I enjoyed this writeup. I always love seeing the lengths dedicated hackers will go to in order to accomplish something most other people wouldn't even consider doing.
The little tricks it takes to get something working in ways nobody really considered or accounted for.
I dunno, this kind of stuff seems like wizardry to me, yet when I read things like this, it makes it seem so easy and inspires me to try tinkering with things.
Well, I've personally got f-droid, newpipe, both Facebook lite and messenger lite as I was not able to install them based on where I live through the play store. Both of those are far better on battery life, and messenger lite lacks ads. I also then use f-droid to install as many apps available both there and the play store as I can because I prefer to avoid Google's services as much as I can. I use apkmirror sometimes to get older versions of apps if i dislike the updated one.
>The vast majority of customers want an app store with tighter controls,
Most people I've talked to don't even realize you can allow apps to be sideloaded on android. Most people don't even really look at their settings menu other than to change backgrounds and stuff.
I mean, at least on the latest phone I bought, I had to go to the build number, tap on it a bunch of times to get to the developer options, scroll down through a bunch of options that likely look terrifying to the average user until I found the option allow apps from outside sources.
When I tell people they can do this, or I tell them about f-droid or show them things on there, they tend to be kind of shocked that you can do that and usually want me to teach them how.
I've noticed a lot of people for the most part are kind.of scared to really dig into their devices without being told it's ok, but as soon as they know it's not going to destroy everything, they usually start trying to dig deeper.
The easy walled garden approach I find really stops people from wanting to learn more about what their devices can do and gives kind of a false sense of security, there's plenty of garbage and unsafe stuff in app stores and honestly, I use almost as much diligence downloading from there as I do from random places on the internet. A lot of people don't read reviews or bother even looking at permissions before the get something from the store and end up filling their phones with garbage anyway.
I've never understood why companies choose to delete videos rather than just monetize them. I've uploaded videos with copyrighted music, rather than get deleted the owners chose to have ads shown in my video(my channel is unmonetized) and I'm assuming they make money from it.
The problem with 8chan is, it's not a cohesive whole. Each board is individually ran and the global moderators won't get involved unless it's content that's blatantly illegal. Not all boards there are the same. Not all the people there are the same. The problem is the hateful supremicists all congregate there. /pol/ is the board where most of them hang out. Other boards have nothing to do with politics and have completely different kinds of people that post there. There's even a /leftypol/ devoted to leftist politics that contains no white supremicists.
This is amazing. I'd also love to read a book on this. Electronics is always something i've thought was cool and played around with a little bit, but never really thought something like this was possible with a bunch of slapped together parts. I feel I learned a bunch just reading the bit od your process described in your article and it really made it feel like something accessible for the average person with a bit of technical knowledge and patience. Thanks for sharing that.
Every samsung smartphone i've ever owned came with an undeletable facebook app(along with a bunch of other undeleteable crap) preinstalled since at least android 2 days.
The little tricks it takes to get something working in ways nobody really considered or accounted for.
I dunno, this kind of stuff seems like wizardry to me, yet when I read things like this, it makes it seem so easy and inspires me to try tinkering with things.