Google definitely has the ability to do that, but I don’t believe it’s currently happening. First, it could get them in pretty big trouble in parts of the world that have the concept of consumer protection if anyone ever got ahold of any proof (and Google seems pretty terrible at keeping secrets). Second, have you seen ANY negative review of a phone? Every time I was researching which phone to buy, all the reviews were always very positive and avoided talking about its weak spots.

For example, my old Nokia 5.3 - every review I found, both in English and in my native language, made the phone sound like it is an acceptable phone for its price - nothing terrible and nothing outstanding. I doubt most of them even tried using half the features, because the rear fingerprint scanner was completely unusable (it got a nice 50/50 success rate if the air was dry and I had perfectly clean non-sweaty fingers, and plummeted down to maybe 10% success rate if any of these conditions wasn’t met), the touchscreen had ghost touch issues in even slightly humid air (meanwhile other phones work fine even with droplets of water on the screen in light rain), the camera app took 5 - 10 seconds to be able to take a picture from cold start (and Nokia/HMD didn’t bother to keep it in memory like other OEMs).

The last point might not sound like much, but it actually made me pretty much stop taking photos because anything that moves at all was simply a no go unless I had quite a bit of time to set up. I took a grand total of 732 photos and 28 videos over the three years I had that phone, which is ridiculously few compared to the over 6k photos I took with my previous Xiaomi phone. (talking about the 8k photos I took in a single year with my current phone would be cheating, literally any phone camera would look like a technical miracle to me after Nokia’s shitshow).

(edit: also, after one of the updates, the camera app would often get killed after taking a photo and the photo would be lost - so if you really wanted to take a photo of something, you would often have to try several times until it actually saved it. This was never fixed in the later updates, and the final update even introduced a fun feature where factory reset is now guaranteed to irreversibly brick the device in case you wanted to sell it. This is confirmed by HMD to be a wontfix because the phone is now EOL)

Oh, and the promised updates (it was Android One ffs) were all about a year late and generally very poor quality (also security updates were sparse), but that’s not something a reviewer could tell at the time.

Sorry about the rant, my experience just made me really hate HMD/Nokia. The main point is that all the reviews were incredibly positive even for a crappy phone and a brand that doesn’t seem to be paying off the reviewers - even tiny local reviewers who couldn’t have possibly be on HMD’s radar were way too excited about it.

And my last point: we’re not talking about reviewers here. This is about “#TeamPixel”, Google’s “organic” marketing campaign. They get a phone and hype it up, they’re not even meant to compare it to other stuff.

It’s even worse, they’re not getting paid. These shills only get rewarded by getting the phones slightly before general availability (but after actual reviewers)

The Quick Share option missing is weird - Nearby Share/Quick Share is supposed to be available on every Android 6 or newer device since roughly 2020. And it’s supposed to be able to automatically figure out a reasonable way to connect the devices (LAN if they are in the same network, Bluetooth or WiFi Direct otherwise).

It’s not about Lens, they just used it as the preview image for some reason. The built-in QR scanner should be accessible through quick settings tiles (you might have to edit your quick tiles and add it), and when I launch it and go to the recent apps screen, it doesn’t have any app icon, so it is at least somewhat special and not just a regular part of some other app.

Maybe try looking up those links on Wayback Machine? I don’t think they use Cloudflare

I get that, but my understanding was that you want to be able to see the map after the trip, not necessarily during it. Which is pretty much what I do with OpenTracks - record my trips and then import them to NextCloud where I can see a big map of all of them combined or look at some specific ones. And there’s plenty of Android apps that can import GPX to do the same.

But if MapMyDrive works well for you, then it’s a moot point - enjoy what works.

How nice does the user experience have to be? OpenTracks is a decent app for recording GPX tracks (if some map application supports importing tracks from outside the app, it will definitely support GPX), but that’s the only thing it does - you don’t even get a map in the app.

I had a similar opinion when I was buying that phone - pretty much every phone had a fingerprint scanner and people generally didn’t complain about them, so decent scanners should have been mass produced and cheap - but HMD/Nokia managed to make me reconsider that opinion.

For context, Nokia 5.3 is a 3 or 4 years old model, so it definitely doesn’t disprove your statement, but I remain sceptical.

If a thief knows your PIN (by watching an earlier unlock), Android is now requiring “biometrics for accessing and changing critical Google account and device settings, like changing your PIN, disabling theft protection or accessing Passkeys, from an untrusted location.”

Sounds great for Pixel 6 series with their reportedly highly reliable fingerprint sensors /s

Honestly, I’m not sure what to think about this - extra protection against unauthorized access is good, but requiring biometric verification with no apparent alternative irks me the wrong way.

Maybe that’s just because of my experiences with Nokia 5.3 and its awful rear fingerprint sensor with like 10% success rate. But then again, there will eventually be phones with crappy sensors running Android 15.

The downside is that you’re then zooming in on the compression artifacts and all the “enhancements” we’ve all learned to “love” over the past decade (thanks, Google!), while the in-app zoom probably works with raw image data before zooming in.

Well, feel free to click on this link then: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode.en

(it’s just a link to Google homepage - the point is that you really shouldn’t trust the link text lol)

What’s sketchy about https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode.en ?

Honestly, I’m kinda surprised that the live translation in Google Camera wasn’t dependent on other Google apps before - I thought all Google apps were developed with the assumption that the apps mandated for Android certification would be available, and that losing functionality if the user starts disabling stuff is fine.

As to why it isn’t very common: Android conditions users to think of the apps as fully self-contained units. There’s no way to have Google Play suggest installing app B as an optional dependency when you install app A, and asking the user to install it during the first launch would go against common user experience wisdoms. The current best practice is to get the user up to speed as fast as possible, with every extra tap they have to make increasing the possibility of them leaving for another app.

But there are definitely apps that do use this. For example OpenTracks, a GPS tracking application, has no integrated map to show captured routes and instead expects the user to find another app that supports its API. Or GadgetBridge, an alternative companion app for many smart watches / fitness bands - it is common for these devices to have some weather forecast widget, but one of GadgetBridge’s design goals is to not to have internet access (to help with trust). So it has an API for weather provider apps to make this work.

Edit: First paragraph is toast, I misread the OP

That just uses normal fast charging to get to 80%, then stops the charge and finally resumes charging about an hour or two before the planned “charged by” time. No slowing down.

Oh, and it also has (or had on Android 13) a cool bug where it just stops charging if it fails to reach 80% by the time it wants to resume charging (for example if you put the phone on a slow charger late at night - that’s how I woke up with 60% battery after 4 hour sleep).

So I just gave up on the idea of using a slow charger to better preserve the battery because the phone clearly wasn’t expected to be used that way.

That requires just unlocked bootloader, not root. In the distant past before full disk encryption you could often use root to replace the bootloader with a new one that doesn’t verify what OS it’s booting (so you could say that rooting was part of the process of changing ROM), but nowadays it’s very rare to be able to do that.

Now you either get a tool from your OEM to unlock your bootloader (and then you can flash ROMs to your heart’s desire), or you’re screwed.

No, face unlock on Pixels doesn’t do anything to illuminate your face, it simply refuses to work if the lighting’s too dim. It’s actually worse than the face unlock in Google Smart Lock in dealing with low light environments.

Infinity did pretty much the same thing a few weeks ago. Now I’m a happy Eternity (previously Infinity for Lemmy) user.

Minor nitpick: I’m pretty sure USB Video Class is not an alt mode, just a standardized interface for sending video over USB (like HID for keyboards and mice or mass storage for flash drives). Alt modes completely dump USB (except the USB 2 link which is always available) and repurpose most of USB-C’s pins for a different protocol.

They would have to sign another contract for another 24 months to get it, nobody was getting an upgrade on the existing contract because it’s just a bundle of Google services (One, YT Premium etc.) and financing on the phone. And if you don’t care about the services, Google’s two year financing is cheaper than this bundle.

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