Tried to restart my fairly new Pixel phone a couple days ago by holding down the power button, but instead of showing the Power menu it prompted me to ask the Digital Assistant something. Excuse me? I don't remember enabling that. Every other phone I've ever had, holding down the power button has always been the way to power down or restart. I had to search Settings to find how to configure the power button to control the power. Or course maybe I could have asked the Digital Assistant - but fuck that.

It's almost like the organization itself is designed to make things worse if it means short term profits, useful and appreciated apps sacrificed at the altar of line must go up

My pixel 5 recently broke and the only reason I went with a pixel 9a was to install grapheneOS on it as soon as I got it. The process has become way easier than it used to be. After setting up/skipping all the first run screens I plugged it into another Android device and used the grapheneOS site to run the install, took like 15 min.

Unfortunately the Android experience is getting more and more bloated and users' freedom to tinker with their phones or sideload apps is getting more and more difficult. The Play Store is riddled with more ads than useful content. Just try searching for something, and oftentimes more than half of your screen is ads.

I've been with Android since the start and I hate what Google is reducing it to. It pains me that the only viable alternative is Apple and I feel trapped.

2 days ago I moved from GrapheneOS back to Stock Pixel in my 8 Pro, just to see what all the hype about the new android 16 in Pixel is about. Jesus, this is way worse than I remember. i tried it for 2 whole days, and that shit just won't allow me to have ANY control over my phone. It's fucking ridiculous. On Android 15 I was able to uninstall Google Drive, Meet, Youtube, and many other Google apps, this time around all it would allow was "disable". What's next, removing the ability to disable (which I don't trust anyway)?

Fast forward to today, I'm back on GOS, and my anxiety levels are down again. This shit is insane, and I honestly can't understand why anyone would put up with this crap.

The stupid attempt to have everyone leave bluetooth always on pisses me off. They've made the BT quick tile 2 more presses to toggle on or off is ridiculous. It's not a quick tile.

I've just put a BT on/off widget on my home screen.

Google keeps making everything worse.

MS keeps making Windows worse but that is not a problem because Linux is great on PCs. The reason is that PC is made out of standardized plug&play components that you can make generic OS image for.

There is no such thing in smartphone world. Each chipset is it's own Linux fork that gets only most crucial bug fixes while in warranty. Same is true for ARM SBCs where I believe the only board that supports generic image are new RPis.

The best thing about switching to an iPhone is that I use my phone way lesser

Mobile GNU/Linux is getting better, but I think it is 5-10 years out from what's needed. I suppose people need to adopt Desktop first. The nice thing is you can install Android apps including Google Play on it natively, and they appear in your app drawer like a regular app

The obfuscated nature of compiled code does an incredible amount of heavy lifting on behalf of shareholders. Imagine a world where x-ray specs suddenly revealed source code. The flight to open solutions would be irresistible. Windows is hot garbage but it clings to its market share like a limpet, through the magic of closed source, occupying space like a flabby tumour. It doesn't care if it kills the host because the top priority is growth and an unassailable market share. That's the magic of capitalism.

Google should be broken up and its leadership fined into oblivion for anti competitive behavior

android peaked with the pixel 2. then everyone went overboard on bezel-less displays and fast refresh rates and smart assistant services and brought the whole damn thing crashing down.

Android has always taken the approach of it being developed in private and then having the full sources and commit history published for each stable release.

We're going to be moving forward under the expectation that future Pixel devices may not meet the requirements to run GrapheneOS.

Many companies and individuals are trying to mislead people about the future of GrapheneOS to promote their insecure products and services.

European authoritarians and their enablers in the media are misrepresenting GrapheneOS and even Pixel phones as if they're something for criminals.

Maybe we should start resurrecting symbian

Sadly iOS is not much better

Up until about two weeks ago I could use wallet on my rooted pixel with lineage and play integrity fix.

Some recent change on their end and it doesn't work at all anymore. I guess they don't want to know what I'm buying.

Can I get a rundown of the few non-flagship phonemakers that are currently out there? I have heard of The Nothing Phone. Are there more companies that put together Androids to operate within the US?