Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)
Well this is the final straw. Guess Iāll keep my current iPhone while it still works (unless they ruin iOS too much before that)ā¦ but then, what? I donāt want a Google thing either :(
So I guess itāll have to be some Android fork. GrapheneOS or so? But even that involves giving money to Google for a Pixel phoneā¦ thereās just no good option.
Or am I overlooking something? I donāt need many features or apps on a phone ā I donāt really like todayās smartphones anyway. Mostly I just need the basic features to work reliably. (Context: my last attempt at a non-Android Linux phone was the original Jolla phone, over 10 years ago, and that has left me a little cautious with the idea of a Linux phone, due to the many bugs with basics like āworking mobile dataā or āworking GPS in a navigation appāā¦)
I have been looking into Fairphone for work. My focus for that is mostly long lasting, repairable, hardware. I want a minimum of friction with switching the users, so it would be Android for us, but I think there are open non-Google options.
Plus 1 for GrapheneOS, has been pretty solid so far. Also, it seems that police imaging software doesnāt work on it yet!
Graphene is very nice, but you should be aware that:
That is concerning. Tbh, banking apps are probably the main reason I use a smartphone at all, because thereās no way anymore, at least where I live, to get a TAN without their stupid apps since they have all deprecated SMS TAN. Some still sell you physical token generators for ridiculous prices, but thatās going away, too.
And on the main topic of this thread: can Xwitter in general just fucking die already?
Regarding banking apps. A relative bought a Huawei just as they were pushed out of the western market and it turned out that it was shipped with a Android fork with a Huawei store. Most things worked fine, but banking apps was a problem because they could only be installed through Google Play or App Store.
The solution I found for her was installing a virtual Android environment with Google Play. So when banking apps are needed she opens the virtual environment.
I donāt know if this solution will continue working, but it works for now. Guess I will find out.
I saw a toot recently showing a number of methods to deal with the general casual shit (such as checking whether something was installed from play store, etc). donāt know if I stored the link, but might be worth a look around re the latter bits
(e: to be clear, not saying youāre wrong for indicating those issues (which are entirely valid concerns), and all of this very much depends on whether user wants to even screw around with stuff. just mean to point out that there are definitely some workarounds and options kicking around, although personally nfi how extensive they solve)
The thing that currently cannot be worked around is the āplay integrity apiā, but relatively few applications make use of it yet.
It is a terrible security measure (because it give the impression to app developers that a 5+ year old android installation thatās never had a patch is more secure than an up-to-date graphene install) so thereās a chance that it might be improved in future, but it is currently a looming problem.
ah yeah, Iāve heard of play integrity. that shit should burn.
A) True, though I got an older model on sale. That said, it is a tradeoff. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
B) Iām an adhd caveman who came from a LightPhone II. It helps to have an appetite for mild annoyance when stepping outside the regular tech ecosystems.
Edit: Apologies for sounding defensive, wanted to share my personal experience and ended up simping for software. @rook is 100% right that options are slim and fiddly!
Thanks for the infos everyone!
I can live with mild annoyance, if it allows me to sufficiently separate things from Google. Banking apps and such could indeed be a pain point, but I could just put them on another device (e.g. old iPad, which Iām never really using anyway, so i could make it a special purpose device for āthose few shitty apps that the world requires me to haveā), since I never need that on the go on my phone anyway.