware flashing unlocking requirements. The work then will be for the community to write support for all these various makes and models of device, but the endgame being actual device freedom. Although with the world seemingly leaning hard into Authoritarianism and Fascism, it might not end up being the right time and freedom will remain underground.

A pity too, all phone hardware at its core is generic ARM computers with various devices connected to fairly generic interface busses. They just encrypt bits of code so the sauce to make things work is hidden.

KaiOS is one alternative, it was FirefoxOS. It’s pretty sluggish though. Maybe on more decent hardware with some optimizations it’d have a possibility. A lot of Nokia feature phones run it.

The complexity of getting the closed binary blobs to run modems and other hardware will make it exceedingly difficult to extract the necessary files and configurations to keep third-party OSes afloat. Then there’s the matter of carrier configs, carrier compatibility, expensive carrier certification, and even then, carriers may still just ban the device because they don’t like it.

Options will end up being:

• Tearing apart ROMs for blobs and backport/reverse-engineering patches to make them run on alt OSes.
• Find some hardware based on janky Chinese modems that will have little band support, lackluster performance, and likely banned by most carriers.
• Start a new company with the pull to design a new phone OS and hardware with chip and carrier support.

Not impossible, just exceedingly difficult. These systems are heavily integrated and heavily proprietary.

Funny part is, this move will actually make Google lose more money, as Google will lose hardware/software sales, and software dev over this. More people will end up on iOS in the interim, and out of it will come some new mobile OS that will make Google’s mobile OS irrelevant in 10 years.

Let’s start now, start a company, base a new phone on QNX, have an Android emulation layer for apps until a proper SDK is developed, and just take the wind out of Google sooner than later.

Oh, the stories I could tell you… I should write a book some day.

My general contribution to the conversation is GitHub should have a donation system. Once a week, some kind of donation raffle happens, and the winner gets GitHub taken down for “reasons” for 4 hours, then 5, 6, 8. Microsoft profits more, and it slowly becomes a technology-and-money-induced vacation day.

Honestly, no, you don’t need a team. It is good practice, but not necessary. I’ve worked at several companies where the production build was made from a tower under a desk or a server blade, or an iMac on a shelf, sometimes one guy knew how it worked, sometimes nobody did, sometimes the whole team did. In most cases, managed by the product’s dev team. IT just firewall-wrapped the crap out of them.

Not to discredit the main meta thread of “we don’t have to manage anything with cloud” vs “having management team” debate. Odd thing is, cloud prices are climbing so rapidly that the industry could shift back in a near future.

Bottom line for most business though: As long as the cost makes sense, why bother self-hosting anything. That’s really what it comes down to. A bonus too, as most companies like being able to blame other companies for their problems. Microsoft knows that, and profited greatly with Windows Server/Office/etc. for that very reason.

When your quarterly profits are dashed because an employee backed into your server room and turned on the halon fire suppression system and you gotta rebuild from scratch from month-old off-site tape backups, how do you write a puff piece to explain that away without self-blame or firing the very people that know how it all works?

When your quarterly profits are dashed because Microsoft’s source control system screwed up, you make a polite public “our upstream software partners had a technical error, we’ve addressed and renegotiated,” message, shareholders are happy, and customers are still stuck with a broken product, but the shareholders are happy.

The best answer is to leave Gmail.

It has turned into this weird thing. The short of it is: antennas and battery, and a touch of telemetry.

There are so many bands across so many frequencies, as well as needing multiple antennas for MIMO that they all take space.

Large batteries are required to run the modems and ostensibly laptop processors, and also…

…All the telemetry gathering they do requires power, also adding to the desire of a big battery. (The last one is fascinating, a phone on GrapheneOS will last 2-7 days on a charge depending on use. The same on stock Android will barely last a day.)

When users find information that they wish to retain – such as schedules, event details, reservations, or listings – they can capture it by pressing the Plus Key or swiping up with three fingers. AI Plus Mind intelligently saves the relevant on-screen content to a dedicated Mind Space, helping users streamline their experience by capturing precisely what’s needed and keeping it organized in one accessible location.

So…it’s a screenshot shortcut?

Hey, now, that’s the “power” of “AI” at work! /s

Win+R, notepad, enter. The run command still works…for now.

They sure are destroying that platform at lightning speed.

Pretty much have to buy a phone that supports a custom ROM as the Qualcomm-based Samsung phones are basically impossible to downgrade unless an exploit is discovered.

Funny/sad thing is, even Apple lets you downgrade your OS for a couple of weeks after a major release.

Battery charge status is now on the bottom instead of the middle, oh dear, now you have to make sure nothing is covering that part of the screen. Battery pill: dumb.

The swipes/gestures/resizes can be disabled, but then unless you theme it, you’re stuck with their iOS icons. And if you haven’t noticed, say you turn off the iOS Control Center (quick settings on Samsung) gesture to get back double-swipe to quick settings, they changed the touch point to make that happen, and you can now pull down quick settings from the middle of the display accidentally, as well as being more sensitive in general.

OS seems slower and chunkier, even on S24.

Redoing all the lock screens to be more Apple-like with Apple-level widget limitations and removing the ability to see notifications/icons is annoying as well. There’s one that puts the time towards the upper left that used to just have a cute little row of notification icons to let you know what was going on. No more! Now it’s this neutered garbage.

Samsung used to be pretty reliable at releasing OS updates that didn’t break core Samsung behavior, and actually try to be unique.

Now their phones are just like one of those Chinese iPhone knockoffs.

Install something like Rethink DNS or DDG App Tracking Protection to see what telemetry the app is sending without your knowledge.