That’s crazy!

?

Anyone know the new best place to get French content? It wasn’t perfect, but it was the only place I could find many French shows, movies. A lot of places have only the English version, or don’t have it at all (French only)

Google has no incentive to walk back, especially given what they saw Apple has been able to get away with on their end. And as we’ve seen with AOSP publishing delays, device tree information restrictions, locked bootloaders, they are making it increasingly hard for Android to be an OS that can be forked and installed on devices, let alone for you to install your own software.

The community ought to prepare for the realities of this, and put mitigation measures in place. Valve saw the similar direction Windows is going years ago, and made the same decision: GNU/Linux is the next best truly open/free-as-in-freedom experience, and we should all aim to use and improve that ecosystem on smaller form factors. Waydroid/ATL can act as temporary bridges for both developers and users alike while native binaries are ported.

If you’re making new apps, target to develop with qt/qml + rust so it can run on the only GNU/Linux equivalent of Android WearOS, AsteroidOS. This let’s you deploy one codebase on watches, phones, tablets, and computers screen sizes with a convergent design.

I tried thetvapp.to on a few devices recently and couldn’t get it working and previously found it struggled with big sport events, it was one of my go to’s. Is it working still on your end?

If it has a headphone jack, you can plug in a dummy aux port. I’m convinced that the removal of the headphone jack was to ensure the microphones are always reachable

Everytime I see stuff like this I’m thankful most of my devices (hopefully all one day) either have cameras/microphones that have hardware kill switches (HKS), or can be unplugged from the device

I have a GNU/Linux phone I carry in my other pocket. Here are the biggest issues I can see:

1. Driver support for components in the mainline kernel (lets you install any distro and things like camera, Bluetooth just work)
2. Power management; turns out it is a hard technical problem to have your phone suspend to save energy, while being awake enough to know what and when to turn back on to receive chats/calls, playback music, etc
3. Cameras have a lot of stuff beyond drivers happening behind the scenes these days in software that would need to be developed, especially given it is a big reason people choose their phones for
4. Phone certification is tough, this has stopped even companies like Fairphone from shipping their devices worldwide, I imagine even harder for a device like the Purism Librem 5 where you can literally upgrade Wi-Fi, BT, and cellular generations like a gameboy cartridge
5. App ecosystems take a while to build up, it is a chicken/egg scenario. I think things are in a useable state for all the default apps an iPhone has, but if you want Uber, Uber Eats, you either have to draw even more power essentially running Android via Waydroid, or use a typically more janky web app that may be missing some features