• waterSticksToMyBalls@lemmy.world
    78·
    6 months ago

    Don’t forget rock solid app gets an unexpected update 3 years later and now is jammed with ads and offers an ad free subscription at $14/week

    • Cid Vicious@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      34·
      6 months ago

      Yeah app purchases sure went to shit, didn’t they? Sorry turns out buying an app one time for a small fee isn’t good enough, we need you to buy it again every month.

        • LordCrom@lemmy.world
          12·
          6 months ago

          Dude fuck that noise.

          I bought a lifetime copy of hex edit like 30 years ago. 20 years later I needed something and the dude answered and sent me a new code.

          Fucking rock on hex edit brother!!!

    • officermike@lemmy.world
      6·
      6 months ago

      I’m glad I heard of Discord’s plan to add ads to their Android app beforehand so I had the chance to disable updates. It’s annoying that Android keeps reminding me there’s an update available, but it’s less annoying than ads.

      • slate@sh.itjust.works
        23·
        6 months ago

        Blocking basically all ads on your phone is trivially easy.

        1. Find “Private DNS” (or something similar) in your settings
        2. Set it to dns.adguard-dns.com

        And that’s really it. There are other ad-blocking dns providers out there, and they all use slightly different block lists. I like adguard because their blocklist is less aggressive than others I’ve tried, and I’d rather an ad or two get through than for something legitimate to stop working.

        You can also set it up as your dns provider in your router to block ads on your entire network. People tend to like to self-host adguard or pihole for that, but as long as you don’t care about a dashboard or manual dns entries, using a free dns is as easy as it gets and is very effective. I self-host as a hobby and I still just use adguard’s public dns.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
        3·
        6 months ago

        Not a big deal, considering that FOSSIFY project offers all the basics you’d need for a degoogled phone: call app, messaging, contacts, calculator, calendar, gallery, etc. F-droid also has a good selection of apps, though most people, me included, will still need whatsapp one way or another. At least that thing doesn’t need any of Google’s “essential” apps.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    41·
    6 months ago

    iOS jailbreaking used to be incredible too.

    I guess it might still be for those who slipped into the “window” to do it, but I have no clue what Cydia looks like these days.

    • LucidNightmare@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      34·
      6 months ago

      Cydia is practically dead, replaced by Sileo or Zebra, and most tweaks are paid now.

      I miss when people did stuff for a hobby or for fun. Literally everything wants your money these days it seems.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        8·
        6 months ago

        Oh that sucks. It’s par for iOS though.

        Yeah, me too. So what if apps were simpler than they are now… that would be nice.

        • LucidNightmare@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          4·
          6 months ago

          It truly was a great time when the scene was really bumping. Maybe one day we’ll pendulum swing back to something along that peak jailbreak scene.

          Maybe…

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
            3·
            6 months ago

            I feel like iPhones had a sweet spot between the 4 and the… I dunno. A few generations after that? Where jailbreaking was rampant and incredible, and the phones are basically like the 16 now.

            Then Android had a ‘sweet spot’ after that. Their quality and UI fluidity really caught up, to the point where my old Razer Phone 2 (SD845) still feels faster than an iPhone 16.

            After that… well, I dunno where to go :(. Feels like both platforms are locking down.

          • Zink@programming.dev
            3·
            6 months ago

            You made me wonder if there could ever be an avenue for Apple to support this, especially with Google just getting worse and worse with android.

            Apple makes a ton of money on just hardware sales. Imagine if the next iPhone had an option that would delete iOS, possibly blow some kind of security fuse in the CPU that voids your warranty (because they still have to be dicks), and reboot into an unlocked bootloader. They could boost sales and be even shittier to Google by rolling their own distro of Linux/Android/BSD for the phones with solid drivers for everything.

            That veered off into fantasy land immediately, since that is not how Apple does things. And they do have services to sell too. But even if they only enabled open access on older models it could move a ton of units. Interesting to imagine.

      • SailorMoss@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        6 months ago

        I held onto jailbreaking till the end. I have a iPhone on iOS 17.0 and TrollStore for permanent sideloaded apps. It’s pretty awesome! There hasn’t been anything like a jailbreak or TrollStore since then. I wish I had bought an iPhone 15 on iOS 17.0 at launch so I could hold onto this as long as possible. Having a lower end iPhone I’ll probably need an upgrade in the next year or so.

        You can get a similar experience to TrollStore by paying for an Apple developer account or a third-party signing service that abuses Apple developer accounts. It seems android users may have to do a similar thing in a few years.

  • Samsy@lemmy.ml
    29·
    6 months ago

    I remember this “don’t be evil” slogan. But what was it from?

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    6 months ago

    I am very happy on GrapheneOS. Even in terms of flashing it was much nicer experience than what you had to go through back in the days

  • Team Teddy@lemmy.world
    15·
    6 months ago

    There’s so much bullshit with smartphones now that make them a pain to use, I’m honestly considering at this point to just get a flipphone and buy separate devices for the things it can do. Get a camera, MP3 player, and portable DVD player and live life the way people did 20 years ago.

  • otacon239@lemmy.world
    7·
    6 months ago

    😢 AOKP was king. I miss all the extra silly features they packed in. You could make it look almost nothing like Android by the time you were done.

    • waddle_dee@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 months ago

      YES! I was talking with someone recently about this ROM. I couldn’t remember what it was called, but I had decked out my phone on a fully wild unicorn theme based on it lmao.

  • Owl@mander.xyz
    6·
    6 months ago

    Wait what ? Side loading blocked

    Well it was a good run, time to look into custom roms…

    • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      6 months ago

      Bootloader is blocked so no custom roms. You will take whatever shit they are slinging and like it.

    • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
      1·
      6 months ago

      I left them only because Pixels were good enough, clean enough, and custom Roms couldn’t update themselves.

      If there’s one that can, I’ll happily switch back.

  • Derpgon@programming.dev
    5·
    6 months ago

    Soo, anyone ELI5. If Android is basically Linux, how hard would it be - given drivers are not an issue - so just make a Linux phone and mass produce it? You probably don’t have that many apps, but it will be possible to call and/or use messaging apps.

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
      8·
      6 months ago

      Linux is just the Kernel, Android is the OS. There’s a ton of stuff on top of Linux that makes an Android device.

      Making an Android device (or Android device hardware) run Linux isn’t hard. In fact, you can just use Termux on pretty much any Android device to run a regular desktop Linux distro run in a container on Android. That way, the Linux distro uses the kernel from the host Android OS and just runs its own userspace parallel to Android’s userspace.

      But if you want to make a stand-alone Linux phone without Android, your biggest issue is that you won’t have phone apps. There’s close to no app support for phone-linux. So on your Linux phone you won’t get any banking/authenticator/messaging/games/… apps. You can run desktop apps, but that sucks on a tiny touchscreen display. And many use cases (e.g. authenticator/two-factor/buying public transport tickets) are very cumbersome or sometimes even not possible on desktop OSes.

      Now you an make your Linux phone run Android by emulating the Android userspace. That’s possible, but then again you are basically running Android at that point anyway. But Android with one big caveat: It’s not a Google Play Store Certified device, and it will never be if it’s not running full Android.

      And missing Google Play Store Certification means no google services and no apps that rely on Google Services or require Google Play Store Certification. That means e.g. no Banking/Authenticator apps and many games won’t run.

      Also, if you aren’t actually running Android but some kind of Android emulator, you will always be outdated and buggy.

      So essentially you made a phone that

      • Runs Linux apps a little better than an Android phone
      • Gives you more control
      • Allows you to do much, much less in regards to it being an Android phone

      People have done it. There are a handful of Linux phones (e.g. Librem 5, Pinephone) that are barely usable as phones due to lack of app support.

      They’ve done the opposite as well, so running Linux on a phone originally designed for Android (e.g. PostmarketOS), also barely usable as a phone.

      There’s also the middle-ground with custom ROMs, some of them degoogled (like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/ and many others). They run full-fat Android, but without all the Google apps including Play Store, Google Services and of course also without Google Play Store Certification. That’s more usable as a phone, but you will still be cut off from anything using Google Services. There are some hacks and workarounds that sometimes work and sometimes not. You might get stuff to work but it’s a constant race.

      The problem is that currently if you want to use a phone as a full phone that covers all phone usecases, it’s got to be an iPhone or a Google certified Android phone.

    • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      given drivers are not an issue

      All the Linux phones run on outdated hardware because that’s the main problem.