• waterSticksToMyBalls@lemmy.world
    74·
    21 days ago

    Don’t forget rock solid app gets an unexpected update 3 years later and now is jammed with ads and offers an ad free subscription at $14/week

    • Cid Vicious@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      32·
      21 days ago

      Yeah app purchases sure went to shit, didn’t they? Sorry turns out buying an app one time for a small fee isn’t good enough, we need you to buy it again every month.

        • LordCrom@lemmy.world
          13·
          21 days ago

          Dude fuck that noise.

          I bought a lifetime copy of hex edit like 30 years ago. 20 years later I needed something and the dude answered and sent me a new code.

          Fucking rock on hex edit brother!!!

    • officermike@lemmy.world
      6·
      21 days ago

      I’m glad I heard of Discord’s plan to add ads to their Android app beforehand so I had the chance to disable updates. It’s annoying that Android keeps reminding me there’s an update available, but it’s less annoying than ads.

      • slate@sh.itjust.works
        19·
        21 days ago

        Blocking basically all ads on your phone is trivially easy.

        1. Find “Private DNS” (or something similar) in your settings
        2. Set it to dns.adguard-dns.com

        And that’s really it. There are other ad-blocking dns providers out there, and they all use slightly different block lists. I like adguard because their blocklist is less aggressive than others I’ve tried, and I’d rather an ad or two get through than for something legitimate to stop working.

        You can also set it up as your dns provider in your router to block ads on your entire network. People tend to like to self-host adguard or pihole for that, but as long as you don’t care about a dashboard or manual dns entries, using a free dns is as easy as it gets and is very effective. I self-host as a hobby and I still just use adguard’s public dns.

        • Mika@sopuli.xyz
          2·
          21 days ago

          Also TrackerControl FOSS app that filters ads on your phone directly. Can enable/disable different stuff per-app. Must have no proxy/dns to work.

    • RobMyBot@lemmy.mlEnglish
      15·
      21 days ago

      The golden age of custom ROMs was truly a technological Renaissance. Magical time.

      • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
        11·
        21 days ago

        They had to throw out lots of customization options, because Google made a ton of changes to Android/AOSP and it wasn’t compatible anymore.

        Like, LineageOS is still a more feature-rich and cleaner OS than what comes preinstalled on most phones. But yeah, even relatively simple stuff like setting a system font never got a real replacement.

        No idea, if it is still easily possible to implement that. You can fake it by replacing the Roboto font file with a different font, but you get weird font issues in various apps then.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    45·
    21 days ago

    iOS jailbreaking used to be incredible too.

    I guess it might still be for those who slipped into the “window” to do it, but I have no clue what Cydia looks like these days.

    • LucidNightmare@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      37·
      21 days ago

      Cydia is practically dead, replaced by Sileo or Zebra, and most tweaks are paid now.

      I miss when people did stuff for a hobby or for fun. Literally everything wants your money these days it seems.

      • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        26·
        21 days ago

        It’s not like everything (or rather every dev) necessarily wants your money. We’re forced to monetize even our hobbies in an attempt to live a worthwhile life. It’s a cancerous system infecting everything and everyone.

        To develop great FOSS software without the need of monetization is an enormous privilege.

        • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
          8·
          21 days ago

          Doesn’t help that Apple wants €100/year + a supported Mac (average €100/year for the hw upgrade treadmill)

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        9·
        21 days ago

        Oh that sucks. It’s par for iOS though.

        Yeah, me too. So what if apps were simpler than they are now… that would be nice.

      • SailorMoss@sh.itjust.works
        4·
        21 days ago

        I held onto jailbreaking till the end. I have a iPhone on iOS 17.0 and TrollStore for permanent sideloaded apps. It’s pretty awesome! There hasn’t been anything like a jailbreak or TrollStore since then. I wish I had bought an iPhone 15 on iOS 17.0 at launch so I could hold onto this as long as possible. Having a lower end iPhone I’ll probably need an upgrade in the next year or so.

        You can get a similar experience to TrollStore by paying for an Apple developer account or a third-party signing service that abuses Apple developer accounts. It seems android users may have to do a similar thing in a few years.

    • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      21 days ago

      You can still use AOSP to make your own phone, but you’ll just have to built your own apps too, since eventually, all of google play apps aren’t gonna work on degoogled Android.

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.worldEnglish
    242·
    21 days ago

    I am very happy on GrapheneOS. Even in terms of flashing it was much nicer experience than what you had to go through back in the days

  • tomenzgg@midwest.socialEnglish
    13·
    21 days ago

    I’m probably going to spam this around a bit, since most people don’t seem to know about it, but a reminder that FuriLabs has a (GNU+)Linux phone with decent spec.s and the ability to run Android app.s (from what I’ve heard) pretty decently: https://furilabs.com/

    Biggest drawback is it’s based on Halium. Usual growing pains of a new product/company apply but apparently the company is pretty responsive and their dev.s have worked with customers to get things like calling working with the carrier and bands of their country where it hasn’t worked before so improvements move pretty quickly.

    Collection of different experiences I’ve variously seen online over the last year or so:

    I don’t own one, myself, so I can’t give any personal experience but I’ve seen it around for a few years now but most people don’t seem to even know about it. Maybe there’s a reason for that? But none I’ve ever seen anyone say.

      • tomenzgg@midwest.socialEnglish
        10·
        21 days ago

        https://halium.org/ (not me insinuating you should’ve just searched for it; I just like to be thorough and give all possible information, even if unneeded)

        The very simplified explanation (as far as I understand things) is that it uses an Android kernel to run Linux on so that hardware issues are minimized (the biggest difficulty that Purism and the Pinephones have had and why they’ve been harangued in terms of what they can do is they’re trying to provide open hardware that can work with the pure Linux kernel).

        So the plus side is that things work with Android hardware – because you’re, ultimately, using the Android kernel – and you can (theoretically) open up the number of devices you can run on exceedingly.

        Downside is (I believe) you get Google/Android closed bits running and you’re tied to the development of whomever made that modified kernel. All the complaints about not getting kernel upgrades after a while (because you’re using a modified kernel, you can’t just pull the latest and greatest from upstream and use it) that people have with Android will still apply.

        Given the moves Google’s making, it’s not a deal breaker, for me, but I know it can be for some people so just wanted to give people the heads up.

  • Team Teddy@lemmy.world
    131·
    20 days ago

    There’s so much bullshit with smartphones now that make them a pain to use, I’m honestly considering at this point to just get a flipphone and buy separate devices for the things it can do. Get a camera, MP3 player, and portable DVD player and live life the way people did 20 years ago.

  • otacon239@lemmy.world
    9·
    21 days ago

    😢 AOKP was king. I miss all the extra silly features they packed in. You could make it look almost nothing like Android by the time you were done.

    • waddle_dee@lemmy.world
      2·
      21 days ago

      YES! I was talking with someone recently about this ROM. I couldn’t remember what it was called, but I had decked out my phone on a fully wild unicorn theme based on it lmao.

  • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
    8·
    21 days ago

    I’m gonna carry around my steam deck and add a USB camera module, a GPS module, and add some meshtastic radios modules, and I’m gonna daily drive it as the ultimate all-in-one device, and Mr. Google Pichai can’t stop me! xD

  • SugarCatDestroyer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    21 days ago

    This is cruel, now I feel like some kind of criminal. Who knew that the most dangerous criminal is an ordinary consumer who wants freedom…

  • Mwa@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    6·
    21 days ago

    Low key it was fun flashing roms back in Late 2023 on a Xiaomi Phone.
    The only unfun part was unlocking the bootloader