mccMy new tablet came! I am so excited. I just know I'm going to hate this thing <3
Well, so far it's actually pretty good, except for the part when I tried logging in to my Google account and it crashed and left the device in a seemingly permanent inoperable state
- Can't log into Google; the Google service is fucked somehow. Need to reboot the tablet.
- Can't reboot the tablet because in new Android, Google has hijacked the "turn off" button to launch the Assistant instead.
- Can't turn off the Assistant because it won't let you turn off the Assistant unless you first sign into Google.
After rebooting, I have now successfully logged into Google. Now I want to turn off the Assistant.
I go into the Google app.
I tap the profile icon.
I tap "settings".
Nothing happens.
I tap the profile app again.
I tap the "settings" app again.
Nothing happens.
Often, when using Android products, I find myself wondering whether Google is aware that Android exists, or the device vendor aware that they are selling an Android device
What is this called, and how do I disable it? It is not "Discover". I already disabled that.
Willing to resort to ADB but only if necessary.
Also, what application do you, reading this, recommend for reading comics on an Android tablet, if those comics are "free floating" (PDFs from itch or something) and not part of a service? I am willing to listen to suggestions for other software to install on my PC local servers etc if it would support this (for example for loading the comics on) as long as it doesn't require an Apple product. This is an explicit invitation to be a reply person?
The mystery tab is the "Entertainment Space". I can disable it by long pressing the home screen and going into home screen settings.
Android 14 on this device is really, really, *really* janky. Like "this is a beta OS" levels of jank. I have found three different ways to get apps to go into GUI death, go in weird states where there are like gray lines that swiping causes the gray lines to move up or down, blank white boxes where interface elements otherwise would be
Here's my current bit of hell. The button bar has been changed into a "taskbar". The critical android navigation buttons get shunted to the side. (Which side is not consistent; it flips left and right at seeming random.) The additional space is taken up by little app icons, like the iOS dock.
What makes this unacceptable is *the side shunted navigation buttons vary*. On the home screen, they're centered like normal.
**The navigation buttons simulate physical buttons. They should NEVER move.**
Sources on Internet claim under Settings->Display there's a setting to turn off "Taskbar". It's not present on my system. So I think: Maybe I can just remove all the items from the bar. I find settings for "show recent apps in taskbar" and "recommended apps in taskbar". I disable them. That leaves only the "quick launch" bar from the home screen. I try removing all the icons from that.
*The quick launch bar, and the "taskbar", grow a noninteractive gray square in the space where apps would go*
So I have a non-optional bar at the bottom of the screen. What is the purpose of the bar? To contain a noninteractive gray square. Why is the noninteractive gray square there? Because otherwise the bar at the bottom of the screen would be empty. This is Android's Emotional Support Square.
Meanwhile, the Android nav buttons, to accommodate this, move randomly between left, right & center. I cannot use the Android nav buttons, *critical for basic use of the device*, without looking at the screen.
In my entirely sincere, non-joking opinion, any GUI that I have to look at in order to use is a bad GUI.
I should be able to use any computer program by just clicking and tapping on things, without having to look to see whether the things are there or not.
So here's where it gets bugfuck. Unable to use the nav bar because Google has decided it must randomly move around as a minigame, I sadly enable gestures.
A gray bar appears at the bottom of my screen.
To show me where to do the gestures.
I only??? Enabled??? Gestures???? In the first place?????? To make a gray bar at the bottom of the screen go away???????????
Why is this here??? No, I know why this is here. It's here because the iPhone has it. The iPhone put at the bar at the bottom of the screen, and the execs at Google who decide what goes in Android don't *use* Android, they have iPhones, so the only direction anyone on Android gets is "make it look like my iPhone". And once it looks like their iPhones, they have no further extra concerns, such as "is it pleasant to use?" "Do the users mind a permanent, pointless gray mark defacing their screen?"
I. Want. To. Read. Books. This tablet is not a computer. This tablet is a book. My family has purchased books which are locked in the Amazon ecosystem. I want to read the books using a book interface, that is, I want a rectangle with words and/or images on it. I don't want a rounded rect or a circle. I don't want holes in my book. I don't want it to be defaced with black marks, or blank gray boxes containing blank white boxes, or a little bar containing the time. I just want a book.
How much of a problem this is depends on what app I'm in. Kindle (left), blessedly, puts black bars at the top and bottom and disables the clock bar and anti-navigation bar at the bottom, so I get what I want: a rectangle.. But say, Shonen Jump (right) doesn't, so I get a jangle of bars of various sizes and colors, and the screenshot doesn't capture this but the top bar has a clock, battery, wifi strength, and for no reason whatsoever, three dots and a triangle (these do nothing)
Although I like this form factor better than the Fire I was considering getting instead (I wish it were 8x11 sized instead of 16x9 sized, but the larger size is better for my eyes), I'm at this moment considering returning this simply to avoid the gray bar at the bottom of the screen. Apparently if you buy a tablet from *Google*, there's a "disable taskbar" feature in the Settings. Lenovo, for no reason anyone understands, removed this. Check Google and you'll find hundreds of annoyed comments.
This is surprising to me. Based on my experience with their Windows PCs, I assumed Lenovo would be a v basic Android OEM and not fuck with shit like, say, Samsung would. In fact, the Settings on this device claims it isn't even running Android, but "Lenovo ZUI 16.0.070 Stable". This appears to be just Android, but with pen support (the pen support is nice) and *multiple* missing features in the settings (not just the taskbar).
I was expecting Lenovo to disappoint me but wasn't expecting *that*.
Based on that, despite again the form factor and weight distribution and price all being quite good, I currently recommend avoiding the Lenovo Tab M11, because in addition to their Android repackaging being very buggy in strange ways they just fucking delete shit out of Android at random, and how are you supposed to predict whether one of the things they deleted is one of the things you depend on?
I guess tomorrow I'll try to see how much of a normal Android experience I can recreate using ADB.
Ok, I'm complaining a lot but one last thing. I want to show you what I mean by Lenovo's patched Android being "Buggy".
I bring down Quick Settings. There's a little "edit" button in the corner. I want to configure my Q.S., so I tap it (it's small, it takes a couple tries). This takes me to
A gray line.
Q.S. is replaced with a gray line. I can move it down and up but I can't go back. I can no longer access Q.S. or my notifications. The only way to get out of this state is to *reboot*. Really.
As you can see in the video, closing + reopening the quick settings/notification shade doesn't fix it. Only reboot fixes it.
Nowwww, I guess I should admit: While experimenting with this, I found it's not an out of box behavior of the edit button. Rather, it is specific to "disable animations" accessibility mode, which I run enabled. So this is *less* of a jaw-dropping QA process slip than it appears.
But wow! "Enabling accessibility options can softlock the OS" is kinda a bad failure mode!!
Okay one thing I will say about this damn Tab M11 is that the speaker is actually *quite* good. This might just be my primary way of listening to Tidal now.
Bass stood up mediocre at best to the Roni Size Matter of Fact test but eh, what do you expect
Okay so going at the "can I get the NORMAL NAV BUTTONS INSTEAD OF HAVING THEM REPEATEDLY MOVE LEFT AND RIGHT" problem (which I really might just return this tablet if I can't figure it out) now
It's hard to search for because tons of people try to enable the taskbar on a *phone* but I appear the first person to want to *disable* it, I assume because I'm the first person who cares about computers who has ever purchased an Android tablet. Possibly the first person to buy an Android tablet period.
Also on every tablet NOT made by lenovo, there's just plain a "disable taskbar" option. So why would anyone be asking about this.
The closest to people asking about this are all Samsung users who say they fixed a problem similar to this with the "Good Lock" app. But that is Samsung exclusive?
I do some checks with adb shell settings list (https://gist.github.com/mcclure/47341511a2b91a1e64eb8a61b2f9ac4a) I find two settings in the "system" namespace that look germane but aren't it, and three mystery settings in the "secure" namespace
The two settings in "global" are the ones that Lenovo exposes to me— they're already off and aren't important. I guess the most helpful thing here would be if someone with a non-Lenovo Android tablet could try doing `adb shell settings list system` and `adb shell settings list secure` before and after toggling the Settings ➜ Display ➜ Taskbar option, and diffing the results. (Or just grepping both for "task" and eyeballing it.) However this seems unlikely since again, nobody uses Android tablets
Incidentally, another thing I'd consider an option— although not necessarily my preferred option— is if I could go with the gesture navigation, but change it so the back gesture is something other than a side-pull, or like a side-pull and hold or something. I cannot function without having my side-pull gesture inside of apps, plus in my testing left swipes nowhere near the border get interpreted as back gestures.
Some "posts" refer to a "swipe gesture sensitivity" setting but idk what this is.
Incidentally, a friend with an old Samsung mentions their Samsung has this second option for nav gestures, where the three standard nav bar buttons are replaced with three swipe-up-from-bottom areas. For the tablet environment, that is actually really nice! I would enable that if I could! It is apparently 100% Samsung exclusive and also, on the newer Samsungs it's been removed.
*Gosh*, I wish Android were actually open source.
The Android evil-genie promise: You may have an open source phone OS. But if you actually compile it from source yourself, you will be banned from running any software. Or at least, they'll try as hard as they can to ban you from running software. Also, if you decide you want to build or even *download* the source, you're going to need to purchase a dedicated 1 TB SSD to check out the repo, and also download our forked version of git to check it out with
Note: You may argue I'm being unfair to Android by saying you need a dedicated 1TB drive to check out the source tree with, when in fact, the AOSP instructions https://source.android.com/docs/setup/start/requirements say only *400 GB* is required to check out and build the repo. However IMO, for any serious project you'll eventually want 2 live checkouts, in case you want to compare 2 branches side by side. Also you'll need space for Android Studio, which on every computer I've ever installed it on took up "all the space I had"
artemist@mcc i built android on a single core laptop like 10 years ago
i think i left it running for around a month and it managed to complete a system image
i think i left it running for around a month and it managed to complete a system image
aa@mcc no you don't need studio
@mcc Also you need 64gb of ram or your reconfigures will take 15min. Every. Goddamn. Time.
@aa in my experience whether you need Studio depends on what you're doing. i've also found Studio, even if you don't run it as a GUI, to be the most convenient way to get checkouts of specific builds of gradle and all the other tools you need.
is there a different way of downloading/managing your toolchain when building AOSP/Lineage specifically, that you'd recommend?
@mcc the aosp source tree manages it all for you in my experience, just source build/envsetup.sh, set your ccache limit, and you're good to go
@aa huh, so the idea is that it builds it's own tools before it builds the OS?
That's interesting ,I wonder what it uses as a bootstrap.
@mcc the bootstrap is prebuilt clang from some google git repo
@mcc part of the reason the tree is so big is because they have entire toolchains checked in to git history
@aa by the way, the AOSP requirements claim to build it you need an "x86-64" machine. Does this imply building on ARM is unsupported/doesn't work?
@mcc (they use it for the whole build iirc since from what I remember llvm takes a decade to compile)
Dancer, your Space Dad 🐝🐝🐝@mcc AS is super-space-hungry.
Phairupegiont@mcc doesn't git workspaces let you see multiple versions in separate directories while only having a single .git? should save space
*edit: it's git worktree, not workspace*
@phairupegiont By "git workspace" do you mean the third party tool I find on github?
At any rate, it won't help you because, as mentioned, you don't check out AOSP with git. Google's meta-git would have to specially support the feature to which you refer, and because of how it works I suspect it would struggle to do this.
Enkiusz🇺🇦
Yanik Magnan@mcc it’s pretty telling that it’s easier to patch the bytecode in the system binaries than it is to engage with any of the source code directly.
Gourd@mcc ...did they actually fork git?
I mean, I absolutely could believe they did, just confirming. O_o
@gourd TECHNICALLY, they didn't fork it, they just wrote a wrapper script to git that changes git's behavior substantially and is thus in practice required to actually check AOSP out.
@gourd But no, I was not on any detail joking, just simplifying details a little
@mcc God, I've been calling AOSP a sick joke for years and that one still takes me aback.
Community android builds basically only exist out of heroic effort to make anything useful out of it, I swear.
@gourd Basically, Google doesn't think git submodules are good enough, so they invented their own kind of git submodule and wrote a special tool to layer it atop the basic git model. To be fair basically everyone I've ever spoken to about git believes that git submodules are not good enough, but I have yet to have it conclusively demonstrated to me that Google's cure is better than the disease
neatchee@mcc I have a Galaxy Tab. I can get you some adb output dumps. Just give me the exact step-by-step (including where to install any apps from, any settings to configure, etc) and I'll get it done in the next 24hrs
Why? Because with great QA experience comes great QA responsibility :D
@neatchee Thank you very much, I appreciate it.
https://gist.github.com/mcclure/75007673c786c8b5657d40fb5ad77a56
Note: I assume you're running Android 13 or Android 14, and I assume you already know how to set up adb, how to confirm with `adb devices` etc. The instructions also assume a Linux system, but if you are on Windows I can make modified instructions.
If the screenshot from step 3 turns out to look different from how I expected, I might ask you to try again. I don't have a local copy of the UI to compare.
@mcc I repeated the steps multiple times, even using three different tools for diffing just to be extra sure (powershell Compare-Objects, linux diff, and Sublime-Text's FileDiffs extension), and unfortunately there is no difference between the outputs of either 'system' or 'secure' with the taskbar enabled vs disabled on my Galaxy Tab S7+ (SM-T970)
Screencaps and SHA256 hashes attached for good measure
@mcc Let me know if there any other set of output I can grab for you! Happy to help :) I'm a long-time android enthusiast (used to contribute to LineageOS back when it was Cyanogenmod) so this stuff is fun for me and familiar territory :D
Owen Nelson@mcc you nailed it
Oblomov@mcc (OK, which manga is that?)
@mcc oh this is why I had a sense of déjà vu: I had read it some years ago but forgot most of the details.
Karel P Kerezman
~@mcc I mean honestly if Lenovo's already deleting random settings they probably should have gotten that one
@modulusshift there may actually be a link where Lenovo removing settings is due to Lenovo realizing they lack the resources to QA all of those settings.
Or maybe the bug is present on stock Google Android also. I haven't checked.
Ongion 🥚🐞@mcc @modulusshift it seems to work properly for me on stock Android, fwiw.
@Ongion @modulusshift Thank you for testing. What version of Android tho
@mcc @modulusshift android 14.
Also, I've since realized that Google Pixel Android isn't necessarily "stock" Android, so this may not actually be correct 🫤
@Ongion @modulusshift that's useful, thanks
ᚳᚢᛚ᛫ᚻᚩᚱᛋi think for a company with lenovo money that is still a jaw dropping qa process slip. inexcusable.
@gutmunchies what's funny to me is this isn't something down in a packin app or something. It is a button that is available from literally any app.
Also, I still don't know for a fact this bug DOESN'T happen on Google Pixels.
ok yeah, that's fair about it potentially being a stock bug. i am just used to oems breaking everything. but tbh it's even more infuriating if this slipped through google's qa
android oems fucking _love_ to remove features & settings from android for no discernible reason, and google just lets them do this. also for no discernible reason