And yet, annoyingly, these podcast platforms hide the podcasts’ URLs as hard as they can, even though these providers don’t host the podcast or files, and a “podcast” is just an XML file pointing to mp3 or m4a file URLs. (Not disputing you, just that the increasing non-openness of something they don’t even have to pay storage or bandwidth for is pretty ridiculous. They are nothing but a man-in-the-middle attempting to extract profit.)
Yeah, I agree, but it also makes a weird kind of sense. Properly regulated stock markets exist to ground the crazy people. Without them, they’d be doing things like building slave cities on nuclear waste for profit.
Look at fancy pants Germany over here with more than one brand of banana in a store.
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See, to preserve the image for posterity, you have to put it on a thumb drive in a nitrogen-sealed UV-filtered case. Otherwise all is for naught.
And much like going from phone call to answering machine to voicemail to visual voicemail (and even for a while being able to text a verbal reply on I believe Sprint back in the day for a bit) we now have phones being able to OCR images, then you can select the text on the image. (Also so the creepsters can harvest metadata on all your images.)
Samsung’s emoji/GIF injector is neat, but Futo Keyboard may be a viable alternative. It seems to be progressing little by little. As long as the vendor doesn’t go “evil” in a future release.
Also Samsung’s autocorrect is an abomination. So often it doesn’t correct a wrong word, or over-corrects a real word. There’s no appeasing that drunk algorithm. Sure, you can un-teach wrong words by hitting “…” next to the suggestions and deleting the suggestion, or periodically resetting the learning dictionary, but how is that keyboard such a needy little shit? Love the alt keys and number pad overlay.
Futo seems very promising once you change the UI settings enough to fit your fingers well.
I’m really surprised “shareholders” with any intelligence don’t start calling out their investments as liars during earnings calls. Tech companies have done this shit for years. Force features into the “on” position by default, force it back on frequently, force not having an off switch to disable the feature. Then they can tell shareholders that user adoption of new shiny widget F is so popular, millions of users are “using” it. Even though the tech company just has NewThing turned on by force and users are completely unaware it is even on, if they even ever use it.
Same crap is done with streaming services partnering with cell carriers and cable providers. Falsify user numbers even if the person just gets it for free and never uses it.
These companies only do this to falsify metrics to make their quarters look good… What if they actually made features users wanted and the user numbers became real?
Or, here’s crazy talk: what if it was illegal to use such tactics to falsify numbers? Gasp.
Good summary right there. Clean up your own house before you start preaching under the guise of user safety, fools.
So far the only “cleanup” I’ve seen in the Play Store is removing old apps that haven’t been updated in a while but still run just fine, which means things like a physical Bluetooth air quality sensor I have needs the APK sideloaded now. Totally fighting scammers, Google. Totally.
Wouldn’t it be great if these tech companies just dropped the verbal diarrhea filter and just spoke plainly?
“We’re doing this to try and increase revenue by making ourselves a walled garden like Apple, because there isn’t really competition anymore, we’re greedy, and we lost the plot,” is what they should be saying.
They’ll just keep further stretching out releases until they stop completely. Google is trying to kill AOSP. What will end up remaining is a skeleton (if that) akin to how Apple only has a fragment of their OS open-source anymore. Google is the enemy and should be treated as such.
I remember it from classic ones, had never seen it on the Switch one. Pretty hilarious.
How does one piss off that many birds at once in that game?
Antitrust Google. Fork YouTube as part of it. All existing content must be preserved. Remove YouTube’s ability to sell licensed content (cable TV channels, music, on demand). YouTube can then be purchased or spun off as a “YOU Tube” again - content made by people for people. Brand saved, community focused. Monetization heavily regulated (governance or internal governance, but just make it a requirement.)
Or just let it burn and replace it with something else. Video’s just super-expensive to host and provide, probably by design to keep others out of the market.
Captive audience on the contracts side, so they can do whatever they want as crappy as they want and the contracts still generate revenue.
You wanted a usable product? Stay away from Big Tech anymore.
If apps didn’t suck, and app devs weren’t manipulative shits, updates would be rare anyway.
Awesome, so pointless manifest revisions to manipulate store reviews and falsify user engagement will update even faster? (Which are most “Bug fixes and quality improvements!” updates these days.)
Really can’t wait for this terrible “app” update concept to go away. The market manipulation aspect drove shipping shittier code out the gate and generalized FOMO.
Or better, apps can go away entirely, lets go back to everything lives in the browser, it’s generally safer, and most “apps” are just browser containers that only exist to harvest device telemetry.
Google could, and probably would become more malicious on deprecating and obsoleting old hardware, but that’d be a huge revenue loss for them. They tend to actively support the app layer on older Android OS versions (here’s an arbitrary breakdown from some web search: https://composables.com/android-distribution-chart ) for a very long time, as older Android is used in many embedded devices, inexpensive devices, purpose-built devices, and other places.
Keeping the Play Services and Play Store up to date on older phones means they can continue a metadata-gathering and app-sale revenue stream on older phones for many years after they “age out”.
Couple that with the fact that most “reasonable” vendors now try to support 3, 5, or more years on a piece of hardware, you should at least be able to get almost half a decade out of a phone before it no longer receives primary OS updates, and likely then another 5 or so years until they stop updating for that API level.
The ELI5-ish version of it is Android is composed of a few layers. The stuff that makes the hardware work, the stuff that makes the OS work (drawing on screen, install/remove programs, texting, calls), and the stuff that makes the software (apps, etc.) work. The part they stop updating is the stuff that makes the hardware work, and the stuff that makes the OS work. However, it’s already working, soo… Over the years, Google spent a lot of time migrating as much of Android as they could so that the apps, some bits of OS, and other things like app security could be updated even on very old versions of Android. You could turn on a phone from 2015 like the BlackBerry Priv right now, and install current apps and most things would run without issue.
Yes, there could be a slight risk that some malware comes out targeting older phones with older OSes and older hardware support, but that’s generally a smaller audience than targeting the latest and greatest phones that are way more “popular” - so not really worth it to malware peeps. The hack targets would most frequently be at the app layer to cast as wide a net as possible. Since Google continues updating Play Services and the Play Store software at the app layer, this would mostly keep people safe from the majority of attack vectors. The diversity of phone hardware really helps here.
Mostly though, mobile marketing just tries as hard as they can to create FOMO that you might be missing out on something by using an older phone.
This is in every way superior.
There are podcast aggregators out there that aren’t just Apple-ify, although now that I’m doing a cursory search, maybe a use for Google’s silly search engine to waste Google’s servers for good.
Search:
"podcast name" filetype:rss"podcast name" filetype:xml