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"
The most frustrating thing about these problems I'm having is they ultimately come down to "Android lets userland have *some* freedom, but you're not allowed to replace the nav bar". & it's infuriating because *Android used to allow this*. There used to be an entire ecosystem of "hide nav bar then add a custom nav bar replacement/gesture system". Around Android 10 Google summarily blocked this. And now I'm maybe gonna return a perfectly good tablet just because Lenovo botched their navbar tweaks
(Also, for the record, the feature they killed that allowed navbars to exist was *also* the same feature that would have allowed me to escape my most hated thing about modern phones: Rounded screen corners. Used to you could shrink the screen and add black bars at the edges, which would have allowed me to shrink the screen past the curves and have what I want, have a rectangular screen. Google finds this entirely unacceptable.)
(I *think* the reason Google did this is because they realized that if people were able to customize or replace the nav bar, they might wind up disabling Google Assistant or— horror of horrors!— replacing Google Assistant with an alternative made by a competitor. That had to be stopped, so the alt-navbar economy had to be executed, and the way they did this was killing `wm overscan`, so this meant also taking away my ability to hack my screen to be rectangular. Infuriating.)
I'm being informed my Google conspiracy theory makes no sense because Android allows you to replace Google Assistant with an alternate Assistant by simply installing one. Except wait if that's the case, why does Google make it so hard to turn Assistant *off*?!
Wondering if I should make a "Null Assistant" that when invoked does nothing but immediately quit, then enable it, so I can stop being bothered by the various offers to re-enable Assistant that Google litters around the OS like land mines
tendstofortytwo 
@tendstofortytwo What happens if you select "None" and then perform an action that would launch the assistant, such as longpressing the home button?
@mcc I have gesture nav on so assistant is "pull diagonally from the corner". it just treats it as the same as a pull up - ie. go home/open recents
@tendstofortytwo …huh. Well, I'll go back and experiment with this, thanks.
Andrew@mcc if this doesn't work then Tasker can throw together a Null Assistant pretty easily. In fact I think that's the default behaviour if you don't set it to do anything else
thebestnom@mcc @tendstofortytwo the only problem with that is that it's gets reenabled after reboot
@thebestnom @mcc not for me... :o
@tendstofortytwo weird, on my oneplus 7t it was, didn't bother to try on my 12
@thebestnom I love android :')
@tendstofortytwo update, no option to disable it at all
syn@mcc huh, but you _can_ just select another assistant app right? I've had an assistant app that treated this long press as a shortcut for years, used it to open the notification drawer so you don't have to swipe up from the top of the screen
Andrew Zonenberg@mcc I mean, I have assistant disabled as much as I can on my phone anyway.
But as much as I would love to fix the android ecosystem too, T&M is already way more than I can do solo...
@azonenberg Me too, but WOW does Google make it difficult.
And even if I disable it, I can't remove the "activate assistant" button (which does nothing but pop up an offer to activate Assistant) from my home screen, and I can't stop any accidentally-too-long presses on the home screen from activating an offer to activate Assistant.
@mcc Yeah I know its a huge pain.
At least I have firefox installed so I can properly adblock...
Dźwiedziu@azonenberg
Try a “VPN” blocker (unless you need to use a regular VPN), like Tracker Control or Rethink DNS.
@mcc I do not want to speak to my computers. I do not want them speaking to me except in the single, narrow case of me using voice navigation on the infrequent occasions that I'm the sole occupant of a car going somewhere I've never been before.
This is apparently difficult for companies to understand.
Mx. Aria Stewart@azonenberg @mcc So much this. I want lights when my hands are full in one specific instance, and if they're actually really good at it, to add things to my shopping list. Otherwise, fuck offffff
Rachel Greenham@aredridel @azonenberg @mcc it’s funny; one grows up watching Star Trek fully anticipating a future where one mostly interacts with one’s computers by voice, but the future arrives and I just don’t want to. And it’s not about how well it works, it can be perfect but I *fundamentally* don’t want to.
@StrangeNoises @aredridel @mcc It's a low bandwidth, error prone, imprecise, broadcast medium.
Compared to typing or clicking exactly what I mean.
@azonenberg @StrangeNoises @mcc Yeah!
honestly I thought Star Trek was mostly voice because it works better on standard def TV :P
Erik Jonker@azonenberg @mcc …and in the kitchen to set a timer…
@ErikJonker @azonenberg That's what the microwave's for!
Kevin Riggle@azonenberg @mcc If people wanted conversational interfaces the command line would have widespread adoption, it wouldn’t be limited to specialists
⊥ᵒᵚ⁄Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️@mcc @azonenberg alternative home screen? Such as Nova?
@falken @azonenberg I'm sorry, that was a typo, I meant lock screen.
EDIT: Also there actually is a way to disable longpress-on-home activating Assistant, and I've activated it; I just forgot because I only learned about it like two weeks ago. :P Disabling the lock screen button is not an option however, at least not on Sony.
@mcc @azonenberg somehow my pixel 6a doesn't do this. Must have found an option!
@mcc but you can change the assistant app in the "default app" settings
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 no idea, every arm host I have would become a ball of flame even trying to build android
@aa Listen if you've ever successfully checked out AOSP even once you got further than me
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🇺🇦@phairupegiont @enkiusz Ah, I see. Yeah, worktree would be a good fix to this, but it's *only* going to be an option if Google's complicated git wrapper supports worktrees. But also even if it does it will only help you so much on the disk space front, because (according to the AOSP requirements page) only 150 GB of the 400 GB is taken up by the repo itself, the other 250 GB is purely to perform the build.
Brian Swetland@mcc Entirely fair. Back when I last worked on Android (in the good old days when clean builds only took 15-20 minutes on a pretty hefty workstation), I usually kept three trees around. One just to have a local up-to-date tip-of-tree clean build, one for whatever main project I was working on, and one for if I needed to stop and chase some urgent bug. Sometimes a fourth during releases for a local build of the current release branch.
@mcc I've never been able to bring myself to do Android app development outside of the OS tree. The various iterations of the SDK, Android Studio, etc have always been utter misery.
Matt Daubney@mcc they do say all software source code ends up looking like the company that built it.
Man aging with style@mcc
Even if you use git worktree?