Exactly. At the end of the day, naming is not that relevant as long as it conveys the message of what the app does. It only gets confusing when you have a bunch of apps doing the same thing
Google isn’t interested in good UX, so they prioritize the next “new” internally to their staff. This is the end result. It’s why I switched from Android (and I was pretty huge fanboy in my teens haha) to iOS. Apples got its own issues but the user experience end to end is leagues ahead. Phones don’t innovate anymore so in the end I just want a solid pocket computer with a great camera.
The legal dispute between Lenovo, Motorola, and InterDigital in Germany has led to a sales ban on devices equipped with WWAN modules crucial for mobile internet connectivity
They just transitioned to Google Wallet, which lacks some features, notably peer-to-peer transactions. The API for virtual banking cards that most banking apps use instead of including their own NFC driver, also called "Google Pay", will keep working. At least that's how I understand it.
I miss the Nexus concept. There were some whiffs, but then wins like the Nexus 6. Having a vendor juggle was always fascinating, and they mostly used good modems.
I'm pretty sure they're just treading water this year, and focusing on their in-house design for the Tensor G5 in 2025. Hopefully it doesn't break Graphene support.
I'll tell you a secret it well always be the next one. Has been that way forever with Google hardware. Don't know why people still think they well do something magical at this point.
Performance matters. The tensor chipsets throttle heavily because they have bad thermals and they cannot sustain their performance after just 3 minutes of mild to heavy use. After 10 minutes they perform worse than midrange snapdragon processors. It would be different if pixels were cheap. But, unfortunately they are not. Making this alongside connectivity issues a sore point for pixels.
The thermals between the different Tensors are not the same. The G3 is made on a smaller manufacturing node and it's significantly more power efficient in daily use.
The a-series are priced at the mid range and they also use the same chipsets as the more expensive Pixels.
When I was talking about thermals I was primarily speaking about the tensor G3. The previous generations are way worse.
As for A series being priced midrange. In my country it costs Rs52999($635) for the base 8/128gb model. I can get the top 16/256gb variant of the oneplus 12R with the much superior Snapdragon 8 gen 2 for Rs45999($551). There are also other options like the Poco X6 pro, motorola edge 50 pro, and the Realme GT 6T which cost significantly less.
Unless, pixels start approaching the price point of other smartphones. Its a no go to pay the google price just for software and camera alone.
Well in that case the Pixels are simply overpriced there and there's definitely more hardware to be had in the ones you mentioned.
On a separate note, the Snapdragon based devices simply don't compare in security update support. That's the primary reason I've been putting up with the first gen Tensor. All of the first gen Pixels in use will be secure till the end of 2026. And the 8/8a series till 2030/31.
Samsung s24 series promise 7 years of OS and security updates just the same as pixel 8 smartphones. Fairphone also promises up to 8 years of security updates and at least 5 os updates until 2031.
Samsung uses a mix of snapdragon and exynos. Fairphone uses an usual but enterprise grade midrange snapdragon processor. So, 7 years of updates do happen with snapdragon. Just depends on the manufacturer and the contract they have with Qualcomm.
This is new development with Qualcomm's chipsets and they've historically been extremely reluctant to sign contracts for long update support so I'm skeptical till proven otherwise. They've always been a super profit maximizing company and they've typically been the king of the hill for Android and still are for modems, so they have all the incentives to not sign such agreements or not honor them. We don't know how strong these are. I'd be super happy to be proven wrong. I've worked (and still do) on the embedded side with devices built on QC chipsets and Qualcomm behave today as they did a decade ago.
A custom ROM based on AOSP, which offers a minimal UI enhancement & close to stock pixel Android ROM with great "Performance", "Security" and "Stability".
What makes this even funnier is that on their website they say that the ROM is great and all (with very poor grammar and odd phrasing), but they don't say what they actually changed. The closest thing I could find was their screenshot gallery where they show some new icons and AI-generated wallpapers
Also corporate memphis art everywhere because why not lol
I feel sorry for anyone who was using this ROM, but this whole thing is hilarious
Who is this for really though? Any person installing roms is clued in and knows what they want. This “stable” author’s custom-rom credentials should be drop kicked into the sun.
Yeah, this is just trading the possible need to open after installing for needing to close the app I wanted to use later. I see it as trading one click for two swipes.
As someone who just switched to an Xperia as it's one of the few phones that still has a headphone jack, NFC, and microSD slot, this sucks. The software support is the biggest problem IMO because the rest is great.
I need to move on from my LG (RIP) G6 soon due to battery life and apps becoming unsupported so I've been shopping around.
Right now I have a headphone jack, NFC, MicroSD, FM Radio and 4k video recording.
I'll probably have to give up the radio at least if not more to get a well rounded phone.
The G6 came out 7 years ago but it feels like most new phones are a downgrade in comparsion.
My Nokia XR20 has all three (and NFC), that and it being a "tough phone" were the attraction at the time, as it double times as the GPS on my bicycle and track logging hikes etc
And it wasn't a proprietary storage card? They didn't invent their own headphone jack that only works with Sony headphones? Amazing. It's like a whole new company!
If you can't tell, I'm still salty about aaaaaallllllllllllllllll the shit they pulled in the 90s/00s. Nothing like buying an mp3 player with money I should've been spending more responsibly and then learning I could only use Sony brand storage cards. Cards that cost twice as much for the same storage space. I bought my Xbox and dropped PlayStation solely because of those shenanigans.
If, in twenty years, HP makes the only computer that doesn't give you literal AIDS I still won't buy one. And i feel the same about Sony today
Sony is shifty with their PlayStation practices but their phones are genuinely good - seems like they are closer with the camera part of the business, which is pretty well liked from what I understand. The software support (or lack of) is the main issue but the hardware is clearly made by people that care (although apparently not enough about overheating on the IV series).
Yeah, I had that with Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung.
A couple years ago, I decided not to cut my nose off to spite my face and evaluate the products and hope some shenanigans root kit doesn't happen after i've purchased it
I think im paraphrasing the author Iain Banks here, I feel like a piece of sweet corn in a turd, technically I'm intact but I'm still surrounded by shit.
On the plus side it pushed me to Linux as my desktop OS.
member digital cameras being 4 megapixel and that was amazing?
member Nokias being bullet proof?
member Nextel push to talk?
member downloading albums on limewire using the coffee shop's Wi-Fi across the street, cobbling together a Can-tenna using a coke can cut up with a utility knife for a better signal?
member waiting for Penny Arcade to load like one line at a time because everyone was using the free Wi-Fi from the coffee shop?
member file sharing using mp3 discs with everyone on your floor?
Dude I went straight back to J&R on Park Row and returned that thing. I had SD cards from my camera that I planned to use, and didn't ask about storage at the store (mistakes of youth lol). I eventually got a Zen (30Gb!) a year or two later. What a tank!
Some Asian markets don't use it, so there are some exceptions. This becomes important when the other requirements filter it down so much (but this was more of a problem a few years ago).
Personally, YT premium is my only subscription I have, and wouldn't really have any others if money wasn't this tight. But I was paying before this recent anti blocker war, I prefer YT Music just because of the way it handles a bunch of the music remixed by seperate and probably not "official" artists. And with how much youtube I watch on mobile instead of my PC, messing with blocking wasn't very appealing to me, since the jump from YTmusic to full premium is less than almost any streaming sub.
But I have always watched/backgroundnoised a lot of youtube, so its not that much of pain. Realistically, this was bound to happen eventually, hosting that much content hasn't really gone down in costs as quickly as most tech overhead. But its a fairly complex line item, not just hardware & facilities, but all the law office hours related to copyright log is an ongoing and probably still growing cost for them and since they are not Disney thats a real cost I'd imagine.
As a side note, it just reminds me how shockingly unaware I am of how much they must value our personal data, that it only just now became worthwile to fight blockers with this much effort and PR/image depreciation.
Except I can't think of a company that's large enough to be multi-state who hasn't made almost every decision in the last 10 years the wasnt the most short-sighted option regardless of how much more value would be made otherwise. No corporate strategies look anything like Shadow Boxing to me, they all want to just rape and pillage for a short of a time as possible the same they're more Bandits then Shadow boxers
It's only worth what people are willing to pay. Already have Spotify anyways and not a fan of googles app killing tactics, learned that the hard way a couple times.
Same as Walmart killing off every ma and pa shop is their fault, they lowbid the competition solely because they're able to with their monopolization, solution being actual competition in the industry.
Can't help but feel your goal posts are sentient with how much they're moving.
I'm not sure how my goalposts could be moving when I'm not even sure I placed any at all. Do you have any ideas to solve this monopoly you see YouTube having?
To add information on that the other person didn't, YouTube was purchased by alphabet in 2006, it was purchased in a very unstable state, it was bleeding money, but they wanted it because they saw potential in the platform for Data Tracking and video analytics along with the fact that it had a very high traffic ratio.
When they purchased it one of the first things they started working on was trying to turn it to be green instead of red, but despite this they still didn't start seeing any real decent change until about 2009, and it wasn't until 2015 that the platform itself started running in the green.
All this happened with YouTube being one of the most popular video platform sites out there. YouTube doesn't have to do anything to actively block competitors from doing it, with their established market dominance, search engine self promotion tendancies(there was an ongoing lawsuit in Australia regarding this) and the amount of sheer money they have, no company is going to try to compete, the closest arguably is likely twitch but they are pushing the reverse direction with streaming instead of video hosting
Just to be clear - it's the API that's shutting down, not the app. Not that Google has put in effort for the app either, it hasn't updated since health connect afaik, but health connect is the health and fitness tooling going forward.
Fitbit has health connect support now, so even if they shift and drop Fit (I hope not, though I also hoped they wouldn't kill the web interface), and make Fitbit the main Google fitness app, it will still work with Fitbit as the app.
I've got a polar h10 myself, I know their app still connects to Fit not health connect, but I'm sure they will update.
I actually made an app to make use of health connect with my polar h10 for entirely different purposes, it's really a pretty minor backend change for them to make, so I'm sure Beat will get an update.
Worst case you could connect to Strava as a go-between should polar be far behind on health connect (again, doubt they would be).
But checking the coospo compatibility, it seems there are a ton of them that all support health connect with coospo, so you wouldn't be shut out even if health connect wasn't ready for Polar, you'll have a ton of options. Including using polar to sync to something that syncs via health connect.
Which is kind of what I do btw, aside from the app for the completely irregular use case I mentioned, I sync polar to Strava, Strava to Fit via health connect. I do that because fairly often I am using polar while cycling, so that's how I want my data to go. But I then found strength training shares nicely too, and running polar beat and my workout app, I can track all my workout routine items (jefit), which syncs via health connect, and then polar goes to Strava goes to health connect, and it all shows as a single session with great HR data.
Not really the question I was answering, but that's not actually a health connect problem.
Withings had an issue, and the way they were connecting to it, which caused a battery drain.
To be specific, withings health mate was constantly reading health connect data, which caused a massive power drain.
I'm not aware of any other battery issues with health connect other than Withings and their Health Mate app (specifically reading, not writing).
(Edit: why, why would autocorrect change writing to riding? For shame. To me, for not noticing sooner.)
Google often feels like a disorganized company with constantly shifting priorities, and a big reason behind that is the lack of top-down initiatives from the CEO. That means the real driving force behind most projects at Google are mid-level executives who show up with grand plans and then leave—either in disgrace or triumph—when those initial plans run their course.
Makes a lot of sense. There doesn't seem to be a unifying strategy behind anything google does. I also think theres a vicious circle going on here: google has a loyalty problem, which could be solved by long term thinking, usually done by loyal employees, but employees don't stick around long enough.
It isn't a problem with long term employees. The problem is that promotion at Google typically relies on developing new products. Long term employees aren't incentivized to improve existing products.
I think it was a mistake for Google to jump into AI last minute. I think they should of offered separate AI products and let growth happen naturally. Meanwhile Microsoft and OpenAI will shoot themselves in the foot.
Being a normal non AI focused company would of been a good look. They could simply have some basic AI tools that are actually useful.
The purpose, is to keep it difficult enough that the "honest" person doesn't get the idea to start doing it.
Same concept as putting a lock on your front door. It's not to stop thieves, it's to stop the average person from getting the idea to "just take a quick look".
By occasional going after workarounds AND making it public news. Your average computer user thinks it's not worth the hassle.
If they don't want honest people considering it, maybe they shouldn't raise the price by 80% in a single price change.
I paid for YouTube premium when it was first available. They guaranteed the price would never change as I was a first adopter. Then they did. Then they did it again. And then again.
Google can fuck off. They have all the money in the world and they need to extort the people who helped grow their business.
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