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Currently rocking a Samsung Galaxy A53 5G. Bought this to replace my old shattered Xiaomi Redmi Note 8.
I’ve been using Android phones since a long time. Started out with a Galaxy Y, loved those small phones with TouchWiz 3!
My most favorite phones I’ve owned over the years have to be my most beloved Xiaomi Mi A1 (probably the best clean stock Android experience I’ve had), the Pixel 3a, Sony Xperia M, and the Moto G2 2014 (again, with the cleanest Marshmallow experience).
My A53 is good, mainly got it because I’ve kind of gotten old tired of experimenting with new ROMs lol. I don’t plan on upgrading for 4 more years…this phone does everything I need it to, and it’s decent enough to last it’s promised update life cycle.
Reddit is now further away from a public offering than it was last year, Mr. Huffman said, but will continue building its business. He added that the community revolt was a part of what made Reddit Reddit and said he and his team planned to continue engaging with top moderators who were upset with the changes.
“For better or for worse, this is a very uniquely Reddit moment,” he said. “This could only happen on Reddit.”
Lol. You deserved that, Spez.
The bigger obstacle, of course, for Google is that Messages and RCS exists. I don’t think the company has ever laid out the difference between the two products or when you’d use one over the other.
And, yet again, we see the launch of another Google product that will shut it’s doors soon.
Yep I second this. I’ve been using GNOME, hyprland and sway interchangeably since 2021 Oct on my system as my main DEs. I recently wanted to give Plasma Wayland a try. Was met with multiple crashes, and freezes that required me to long press the power button to reboot to get it working again.
While the new rootless wayland on SDDM worked fine for me, there are several things in Plasma that still don’t yet have support for Wayland. I could never get screen sharing to be reliable on Plasma Wayland, despite having the right portals installed.
GNOME, Sway, and Hyprland are miles ahead in having a stable system on Wayland.
This is usually a function that full blown media servers offer.
Jellyfin is the one that jumps to mind with this functionality, however I haven’t really this functionality out as of yet.
I don’t do much on my phone anymore.
But, I’d like to pitch in with a story from the time when I was involved with the Android-x86 project, and was testing out a bunch of things on their Android distro.
I had a Vaio laptop from 2010 that had the first gen Core i3 in it. Was pretty okay for the time specs wise, and it came with Windows 7. I used that for a while, and eventually replaced it with Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat - probably my most favourite version of Ubuntu to date. It had all the right things - Unity, good support for most things - and it was just a joy to use.
Back then, towards late 2011, the Android-x86 team (mainly Chih-Wei Huang, but also a bunch of other folks) were hard at work making Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich stable on x86 architecture. ICS had a lot of things going for it - Google were gearing up for Project Butter (I think that’s what it was called anyway), and ICS was built on the strong foundations of both Honeycomb and Gingerbread, which meant that of course it was pretty decent to use on large screen devices.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s in my country, we were just seeing the rise of Internet in the form of 3G and CDMA dongles - they weren’t fast, but they were good enough. This was also the start of the 3G revolution - smartphones were just coming out with support for 3G bands, and by smartphones, I mean Nokia S40 and S60 (v3 and v5) phones, with a couple of Samsung Galaxy SIIs thrown in here and there. Data plans were usually at a premium - 1 Gigbyte of data cost about 15 USD, which meant I needed to make a wise choice in deciding which operating system I wanted to download.
I happened to choose Android-x86, and it so happened that I would not have access to another PC or that much data for the next couple of years.
So what did I use on that Vaio that ran Android-x86 ICS? In no particular order:
- I did taxes, and paid bills
- I booked movie tickets, and ordered food
- I did a bunch of reading on the Kindle app, and on Aldiko
- I browsed a bunch of forums I frequented back then and made posts, replied to them and so on. This was mostly done on the Tapatalk app, but also on the ICS browser (yes, we had a separate browser from AOSP prior to the switch to the ARMv7 and v8 platforms and Google’s release of Chrome)
- I tagged a bunch of my MP3 files using an audio signature app that mostly got it right
For more hardcore stuff, I was also involved with a few projects in the Samsung Galaxy Y ROM scene, and I helped by testing out the ROMs on my Galaxy Y. I would download the ROM on the Vaio through the browser, use a file manager I was familiar with from my days in Symbian called Xplore to move it over from the Vaio to the Galaxy Y, then flash the ROM on the phone through Creeds version of the Samsung recovery. Oftentimes, I would need to make quick edits to the ROMs themselves by editing manifest files or oftentimes the install script for the ROM itself.
I used to use Picsay Pro editor for editing and touching up a bunch of images. All of them would get backed up on Google+ and this carried on into the Google Photos era, and eventually ended up living in Drive when Google axed the Photos free forever plan.
I used Tasker quite heavily to automate a bunch of things TBH. Back when root was a very easy thing to acquire, I would periodically backup chats from WhatsApp on my Galaxy Y, and upload it to an FTP server on the Vaio. I had a Tasker script firing on both devices at around the same time, and it used to work like a charm much before WhatsApp eventually got around to rolling out chat backups. I used Tasker to run a task to export my contacts and SMS to the phone storage.
This also being the golden era of ROMs, I used to use Titanium Backup on both my Vaio and the Galaxy Y to have a very identical setup of apps. This meant that for apps that didn’t have a cloud sync feature (which to be fair was most apps), I’d backup and transfer backups to and from the device to ensure I was working with the same set of data. I didn’t do this for all apps because the process is tedious, but yeah. Titanium Backup was also great for very quickly setting up a new custom ROM with the exact same settings as the old ROM.
I used ICS on that Vaio for almost 2 years. I used it until my first week of Uni, and I eventually switched to Linux on that laptop until I replaced it with a MacBook.
Using Android on a computer made me realize a lot of things: Android is a damn capable OS, and its vast majority of applications enrich the experience very very much. There’s almost nothing that you can’t do on Android that a computer can’t, especially when it comes to general computing needs. Android might have been built with phones in mind, but Google have put in a ton of work to make that transition over to bigger screens very smooth - I still firmly believe that Honeycomb was one of their best releases, right alongside KitKat. Both very polished Android offerings, and set the basis for a lot of things that we still use on modern Android today.
Since that time running Android on a computer, my Android based computing needs aren’t that great TBH. I rarely use my phone these days, and since I switched from my Mi A1, I haven’t really tinkered with Android much.
I still fondly recall a lot of things that made Android dear to me - like Xposed, Titanium Backup, Magisk, CyanogenMod, LineageOS, omniROM, the rise and fall of the Android modding scene on XDA Developers and the growth of some great devs like AChep (creator of AcDisplay), Paul Henschel (Paranoid Android), Francisco Franco (Franco Kernel dev), and many many more.
For me, Android will still remain one of the best computing experiences that most people can and will have. It will probably also be the first ever computing experience for the newer generations, and I think Android is poised beautifully to capture and enthrall generations of users to come.
Back in the day, it was a really great way to find new apps. And by back in the day, I mean when it was still called the Android Market.
Its initial transition to Play Store in the ICS era also wasn’t too bad. It still kept a lot of the good things from Android Market. But since the launch of Lollipop, things have really deteriorated. It might not have really been the fault of Google, but there’s a lot more noise with subpar apps that crowd the store now. There’s also the incessant ads for sketchy apps featured prominently that leaves a bad aftertaste in your mouth.
Like you, I’ve probably spent like 30 minutes on the Play Store over the last 4 years probably. Every app I want today is either on F-Droid, or already pre-installed on my phone. Or they’re PWAs, and it’s easy to install them just by going to the website.
