It depends on what you use Google Maps for. For straight-up navigation, CoMaps is good. And I mean it’s good at the navigation itself for the most part. Although sometimes when you enter in an address it thinks you’re referring to the entire street. But most of my favorite restaurants and a lot of locations that have been open for a while aren’t on it, which I’ve been happy to add. Locations that have been closed for a while are still on it, which I’ve been happy to delete.
But if you use Google Maps for discovering places or looking at pictures or seeing reviews of businesses, or if you do a lot of multi-stop trips, comaps doesn’t have those features even in the littlest, tiniest bit, and in that sense there is legitimately no (Foss) competitor. For instance, if you’re out and about on a vacation and you’re trying to find a restaurant, nope, comaps is useless for that. If you’re trying to plan a trip by seeing what’s around somewhere, nope, useless for that too.
It really just focuses on navigation itself, and it does a pretty good job of that. I use it to get around when I drive.
I really want CoMaps to be a valid choice. Its maps look are absolutely great, like Ordnance Survey Maps. But I don’t normally use it for the reason I experienced again just today. I use Android Auto in the car with my GrapheneOS phone, but my phone SIM reader failed the other day, so this phone has no internet. Google Maps refused to work without internet. So I just used CoMaps again today. This is in the UK, and lack of traffic info matters. It does routes down the little country roads that are technically 60mph, but you literally can not drive that fast down them. Even with a death wish. But it plans them in assuming that speed. This results in bad routes and inaccurate times. (Though I do enjoy country roads, when used well.)
Yeah, this is a misunderstanding of speed limits by the app developer. In the UK, as far as I remember, these national speed limit roads have just never had a speed limit put on them. Things like accidents, petitions, zoning etc. is how everywhere else has gradually added speed limits.
So although you could say “well, national speed limit on a single carriageway is 60mph” by default, that has almost nothing to do with how fast people are able drive on them. To work that out, you’d probably have to do some Waze-type stuff.
I’ve very sympathetic to the developers. It’s a stupidly hard problem to know what speed is likely, at what time of day, on these roads. Far far easier to just have the data of what people are actually doing on these roads. That’s what Google do.
Though if you can detect country road, you could safely assume half the speed advertised.
It’s also cultural. Country roads in my country are 90 km/h and unless it’s dangerous, that’s what you would do on them. Which means speed is lower than posted in tight spots and curves, but not normal roads.
I love these roads and the British countryside, but it is definitely an eyes wide open environment. Certainly can be a shortcut, but often SatNavs without traffic info, use them when they really shouldn’t. You used to often see signs telling people to ignore their SatNavs and not take this road, but it’s less of a thing now as everyone just uses Google Maps. Basically, I want that traffic info as public access for all SatNavs. Not locked away.
So you’re saying that you can’t drive this speed limit on those roads because of the amount of traffic, right? not because of some sort of geographic feature or shape of the roads?
Yeah…hard to imagine much of a way to get traffic updates in comaps, or any OSM project honestly. It seems like it would have to be a separately maintained service. And either way, I’m guessing the number of users that would buy into something like that just wouldn’t be enough to get meaningful data most of the time. Especially since it pretty much relies on tracking people’s locations, which I feel like is counter to the purpose of most people’s reason for getting into those services.
Oh it’s not traffic. They are often quite empty. British country roads are narrow and often stone wall lined, or tree lined, or embankment lined, or all three. They are winding and can be quite steep. Corners can be almost back on themselves. Often there are bits down to a single lane for both directions, with passing points for someone to wait for the other direction to pass. If you encounter someone who can’t reverse, you might have to reverse quite a way.
I think they do mean that the layout of the road means you can’t drive at the speed limit. In the UK we have quite a lot of rural roads that are technicallylegally 60mph limit roads, but they are in reality very narrow, windy roads that you couldn’t safely drive on at 60mph. I guess CoMaps goes by speed limit for estimates so it measures these roads as if they are 60mph but in reality you may only be able to go 20mph without dying
map apps solve the first by using outside satellite imagery services. but it has bus/tram line data, so if the app supports it then it should work. not comaps but osmand supports it
yeah, osm does not have schedule data, but it wouldn’t be feasible to keep that info in osm, because it changes constantly.
instead bus schedules are supposed to be in GTFS datasets, normally published by the transport company. there are already services like transitous and motis, that aggregate and sanitize these sources for consumption by apps. comaps has plens for adding support, but it’s going slowly.
Europe has relatively good coverage with these services, but as I see it the end user apps are still not ready. also, transport providers often don’t publish realtime data, even if they are collecting it for themselves.
I have only one of their services that I do not see replaced any time soon. YouTube.
What they do there is impressive, and very, very hard to replicate.
Not a fan of YouTube, don’t get me wrong. But I see nothing comparable out there (maybe AWS, but they just run some infrastructure orchestration).
Google will kill YouTube long before anybody else is able to pull off the same stunt.
Or is there a service comparable for video streaming?
Been using Newpipe/Pipepipe for the longest time, but Google has been screwing with the Youtube API so the Newpipe Extractor hasn’t been working properly for the last two updates. Can’t keep a video playing in the background for long, can’t download OPUS audio files, playlist albums from YouTube Music are still iffy.
Genuinely about to switch to Nebula or Peertube. Fuck Google, I hope Pichai dies.
Those are just YouTube clients, though. The 1st-party YouTube client apps are pretty widely regarded as crappy, but they are far from the main problem. The YouTube content and its distribution are almost totally unmatched and almost certainly operate at a loss. Google is uniquely willing and able to operate it that way because it adds more value to their other business units than it costs them.
Sure, but I’m not interested in that ecosystem at all. My desktop and my tablet don’t run proprietary software. My phone runs a few apps which rely on sandboxed Play, but honestly, I don’t need them badly so I could stop tomorrow.
Both of those are soft forks of Android, meaning they still exist at the whim of Google.
The only real alternatives are Sailfish (proprietary userland, relies on Halium for its devices to run, which means the devices have a limited lifespan as they rely on a specific version of the Linux kernel that will eventually stop being supported), UBPorts, Droidian, etc. (also relies on Halium, but the userland is open sourcs), and mainline Linux distros like PostmarketOS (has one device that is fully functional, but is extremely slow, but device support is slowly improving over time).
All of those alternatives also support an Android compatibility layer, presuming you don’t rely on device attestation DRM like Play Integrity.
If I can’t have hardware that supports open source Android forks, then it means that I won’t buy it. I can work around with dumbphones, MiFi routers with tethered Linux or BSD portables. I will not use a proprietary system outside of work, full stop.
Use whatever nonproprietary open/libre systems that are out there. Right now, for mobile smartdevices that’s Lineage OS and Graphene OS.
If you want GOS, that’s currently limited to Pixels. I’m not giving a shit about proprietary vendors, it’s a freedom thing.
If I can buy open hardware, I will.
What issues does iOS give you? I was a first-gen Android adopter and loved it, had the Dream (first Android phone that came out) right away, then had another Android phone after.
When phones went away from physical keyboards, I tried my partner’s iPhone and typing on a screen was much better then on Android phones at the time, so I picked one up. Lasted five years, and during that time, I dropped all Google products and services.
I haven’t run into any issues myself, and I find I can keep them for a long time without having to upgrade. I don’t tinker on my phone, though—I work on my full computers and other stuff, but I just want my phone to do internet things quickly, take sick pictures of cats, play music, and shitpost.
It’s hard to explain, it’s more an emotional thing than a logical thing. Death by a thousand cuts kind of thing.
I don’t like Apple choking out in-app purchases like they tried to make it even on Safari if you use Amazon website they wanted 30% cut…
I don’t barely use any of the lock-in ecosystem like iCloud, I don’t trust “automatic backups”, I don’t understand or see the mechanism of.
I wish I could actually access the file system when plugging into my PC.
It doesn’t support Linux at all.
I can’t download my movies I purchased onto my devices for backup.
As an intermediate photographer, the camera really pisses me off.
They updated the default keyboard years ago so swipe to type is awful now and I had to install GBoard.
I don’t really trust Google either.
I wish I could install Firefox and add-ons but Firefox is just Safari with a trenchcoat.
I can’t sync things to my iPhone properly.
Apps don’t really work properly in the background, they keep going to sleep. Even just switching between 2 apps to copy paste by the time I come back it’s killed the first app to save memory or something. I have plenty of memory.
Web apps suuuuuck and keep logging me out and losing state.
I hate notifications and being “always online” and social media. It makes my head hurt and it’s so hard to curate your notifications. Like I want discord to tell me about messages but not about Nitro promotions at 9pm.
I’m probably forgetting things too, but really it’s just a combination of factors. I feel like I’m paying a lot for things I don’t want or use. Honestly give me a phone with no apps apart from phone and messages, and just great Firefox web app support, and I’d probably be happy. My phone is an iPhone 13 so it’s getting a bit old, but I’m not sure yet what I actually want… Just thinking about it for now. Thinking about maybe something wildly different.
A lot of those are extremely understandable. A lot of them are ubiquitous to all phones, however. Many of them are unique to you, which is precisely what I was curious about—thank you for taking the time to share! I don’t run into many of the same issues, but I’ll try to give my insight on them, whether you care or not ehehehe
That’s totally way fair, but no cut is taken if you buy stuff through a browser. It’s ridiculous that if you support someone through the Patreon app, they take a cut. I don’t like that. But there is no cut through web browser, and better fuckin not ever be.
I’ve been using iPhones since the… 5? And I have NEVER used iCloud for anything. I wouldn’t use Google’s online backup either, though. I don’t trust any of them, but I’d trust Apple more. Yet… still hell no. I use iTunes on my computer to make incremental encrypted backups, which it does very well. But I don’t want any of my sensitive stuff online anywhere. It stays on my own hard drives and servers.
I also wish we could do that. I really would like to be able to use it as a standard device by plugging it into any of my computers.
Fair, but I don’t want Linux on my iPhone personally. I want Linux on my Linux machines. Linux on any phone sucks ass right now. I’m psyched for it to be better, but for the stuff I personally want a phone to do, it would be a nightmare.
I don’t know how to answer that one other than we have a separate set of morales, I haven’t purchased a movie since I got my first DVD player. Burners came out shortly after that and all of my movies and shows have been DRM free since.
The camera takes some getting used to, but I’ve found it superior to any other phone camera. For photos, it’s kind of a wash between end Android and iPhones. For video, iPhones are leagues better. I don’t do video much, so that doesn’t super matter to me tho.
i love the keyboard, but I haven’t used a google touchscreen keyboard since like 2009 or so. I’m sure they’ve improved since then hahaha. If I turn on Apple’s AI bullshit the keyboard and autocorrect become garbage, but with it disabled, it feels the same as it did to me when I used my first iPhone and I really like it. I do have to set all of the shortcuts to add special words I use to its dictionary every time I get a new phone. Maybe that changed? I’m not sure, but that’s a bit annoying… but only because I use words dumbly.
I quit all google and Facebook products and services a decade ago so I gotta agree. Never used a Twitter or a TikTok.
everything WebKit under the hood, I’m against. I’d love actual Firefox or forks. I am happy that there are now extensions like ublock origin, but full ass support for Firefox would be excellent.
I’m not sure what kinds of things you sync, but I’ve had issues with this as well, with music. I have my music tagged very specifically because I’m various types of neuroatypical it’s good to have them like that and feels right. Songs are sorted fucking WACK if I don’t sync them a certain way, and that changed with one specific update—they used to work properly without me having to sync them a weird certain way. Nonmusic files work fine for me, though.
That’s my one gripe with my last phone. I had an XS MAXXX and it started closing like everything in the background. To be fair, I had the phone for five years. That’s pretty insane for a phone that overall works great without modifications; I had to CFW my HTC Dream after like a year.
I’ve only used a Lemmy web app and it never did that, but once Voyager was released, I stopped using any web apps so I can’t give any opinion on that—it would be very annoying to be logged out often!
This is the only one I’m gonna hard refute—that’s not an apple thing. That’s every phone. I get zero notifications unless it’s important. Everything allows you to set it as you want. Google is way worse for this. The only notifications I get are E-mails (with many folders set not to notify), all texts, all calls, and very specific apps.
It kinda sounds like you just hate smartphones which is TOTALLY fair—my good friend is looking to get a flip phone right now lawl. I can understand for a lot of fools including that friend, as they got caught up in the whole “dopamine app” shit like TikTok and Twitter and insta and whatever shit wants all of your time and attention and eww. I never touched that stuff; my phone has always been a little computer I use away from my big computer, and I only use it for texting, chatrooms, E-mail, media playing when needed, and taking photographs and videos.
For tinkering and playing around and doing deep stuff, I go to my heaps of computers hahaha. Not saying this is anyone else’s experience, but it is why I dig iOS. Well, that and it’s my only choice for a high end phone as I haven’t touched Google for a decade or more and never will.
Appreciate you taking the time to voice your feelings about this tho, lotta valid points.
Thanks for the detailed reply :). Yeah I agree with you on most of it. A dumb phone actually sounds kind of appealing… Especially since it doubles as a fidget toy. Opening and closing it used to be like my favourite stim. I’ll seriously consider that.
On the Linux thing, I meant more that ITunes doesn’t work on my Linux PC, so it’s extremely hard to do anything between my phone and PC since I don’t use Windows at all anymore. And I really don’t want to dual boot it just for that and have it fuck up my grub file and ext4 drives. I tried having multiple file types on one drive once… Never again…
The camera is really high quality but really annoying. Like I can’t edit exposure or focus or anything properly. Either it takes a great photo, or it takes a garbage photo, and I kind of just have to accept whatever the phone app decides lol. There’s alternative apps but they work really weirdly due to API restrictions.
I’m starting to think my ideal setup is multiple separate devices that does one thing well. Like: dumb phone, dslr camera, kindle (for reading books), desktop for games, laptop for life admin, etc. Decentralise my digital life lol
Oh god also I know upvotes don’t mean anything here but did you post your comment and un-upvote yourself? If I un-upvote you, you go to +0 which is not usual? Idk what even is the world anymore
Dude the Linux iTunes incompatibility is INSANE. I still have windows as a dual boot on most of my machines (AND HAVE HAD THE SAME LOVELY EXPERIENCE OF WINDOWS FUCKING UP EVERYTHING AFTER ONE BAD BOOT, THANK YOU WINDOWS (extra thank you to my genius Linux friend who fixed my issue by having me boot from my ventoy live partition and type like three lines into terminal, I would have taken DAYS if not for them I love them)
ANYWAY, insane that we can’t plug an iPhone into Linux and back up just as easily as on windows or mac. There’s absolutely no excuse for that anymore.
I’m also VERY with you on fidget toy—got a flip phone after my first brick, then Densha Otoko convinced me to get a slider phone… spinning it hard enough would cause it to expand or contact, and the slide motion was SO satisfying. Then I got a Dream when they were released and that crazy semi-circle slide motion was delicious. I had a couple other phones before I switched over to an iPhone, all having slide mechanisms. I’m… really into slide mechanisms. If I gotta get a brick style phone again that’s all screen, I just want it to be stupid easy for basic stuff, which is why I’m on the iPhone’s dick unnecessarily much for whatever reason. My dream is a Linux phone with a slide out keyboard that can do all the things I use my phone for, including payment at local stores. I know that’s completely impossible right now, but a bish can hope I guess
But I gotta give it to ifone for just feelin right to me. It is would that you still can’t plug it into an ix-based system and explore files like…. A regular device? Like it’s supposed to? That’s kinda the most egregious to me. I think I said before that I didn’t have any issues, and that’s wrong. But I kinda minimize them cuz it doesn’t really come up much for me—I keep my phone as little computer of its own, and ship shit to Big Computer when it’s important or whatever.
Why am I writing this much? Am I defending faceless corporation? Or am I just writing stream-of-conscousness shit because I’m no longer sober? Probably the latter, ‘cuz I switched to a keyboard halfway through this shitpost comment and now spellcheck both works and doesn’t work. Anyway, I’mana go lay down. You’ve got some excellent points, I still love this fone, and there are big improvements that feel way simpler to implement than it’s taken what, a decade and a half to implement?
bottom text (I had to delete the capital b in the word “bottom” like eight times before I figured out I had to type multiple “b”s and delete the capital (capitol? No, that’s not right) letter B and keep the small one or it wouldn’t let me type fully-lower-case-stylized-“bottom text” without capitalizing the “B”)
👍🏽great stuff. BTW, stop using google products, there are enough good alternatives.
Is there a good alternative for maps?
CoMaps fulfills most of my needs
It depends on what you use Google Maps for. For straight-up navigation, CoMaps is good. And I mean it’s good at the navigation itself for the most part. Although sometimes when you enter in an address it thinks you’re referring to the entire street. But most of my favorite restaurants and a lot of locations that have been open for a while aren’t on it, which I’ve been happy to add. Locations that have been closed for a while are still on it, which I’ve been happy to delete.
But if you use Google Maps for discovering places or looking at pictures or seeing reviews of businesses, or if you do a lot of multi-stop trips, comaps doesn’t have those features even in the littlest, tiniest bit, and in that sense there is legitimately no (Foss) competitor. For instance, if you’re out and about on a vacation and you’re trying to find a restaurant, nope, comaps is useless for that. If you’re trying to plan a trip by seeing what’s around somewhere, nope, useless for that too.
It really just focuses on navigation itself, and it does a pretty good job of that. I use it to get around when I drive.
I really want CoMaps to be a valid choice. Its maps look are absolutely great, like Ordnance Survey Maps. But I don’t normally use it for the reason I experienced again just today. I use Android Auto in the car with my GrapheneOS phone, but my phone SIM reader failed the other day, so this phone has no internet. Google Maps refused to work without internet. So I just used CoMaps again today. This is in the UK, and lack of traffic info matters. It does routes down the little country roads that are technically 60mph, but you literally can not drive that fast down them. Even with a death wish. But it plans them in assuming that speed. This results in bad routes and inaccurate times. (Though I do enjoy country roads, when used well.)
Yeah, this is a misunderstanding of speed limits by the app developer. In the UK, as far as I remember, these national speed limit roads have just never had a speed limit put on them. Things like accidents, petitions, zoning etc. is how everywhere else has gradually added speed limits.
So although you could say “well, national speed limit on a single carriageway is 60mph” by default, that has almost nothing to do with how fast people are able drive on them. To work that out, you’d probably have to do some Waze-type stuff.
I’ve very sympathetic to the developers. It’s a stupidly hard problem to know what speed is likely, at what time of day, on these roads. Far far easier to just have the data of what people are actually doing on these roads. That’s what Google do.
Though if you can detect country road, you could safely assume half the speed advertised.
It’s also cultural. Country roads in my country are 90 km/h and unless it’s dangerous, that’s what you would do on them. Which means speed is lower than posted in tight spots and curves, but not normal roads.
That’s pretty much the UK really. Only you are very rarely able to get close to the 60mph limit at all, let alone safely.
The are more dangerous by statistics. Some random links:
I love these roads and the British countryside, but it is definitely an eyes wide open environment. Certainly can be a shortcut, but often SatNavs without traffic info, use them when they really shouldn’t. You used to often see signs telling people to ignore their SatNavs and not take this road, but it’s less of a thing now as everyone just uses Google Maps. Basically, I want that traffic info as public access for all SatNavs. Not locked away.
On the plus side, it worked without internet!
So you’re saying that you can’t drive this speed limit on those roads because of the amount of traffic, right? not because of some sort of geographic feature or shape of the roads?
Yeah…hard to imagine much of a way to get traffic updates in comaps, or any OSM project honestly. It seems like it would have to be a separately maintained service. And either way, I’m guessing the number of users that would buy into something like that just wouldn’t be enough to get meaningful data most of the time. Especially since it pretty much relies on tracking people’s locations, which I feel like is counter to the purpose of most people’s reason for getting into those services.
Oh it’s not traffic. They are often quite empty. British country roads are narrow and often stone wall lined, or tree lined, or embankment lined, or all three. They are winding and can be quite steep. Corners can be almost back on themselves. Often there are bits down to a single lane for both directions, with passing points for someone to wait for the other direction to pass. If you encounter someone who can’t reverse, you might have to reverse quite a way.
I think they do mean that the layout of the road means you can’t drive at the speed limit. In the UK we have quite a lot of rural roads that are technically legally 60mph limit roads, but they are in reality very narrow, windy roads that you couldn’t safely drive on at 60mph. I guess CoMaps goes by speed limit for estimates so it measures these roads as if they are 60mph but in reality you may only be able to go 20mph without dying
I’m pretty sure there are appropriate tags to mark that in osm. comaps should be using them if the roads are properly tagged
HERE WeGo (aka HERE Maps) is not FOSS, but has traffic, satellite view, offline mode, etc. Some POI might be outdated (due to it being not Google)
Here is trash and not open
No, everything I have tried is worse in significant ways. Let me know if you find a genuine alternative.
Comaps is actually not bad. It’s limited in info to what’s on OSM, but good news is you can help by updating the spots you frequent!
Doesn’t have satellite view or bus/tram navigation
map apps solve the first by using outside satellite imagery services. but it has bus/tram line data, so if the app supports it then it should work. not comaps but osmand supports it
Osmand seems more promising but you can only search for public transport leaving right now, not in two hours or the next day
yeah, osm does not have schedule data, but it wouldn’t be feasible to keep that info in osm, because it changes constantly.
instead bus schedules are supposed to be in GTFS datasets, normally published by the transport company. there are already services like transitous and motis, that aggregate and sanitize these sources for consumption by apps. comaps has plens for adding support, but it’s going slowly.
https://transitous.org/
https://github.com/motis-project/motis
Europe has relatively good coverage with these services, but as I see it the end user apps are still not ready. also, transport providers often don’t publish realtime data, even if they are collecting it for themselves.
It also plans routes longer than Google maps, and 90% of the places you want to go don’t come up in search.
Yes.
I have only one of their services that I do not see replaced any time soon. YouTube. What they do there is impressive, and very, very hard to replicate.
Not a fan of YouTube, don’t get me wrong. But I see nothing comparable out there (maybe AWS, but they just run some infrastructure orchestration).
Google will kill YouTube long before anybody else is able to pull off the same stunt.
Or is there a service comparable for video streaming?
Nebula.tv is great, but won’t replace all of YouTube.
Been using Newpipe/Pipepipe for the longest time, but Google has been screwing with the Youtube API so the Newpipe Extractor hasn’t been working properly for the last two updates. Can’t keep a video playing in the background for long, can’t download OPUS audio files, playlist albums from YouTube Music are still iffy.
Genuinely about to switch to Nebula or Peertube. Fuck Google, I hope Pichai dies.
Those are just YouTube clients, though. The 1st-party YouTube client apps are pretty widely regarded as crappy, but they are far from the main problem. The YouTube content and its distribution are almost totally unmatched and almost certainly operate at a loss. Google is uniquely willing and able to operate it that way because it adds more value to their other business units than it costs them.
Such as iOS?
Lineage OS and Graphene OS.
If you can. The problem there is Play Integrity API, which is used as an anti-competition measure.
Revolut was the only app I had issues with on Graphene OS. I obviously closed Revolut account and continue using Graphene.
I use Revolut with no issue on GrapheneOS. Maybe things changed.
Interesting, looks like they fixed it last year: https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report/issues/90
For sure thanks to people like me who complained and closed their account :)
Sure, but I’m not interested in that ecosystem at all. My desktop and my tablet don’t run proprietary software. My phone runs a few apps which rely on sandboxed Play, but honestly, I don’t need them badly so I could stop tomorrow.
Both of those are soft forks of Android, meaning they still exist at the whim of Google.
The only real alternatives are Sailfish (proprietary userland, relies on Halium for its devices to run, which means the devices have a limited lifespan as they rely on a specific version of the Linux kernel that will eventually stop being supported), UBPorts, Droidian, etc. (also relies on Halium, but the userland is open sourcs), and mainline Linux distros like PostmarketOS (has one device that is fully functional, but is extremely slow, but device support is slowly improving over time).
All of those alternatives also support an Android compatibility layer, presuming you don’t rely on device attestation DRM like Play Integrity.
If I can’t have hardware that supports open source Android forks, then it means that I won’t buy it. I can work around with dumbphones, MiFi routers with tethered Linux or BSD portables. I will not use a proprietary system outside of work, full stop.
If i remember correctly, GNU is working on a Librephone, the progress is slow tho
Just about what we should expect from the same FSF that has been developing GNU Hurd for more than 30 years now?
Yeah don’t use android. Use android. And android but only for google’s phones. That’ll learn 'em.
Google makes a good, open, affordable phone with 7 years of support. They suck but their phone is not the problem here.
Use whatever nonproprietary open/libre systems that are out there. Right now, for mobile smartdevices that’s Lineage OS and Graphene OS. If you want GOS, that’s currently limited to Pixels. I’m not giving a shit about proprietary vendors, it’s a freedom thing. If I can buy open hardware, I will.
I think my next phone will be Graphene. I’m sick of iOS bullshit
What issues does iOS give you? I was a first-gen Android adopter and loved it, had the Dream (first Android phone that came out) right away, then had another Android phone after.
When phones went away from physical keyboards, I tried my partner’s iPhone and typing on a screen was much better then on Android phones at the time, so I picked one up. Lasted five years, and during that time, I dropped all Google products and services.
I haven’t run into any issues myself, and I find I can keep them for a long time without having to upgrade. I don’t tinker on my phone, though—I work on my full computers and other stuff, but I just want my phone to do internet things quickly, take sick pictures of cats, play music, and shitpost.
It’s hard to explain, it’s more an emotional thing than a logical thing. Death by a thousand cuts kind of thing.
I’m probably forgetting things too, but really it’s just a combination of factors. I feel like I’m paying a lot for things I don’t want or use. Honestly give me a phone with no apps apart from phone and messages, and just great Firefox web app support, and I’d probably be happy. My phone is an iPhone 13 so it’s getting a bit old, but I’m not sure yet what I actually want… Just thinking about it for now. Thinking about maybe something wildly different.
A lot of those are extremely understandable. A lot of them are ubiquitous to all phones, however. Many of them are unique to you, which is precisely what I was curious about—thank you for taking the time to share! I don’t run into many of the same issues, but I’ll try to give my insight on them, whether you care or not ehehehe
I’m various types of neuroatypicalit’s good to have them like that and feels right. Songs are sorted fucking WACK if I don’t sync them a certain way, and that changed with one specific update—they used to work properly without me having to sync them a weird certain way. Nonmusic files work fine for me, though.It kinda sounds like you just hate smartphones which is TOTALLY fair—my good friend is looking to get a flip phone right now lawl. I can understand for a lot of fools including that friend, as they got caught up in the whole “dopamine app” shit like TikTok and Twitter and insta and whatever shit wants all of your time and attention and eww. I never touched that stuff; my phone has always been a little computer I use away from my big computer, and I only use it for texting, chatrooms, E-mail, media playing when needed, and taking photographs and videos.
For tinkering and playing around and doing deep stuff, I go to my heaps of computers hahaha. Not saying this is anyone else’s experience, but it is why I dig iOS. Well, that and it’s my only choice for a high end phone as I haven’t touched Google for a decade or more and never will.
Appreciate you taking the time to voice your feelings about this tho, lotta valid points.
Thanks for the detailed reply
:). Yeah I agree with you on most of it. A dumb phone actually sounds kind of appealing… Especially since it doubles as a fidget toy. Opening and closing it used to be like my favourite stim. I’ll seriously consider that.On the Linux thing, I meant more that ITunes doesn’t work on my Linux PC, so it’s extremely hard to do anything between my phone and PC since I don’t use Windows at all anymore. And I really don’t want to dual boot it just for that and have it fuck up my grub file and ext4 drives. I tried having multiple file types on one drive once… Never again…
The camera is really high quality but really annoying. Like I can’t edit exposure or focus or anything properly. Either it takes a great photo, or it takes a garbage photo, and I kind of just have to accept whatever the phone app decides lol. There’s alternative apps but they work really weirdly due to API restrictions.
I’m starting to think my ideal setup is multiple separate devices that does one thing well. Like: dumb phone, dslr camera, kindle (for reading books), desktop for games, laptop for life admin, etc. Decentralise my digital life lol
Oh god also I know upvotes don’t mean anything here but did you post your comment and un-upvote yourself? If I un-upvote you, you go to +0 which is not usual? Idk what even is the world anymore
Dude the Linux iTunes incompatibility is INSANE. I still have windows as a dual boot on most of my machines (AND HAVE HAD THE SAME LOVELY EXPERIENCE OF WINDOWS FUCKING UP EVERYTHING AFTER ONE BAD BOOT, THANK YOU WINDOWS (extra thank you to my genius Linux friend who fixed my issue by having me boot from my ventoy live partition and type like three lines into terminal, I would have taken DAYS if not for them I love them)
ANYWAY, insane that we can’t plug an iPhone into Linux and back up just as easily as on windows or mac. There’s absolutely no excuse for that anymore.
I’m also VERY with you on fidget toy—got a flip phone after my first brick, then Densha Otoko convinced me to get a slider phone… spinning it hard enough would cause it to expand or contact, and the slide motion was SO satisfying. Then I got a Dream when they were released and that crazy semi-circle slide motion was delicious. I had a couple other phones before I switched over to an iPhone, all having slide mechanisms. I’m… really into slide mechanisms. If I gotta get a brick style phone again that’s all screen, I just want it to be stupid easy for basic stuff, which is why I’m on the iPhone’s dick unnecessarily much for whatever reason. My dream is a Linux phone with a slide out keyboard that can do all the things I use my phone for, including payment at local stores. I know that’s completely impossible right now, but a bish can hope I guess
But I gotta give it to ifone for just feelin right to me. It is would that you still can’t plug it into an ix-based system and explore files like…. A regular device? Like it’s supposed to? That’s kinda the most egregious to me. I think I said before that I didn’t have any issues, and that’s wrong. But I kinda minimize them cuz it doesn’t really come up much for me—I keep my phone as little computer of its own, and ship shit to Big Computer when it’s important or whatever.
Why am I writing this much? Am I defending faceless corporation? Or am I just writing stream-of-conscousness shit because I’m no longer sober? Probably the latter, ‘cuz I switched to a keyboard halfway through this shitpost comment and now spellcheck both works and doesn’t work. Anyway, I’mana go lay down. You’ve got some excellent points, I still love this fone, and there are big improvements that feel way simpler to implement than it’s taken what, a decade and a half to implement?
bottom text (I had to delete the capital b in the word “bottom” like eight times before I figured out I had to type multiple “b”s and delete the capital (capitol? No, that’s not right) letter B and keep the small one or it wouldn’t let me type fully-lower-case-stylized-“bottom text” without capitalizing the “B”)