I mean, it’s less of an issue on Linux for both design and user profile reasons, but imagine a world where somebody can send all the normie Windows users a file called Chromesetup.exe to sit alongside ChromeSetup.exe. Your grandma would never stop calling you to ask why her computer stopped working, ever.
Yeah, right? Are we pretending that having case sensitive file names isn’t a bad call, or…? There are literally no upsides to it. Is that the joke?
See, this is a tough one. Privacy concerns are legitimate, but also, when people keep reminding that Meta was a key player in acts of terror and genocide what is often not said is that a lot of it happened over Whatsapp groups and direct messages, as in India and Burkina Faso. Direct messaging apps are also social media.
I don’t have a solution for this. It’s a mess of an issue and honestly, I don’t know that I trust anybody with a strong, aggressive position one way or the other.
This feels like one of those small innovations that will become a marker of quality once somebody thinks about them for a while. Someone will figure out how to make the perfect indicator visible in a dark-ish environment without emitting much light otherwise, or some other way to confirm something is charging and it’ll become the way you can tell which electronics are expensive. I, for one, can’t wait. My fiber box is wrapped in so much tape you could drop it from a tall building and it’d be just fine.
It is a replacement for a specific portion of a very complicated ecosystem-wide integration involving a ton of interoperability sandwiched between the natural language bits. Why this is a new product and not an Assistant overhaul is anybody’s guess. Some blend of complicated technical issues and corporate politics, I bet.
So an interesting thing about this is that the reasons Gemini sucks are… kind of entirely unrelated to LLM stuff. It’s just a terrible assistant.
And I get the overlap there, it’s probably hard to keep a LLM reined in enough to let it have access to a bunch of the stuff that Assistant did, maybe. But still, why Gemini is unable to take notes seems entirely unrelated to any AI crap, that’s probably the top thing a chatbot should be great at. In fact, in things like those, related to just integrating a set of actions in an app, the LLM should just be the text parser. Assistant was already doing enough machine learning stuff to handle text commands, nothing there is fundamentally different.
So yeah, I’m confused by how much Gemini sucks at things that have nothing to do with its chatbotty stuff, and if Google is going to start phasing out Assistant I sure hope they fix those parts at least. I use Assistant for note taking almost exclusively (because frankly, who cares about interacting with your phone using voice for anything else, barring perhaps a quick search). Gemini has one job and zero reasons why it can’t do it. And it still really can’t do it.
I am cringing pretty hard, doesn that count as “emotional”?
I sincerely don’t care enough about the fate of F-Droid to spend too long litigating the parts of this strategy that seem ill-conceived. If you think that implies hostility… well, it doesn’t. Hell, I hope I’m wrong, it’d be great to have a good indie storefront on Android to use as a default. I just don’t think as described this is it at all.
Otherwise, cope as you need. I have explained the bits I think you’re misunderstanding, I just don’t want to repeat that over and over because man, I need to have an online interaction that doesn’t devolve into that at some point. And I don’t want to explain why not wanting to talk to you any longer is not conceding the point, so this is the last time I’ll express that, too. Cool? Cool.
That’s a weird take, man. By that metric no online conversation can ever end.
I’ve made my point, I’ve said my piece. I’m not super emotionally invested on F-Droid’s success, either. This seems like a bad move in a few different ways, and it’s one that interferes with how I use the platform for the reasons I’ve stated. You don’t want that to be the case, I get that, but I don’t need your permission to feel that what’s being proposed here is going to mess with how I use it.
I also don’t need your permission to make the case that a store of monetized apps is a store of monetized apps and is competing with huge, polished, integrated alternatives in a way that F-Droid currently doesn’t. You’re mostly arguing with the kind of just-use-GIMP wishful thinking where it’s feasible for people to step out of their comfort zone or make morality-driven consumption choices en masse. I don’t feel I need to argue with you about it, though. It’s gonna go the way it’s going to go. The part that bums me out the most, as I said, is as an illustration for how self-reinforcing the niche position of FOSS can be sometimes. Otherwise, you do you.
I genuinely have nothing new to add to this conversation. All my previous points stand and they either address those objections already or the caveats are self-evident.
If anything I’ll say that seeing the defensiveness come together in real time is really helping me understand many recurring narratives happening around this space. I suggest we call this process “the GIMP effect”.
My point is I don’t care about the intentions of the project, I care about the piece of software that comes out the other end, regardless of whether that’s intended or not. A store with a mix of commercial and noncommercial software is just an Android store, like all the other Play alternatives. A repository of non commercial software where you know all the stuff you find fits a specific set of properties is a different thing, and I don’t need to read what the developers say online to feel that difference in the software.
It´s fundamentally harder to see the difference between Play and F-Droid if both have free, monetized and ad-based applications than if Play is mostly monetized and F-Droid is all noncommercial. If F-Droid steps away from that then it has a lot of homework to do and it enters a direct competition that is easy to understand: there are many stores, Play is the best one and the default, so why would I be using another one? If it was up to me, I’d even consider doing this as a separate app and keeping F-Droid as a dedicated version to remain in the position it already has, even if for developers they´re all uploading their software to the same back-end.
F-Droid now has a good answer to that. The version they´re proposing, regardless of their intentions, does not.
Does that help clarify where I´m coming from?
I think this train of thought fundamentally misunderstands how usability works and how positioning works. But hey, I don’t own this, I don’t have a stake on this and I already have F-Droid installed. At a glance it seems like a bad move that makes a thing I use less useful and more like a bunch of things I don’t use. We’ll see where it goes.
To clarify, I’m making a two step argument: One, I will only install a second store on my phone if that store serves a specific use case I don’t get from the first one (which is Play by default, since it comes preinstalled). Two, if F-Droid is going to sacrifice the clear message that it’s the place for noncommercial apps, then it must carry the same apps Play does, it needs to carry ALL of them so I can make it my default store.
So I understand what you’re saying, my point is that this is not a viable value proposition for me. F-Droid is positioned as the safe place for noncommercial software. If it’s no longer going to be that, then it’s picking the same fight with Google Play that the Samsung or Amazon stores do, and it’s just as likely to lose that fight. The reason it isn’t doing that at the moment isn’t its moral high ground, it’s that it has a clear position that doesn’t overlap with Play’s: noncommercial software.
Those are all advantages for developers and activists. End users don’t care or need to care. As an end user the only reason for keeping two stores in my phone is that one does a thing the other one doesn’t, functionally. That’s why Samsung can keep putting their dumb store on their phones forever but people just don’t engage with it.
Now, unlike the Samsung store when I was on a Samsung phone, F-Droid is something I do use, because there is a clear use case there: Play for all the commercial apps, F-Droid for non-commercial alternatives and a stuff that Google doesn’t allow on Play for whatever reason.
If F-Droid wants to make a push for being my only store, they better provide all the functionality, support, variety and convenience Play does, because Play comes pre-installed. If I can’t go to F-Droid to be guaranteed to not have to deal with payments or MTX, then it better have every single thing I need. I’m talking every game, every app, every legacy piece of software. It better have the same one-click payment convenience I get from Google Pay. And it better still have a default option to search for completely free apps, or I’ll have to go find a F-Droid alternative that does that for when I want to be sure I’m not getting any hidden fees with my app.
I’m not sure I can be as pliant as others here. Being less of an activist and more of a user of convenience, if I am making PayPal payments somebody better give me a reason why I’m not just using the same store that came in by default with my phone.
Man, the lack of a sense of humor in this thread is palpable. Can cut the harrumph with a knife.
For context, Meta reported 40 billion in revenue during that period, with 24Bn in expenses and made 13bn for the period. All those numbers are up from the same period last year.
So I’m gonna go with “probably, yeah”.
Is the fuel in this case a bunch of damaged 13 and 14th gen CPUs?
Man, this is only tangentially related, but I’ve slowly drifted away from the garbage app economy over the years, huh? That paragraph literally had me going “Oh, right, people use Instagram on their phones and stuff”, for different things like three or four times. No bearing to your point, but I will give myself some props.
Anyway, yeah, I’m not gonna stand here and say that iOS doesn’t make more sense as a starting point, both due to their hardware and software consolidation AND their US-centric nature that tends to make it a more profitable first stop (although that margin has narrowed) or that full legacy Android support isn’t more technically challenging. I think you’re overrepresenting the memory issue, though. You’d be hard pressed to find a dirt cheap Android phone with less than what? 4/6 Gigs of RAM? For mobile apps that will condition how fast things load and how many background apps get held before being flushed, but it’s not gonna be a massive challenge to make something run. And if it is, you should get that under control regardless.
About the rest of that list, I do think it’s interesting how half-remembered it is. For a while Instagram photos “just looked better” to the point of it becoming a meme, but that hasn’t been a thing on major Android phones for a couple of iterations, so it shouldn’t matter to anybody buying a new phone today even if you’re on Instagram (don’t be on Instagram). I don’t know about the “chatGPT” or “chatGPT competitors”. Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT and Perplexity have all been on Android for a while, not sure if it was all day one, but it was all certainly timely and available when I wanted to check it out. As for the LTT thing, I’m guessing from a google search, but was that about pop-up video being free on iPhone but part of the subscription on Android? Wasn’t that a regional thing? In any case it wasn’t a lack of support, it seems it was a guideline compliance thing. Not that I use the default Youtube app, but I’m guessing the Youtube guy wouldn’t point that out.
All of the minutia aside, I will say that as an Android user it’s been a long time since I went “wow, I wish that very useful app/feature/implementation” was available on my phone. I think the only things that came close to that were a couple of Apple Arcade exclusives I wish I could have purchased outright. It’s no question that there is an extra demand for coverage and support on Android, but at this point the market is large enough and the processes well understood enough that this is a development issue, not an end user issue. By and large, mobile apps you want and hear about are available right away and work just fine across devices.
Whose mandate? Are you going to make a law saying you can’t customize Google’s base Android?
It’s an open source OS, manufacturers offer crappy support because they want customizations and proprietary software but don’t want to have to spend a bunch of engineering time to keep pace with Google’s reference spec. Samsung does, but that’s because they’re the literal largest phone manufacturer on the planet.
But Google can’t be out there saying you don’t get to use Android code if you don’t offer timely support for a decade. There’s a reason years of security updates are now a declared selling point, the only force to drive it is market pressure. At most you could regulate that you HAVE to support swapping OSs on phones, but you can’t just target that at Android and not Apple, and Apple would buy themselves a nuke to fight against that one.
Well, camel case does help readability on file names. But I guess that’s the point of case insensitive names, it doesn’t matter. However you want to call them will work.