Same as Apple: total platform control. Like HP and printer ink.

Isn’t that the way with almost every tech introduced into phones? “Track your phone while off (for arbitrary unit of time)” = you’re tracked by any Bluetooth beacon networks whether you want to or not. Also, “you’re now part of a beacon network whether you want to or not.”

Any 911/safety feature is just a reach for more tracking/stalking.

You get to contribute to traffic and wifi mapping so the company gets free telemetry they can use for whatever they please at the expense of your battery.

We’ll introduce notifications and then not give the user enough control, so notifications can become malicious nags to get you to look at your phone as often as possible.

We’ll introduce app stores that become gamified by the app devs, that push updates weekly or more frequently. The changes? Nothing, the dev just wants to reset the ranking of reviews and get the user to notice their app again for more user engagement, meanwhile, burning out your flash with every pointless update.

Oh, shoot, people are using phones too much, we’ll introduce “night filters” that only partially filter out blue light, and then let you feel ok about using your phone all night instead of sleeping.

Reckless transmission of telemetry from every app, which often have some blanket permissions to reach into your phone and extrapolate what other apps are there, characteristics of your phone to fingerprint. If you’ve ever used an app tracker blocker like 1Blocker on iOS or NextDNS or DuckDuckGo App Tracking Protection on Android, you’ll see some apps are spatic about gathering and transmitting telemetry. (Worse, some just start firing telemetry attempts at insane levels, like thousands an hour, if they can’t connect to the Internet, further depleting your battery.)

If you ever spin up an OS like Graphene that has all this telemetry junk removed, you’ll be surprised to find out that your phone’s battery can last days. That’s an actual useful powerful feature to have, runtime. And instead of having switches like in iOS to “only charge when you’re charging off green energy” you’re being more green by only having to charge your phone every 3-5 days. The charge/discharge cycles are also reduced, so your battery is now lasting years instead of 12-18 months.

I used to work on phones, it was so great getting to help design these pocket computers the way I wanted to use them. I honestly saw the future being something like, “ok, cloud is a bit of a trust reach, but on the other hand, your phone becomes a cheap access terminal.” I assumed we’d hit a point, with how cheap the hardware inside the machine is, (to this day) where phones would ostensibly become something you could grab from a vending machine. They’d eventually become highly recyclable so you could just take an old phone and chuck it in a recycling bin to have the parts repurposed/recycled.

“Oh crap, my phone just fell out of my pocket and got run over!” Go to vending machine, chuck old phone in recycling, log in to new phone, old phone is nuked remotely if it still functions, new phone starts caching your “phone”. You’re back in business in minutes.

Phones would have no value to be stolen, phones are accessible to all walks of life, a fairness of technology access helps balance the world.

None of that happened, instead, it was a war of walled gardens, information hoarding, privacy violations, expense, distrust, and loan pyramid schemes so people can dump $1500 on $50-$200 worth of parts that will probably just end up being stolen and sold in aftermarket/underground markets in countries that are less well-off.

I’m kinda irked I ever tried to work on the tech to make lives better and do not regret my choice to not go back to that industry.

If America as it is known survives this, massive reforms will have to take place.

Random things like:

• The absolutely useless “impeachment” process will have to be replaced with something closer to Parliamentary “vote of no confidence” - no “trial” to be held by one section of one branch of government. It is nothing more than a sham process. If business boards of directors have figured out how to oust CEOs, the government should have a similar mechanism.
• President can’t have God-mode powers nor sign executive orders anymore. The President’s power should be severely limited. No one person should be a king. Not sure how we managed to do that one thing completely wrong. The position should be nothing more than a communications filter between government branches, nations, states, people, to push policy and steer governance.
• President could be allowed emergency declarations for 15 days, but their action is limited to deploying aid and resources and nothing more. Congress must then convene in 7 of those 15 days to decide how to proceed, in- or out-of-session. They can get off their lazy butts and work for once.
• President should be allowed to be jailed, and no member of government should ever be above the very laws they control.
• Presidential position could also be restructured. Pres and VP are just pres and pres. They both have to agree for any action to be taken. Why having one person with the final decision was ever a good idea when trying to remove kings makes no sense.
• Supreme Court ideally should be disbanded as it was only created to appease the rich, but in lieu of that, it should be completely refreshed. Possibly size expanded to 20 or some arbitrary number that helps break a focused pile of power by a few. All justices removed, replaced with non-partisan justices. If any justice seems to show partisan decision-making, they are audited by (some auditing body) that is probably not the other justices, like how an FAA flight crash incident is audited by a board of retired pilots. Justices will be term-limited. Justices should also be age-limited. Again, borrowing from FAA, if ATC controllers have to retire at 56, we can age-limit every governmental position. This gerontocracy has to stop. Old rarely means wise. Mental fitness should also be a factor, if you’re a Reagan or a Mango or a Feinstein where you don’t even know where you are half the time, you’re out.
• All government positions are term- and/or age-limited, but a staggering rule has to be initiated so there isn’t possibility of a 100% turnover in any given period of years. (Boards already have this concept.)
• Some mechanism should be put in place that makes it more commonplace for states to weigh in when the Federal government is doing something wrong. And one for individual citizens. Voting processes should be standardized and modernized to make every citizen’s vote more powerful.
• To toss the Libertarians a bone, states rights. The power distribution has to be restructured. Things like “state pays Fed x money, so state can receive y money” goes away. The state sends some money to the Federal government and keeps more internally so they can self-manage. The economies of each state would need balance as there are many welfare states that need the money in the Federal government to survive. Regardless, each state’s economy should be structured so that the Federal government is more of an afterthought. Federal government standardizes processes, roads, specifications, etc. so that interstate trade travel and movement is made easier. Basically though, to limit the scope of power the Federal government has. Not to demolish or disband it, just to make it so even if somehow, in the new system, someone tries to play king, they’re but king of very little, and can’t threaten states to bend the knee by trying to cut off their precious money. (Which alone should be made illegal.)
• All the obvious money in elections and money in politics and political donation stuff all has to die, for good. Codified into the constitution. Each candidate is given y amount of timeslots on various media, and z amount of campaigns, funded by taxpayers equally. No other money can be used. (Funded by the taxpayers so it’s all an even ground and some CEO can’t come sail in on his space yacht and run a fancier campaign.)

And at the end of it, governance should be made boring again. One shouldn’t get into the job to be Lauren Boobert the reality TV trash soundbite handjob star. It should be a paper pushing position that keeps the country and its “economy” going.

Probably some other stuff this ramble forgot to add.

It’s weird how business, boards, even HOAs seem to have a better set of checks and balances than the US Federal government.

You’re supposed to take it to the Apple store, where they will charge you $800 to “clean” the keyboard, by replacing and throwing away half the computer. This is the correct user experience. /s

Apple hates making functional serviceable machines anymore.

I really wonder if testing in Europe could be part of the issue. In the US, everyone is a privacy moron and leave things wide open. Elsewhere, people are more conservative about sharing location in general, let alone joining a “community-supported” device location mesh network. (Google’s and Apple’s are also separate “networks” and don’t share, other than being able to both track AirTags and similar trackers to report stalkers.) They also aren’t as frequent to have the latest and greatest phones/devices elsewhere, as American corps all rig up loan pyramid schemes to push units as frequently as possible.

Apple customers also tend to be more trusting of that 100% closed-box company’s software, it’s completely possible more people have that feature turned on, making it more functional (and with Apple’s dark patterns to trick users into re-enabling features, they may even be unaware it is on.)

The article author could have done a little more minor technical diving as well, using LightBlue Explorer on an Android device to find the MAC address being transmitted when the phone is turned off, and then look for it later.

Apple’s devices when using their “Find My” network, while off, actually start using a different Bluetooth MAC address than when the device is turned on. Android’s may behave similar.

Gotta say, this is one thing I miss on most review sites these days. They’re so basic, they do the bare minimum, very little black-box engineering, very little sleuthing. It’s more important for them to receive free demo units from the manufacturer than to do actual tech journalism.

Aww, how cute, he wants to choose the prison he will rot in while awaiting his execution.

The hilarious part is that they think the rule of law actually still applies in America. It’s already dead. The message just hasn’t yet traveled from the nerves back to the brain yet.

Really wish these companies would stop with the pointless UI “reimaginings” - the point of a user interface is to interface with the user - yet they think stupid new shapes will give people boners.

These terrible colorless undefined icons are so annoying as well. I like icons having shape and color, so I can go, “I want to go on the web, where’s orange fox circle shape?” “I want to send an email, where’s blue envelope rectangle?” Not neon screaming colors, but some subtle difference beyond “gray starburst with straight line versus gray starburst with weird symbol.” Might as well just do away with icons entirely and just use hieroglyphics.

Until the AI hype train finally falls off the tracks. Of course, then there will be something newer and dumber they’ll all set their sights on. Tech CEOs are all lemmings with goldfish memory capacity.

They’ll never open the API, they closed it specifically for control. This has been their Android plan all along, and why AOSP slowly loses more and more functionality with each release. They wanted the perception of “open” while actually ensnaring users.

Best to abandon carrier messaging at this point except as a last resort and use something decent like Signal that doesn’t leak telemetry to Google.

Android really should be divested from Google due to conflict of interests. They will never have users in mind when data mining is the top priority.

Cats actually get some of their moisture from dry food. Old dry food will be more dry.

Go to a pet store and buy 5 or 10 single serving flavors of decent quality. Might be $10-15 for the experiment to land on something they like. Plan and accept that a lot of it will be thrown out. They also might love it, but not day 2 when refrigerated.

That’s SOP for government contracts. The US government, and others, have had access in the past. NDA blah blah blah.

Too little, too late. I’m helping everyone I can get away from Google services as fast as possible, including that terrible store.

Try Quake LAN parties. You also gotta drag that tower around and belt it in. Oh no, it slipped on the expressway and knocked you out of 4th gear into neutral!

I consider LLMs basically high-frequency StackExchange trading. You gotta be exact and not keep the thread alive too long or driftrot is real though. Much faster to parse, though.

Also, the ones that can access the web are great for “I want specific lib x version y to solve a weird problem, what support libs are needed?”

What happens when you feed your chia pet after midnight.

A narrative the manufacturers push, so not surprising that the thought pattern developed that way.

UI designers hate usability anymore. Is it text? A link? A button? Who knows? Tap and find out you just subscribed to Satan-of-the-month club.