I don’t think the new changes will mean that all sideloaded apps are banned. We don’t yet know how much Google will misuse this to make installing apps that they don’t find “appropriate” even though they are completely safe a burden. The verification will probably be fully automated. Can anyone clear this out?

You are right. I forgot, that there actually is a GUI panel for NVIDIA. It’s pretty simplistic, but still that makes my previous claim false.

It’s crazy how Google Maps are such a crucial app in some countries. I have used Google Maps only on rare occasions in recent years.

On Linux you have no official GUI companion app for your graphics card from NVIDIA AFAIK.

You protect yourself against “propaganda” by educating yourself and not falling for emotions. Not reading LLM responses won’t safe you from propaganda.

Just throw out LLM ideas you don’t find reasonable and only use ideas that you yourself find reasonable. You don’t instantly turn into a zombie when you use LLM. You can still use your head.

This. It doesn’t make sense for the eye to be minimalistic and the hand to be very detailed. Either they are both detailed or both minimalistic.

why would swiping away an app not kill it? why would you do that? leave it be until it’s done wtf

how much RAM you got? on my two A15 phones with 6 and 8 GB RAM nothing extraordinary happens in that regard, whereas my A15 4 GB RAM tablet can’t handle a lot of open apps and OOM kills some in the background.

EDIT: I tested the same with my file explorer while moving files, but the task didn’t get killed. This might jusz be issue with the browser.

All the stock Android versions I used until Android did not kill tasks that are run with a persistent notification. Swiping away killed the app activity, but it did not stop its tasks or services.

My device has 6GB RAM and I never had such behavior.

Are you allowing notifications for background apps?

I do. However permanent notifications was usually a workaround on OEM modified versions of Android that had a more agressive process killing policies and on stock Android this usually wasn’t needed at all. And many apps which use push notifications don’t run a constant background service, but instead run some checks at regular intervals like e-mail apps. I use K-9 mail which checks e-mails every hour and I stopped receiving notifications after the Android 15 update.

I reflashed the ROM yesterday with a newer nightly build and used Basic NikGapps instead of MindTheGapps so I will see if the situation gets better. For now I seem to be receiving notifications from Protonmail, but that may be only because their app is maybe using Google play services for notifications.

I am running 22.2-20250714-NIGHTLY-surya.

There’s a constant barrage of notifications, and by the time you have dealt with them, chances are you have forgotten what you wanted to do in the first place.

There’s a notification permission since Android 13 and you can always disable any apps notifications since I don’t know when. If you download a ton of shitty social media applications and games and then click “allow” on every notification permission prompt don’t be surprised then.

Then there is Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence bot, which won’t leave you alone. Press the home (middle) button for half a second too long, and it pops up, offering to “assist” you.

Change the default assistant settings. You can disable the assistant feature altogether.

deleted by creator

I will be honest that I don’t know what exact shit are we discussing here I rather wanted to point out that Apple might not be as much privacy first company as they like to present themselves.

I can’t. Everything they release is proprietary and locked down, so let’s just trust their narrative.

I can only recommend well researched eyeopener from Techaltar: https://youtu.be/JHnBOUNxHsw

On some BIOSes you have to set and enable master password for some advanced options to show up.

I don’t want to be “that” guy, but enabling features added with an update by default is just not the best user experience (if that’s the case).

It makes sense if your phone is well supported in the custom ROM comunnity and doesn’t receive feature or security updates from the manufacturer anymore. I am already 3 Android versions past the last supported Android version by the manufacturer thanks to community maintained ROMs. (Xiaomi Poco X3 NFC).

Google play services is a monolith, that does a plethora of stuff on the phone, including features like quick share, location services, various Firebase APIs for instant notifications stuff, find my device and whatnot, so I think the size is pretty reasonable.

The newer Android versions aren’t that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably especially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management over the years and I have an experience of newer Android versions running better than the older ones. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.

When we get to the manufacturer’s custom Android skins… Well that’s a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove manufacturer’s bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.

I stoped using yt-dlp frontends the moment I saw youtube actually serving upscaled opus media files (very visible line on a spectrogram). Also their metadata is totally fucked-up and not very well organized and full of shit (comments with huge spaces and non useful metadata…).

Wow really? Are you sure it applies to all audio files? YouTube gathers music records from different companies so they could be of varying quality. To me the opus quality from YouTube was always decent and personally I cannot hear any compression in the audio. The metada is not perfect, but I usually use some tag editor to complete what’s missing. YTDLnis on Android does a great job of scraping as much usable metada from YouTube Music as possible.