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
Status on the tablet, and the horrible baffling "taskbar" feature that breaks the navbar:
I appear to be fucked.
I got a volunteer to measure `adb.exe shell settings list` before and after enabling "taskbar" on a non-Lenovo. My aim was to figure out what preference Lenovo removed the switch for. We found nothing. I went to XDA. XDA doesn't even have forums for the Lenovo Tab line. I guess I need to reverse engineer which of these 42 devices is most similar to a Lenovo Tab M11, and beg in there
The rule of XDA of course is that the more obscure your device is the less likely there is to be anyone in the relevant subforum, so I don't think I'm going to connect productively even if I figure out which of these various mishmashes of letters and numbers corresponds to my device.
Legitimately, I can't use this device if I have to play a game of "have you moved the navbar to the left, right or center?" every time I switch apps or books. I'm looking at returning it and buying an equivalent Samsung. Of course, now I'm re-entering the shopping phase, which took forever the first time. And perhaps the Samsung, once I've picked one, will *also* have a "it's perfect except once every ten minutes it releases a bee and the bee stings you" feature, and I'll have solved nothing.
Bruce Heerssen@mcc
I'm pretty happy with my Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Fe, but it's a couple years old now. I don't know if the new ones are as good or if the recent AI-in-everything trend has spoiled them.
I'm pretty happy with my Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Fe, but it's a couple years old now. I don't know if the new ones are as good or if the recent AI-in-everything trend has spoiled them.
Garren 曹嘉麟@mcc Android is increasingly rubbish! I have used many android phones over the past 13 years including three Google-ass pixel phones. They're all buggy in different ways but since 2017 they're just gotten worse and worse
Edit: buggy or finicky
Edit: buggy or finicky
Ancients@mcc This whole adventure has reinforced my previous choices of only buying devices that LineageOS already supports so I can nuke the default OS if I don't like it.
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
shaddowie Cone@tendstofortytwo @mcc I'm positive that I didn't have that option last time I checked, but it appears to have been added in an upgrade. Thanks for the tip!
CaveDave@mcc honestly, any conspiracy theory about any giant big tech company should be automatically believed without question. They've done so many shitty things and many of those conspiracy theories turned out to be true that you can claim Google's CEO secretly ships Google Assistant in every Android phone just so he could jack off to surveillance audio of people's dogs barking and everyone should just take it as a fact
@engravecavedave The reason Google allows you to replace Assistant with a competing Assistant yet goes to such extreme lengths to prevent you from *disabling* Assistant is CEO solidarity. The Google CEO knows that, for antitrust reasons, they won't get to jack off to *all* surveillance audio of barking, but they want to make sure that at least one of the competing CEOs will get to jack off to surveillance audio of barking.
Bujold@mcc @engravecavedave Reminds me of that saying, that whether or not *you* believe in class solidarity, billionaires sure as shit do
Ted Mielczarek@engravecavedave @mcc Hanlon's Razor is difficult to apply to giant corporations where malice and incompetence are freely commingled.
Sevoris@mcc slight hot take, but if someone posts about "I can't get feature X disabled", then something in the whole "Information Architecture"/"User experience" plex has already gone wrong. Being unable to do something feels to me like it is proximal to "the way to do something is not well explained and not well-discoverable" and that is already a black mark, even if (even many others) know of ways to acomplish it.
(this may to too unfair.)
@Sevoris One of the huge problems with Android is often I go "how do I disable [X]?", and I can't find it, so I check Google, and I find lots of people saying "you just [Y]" where Y is something that's not on my phone. And then I find myself baffled trying to figure out, is [Y] something in an older version of Android that got removed, or something that's still in Android but moved, or something that only exists on some OEM's Android distribution?
@mcc Okay yeah, deciding my take is ice-cold now 
you should be able to readily match your device configuration to advice.
you should be able to readily match your device configuration to advice.@Sevoris No, I think your take was correct. It should be possible to customize the device behavior, and it should be clear and straightforward to understand how to do this. If it were clear and straightforward for me to figure out the features on my own, then it would not matter that the advice of people on the Internet about how to use the feature turns out not to apply to my device.
@mcc *sigh*
And with those thoughts...
It's an interesting problem. Maybe also a complex problem. It has privacy implications (if you can share all the configs that impact you device behavior, that's probably a unique fingerprint these days.) But I like the idea of being able to associate this kind of data on the internet with configuration metadata. Maybe use communalities and changes as paths-of-traverse.
GFD@mcc i believe “none” is always an option when selecting a default “digital assistant”? (i have mine set to Firefox so a long‐press of the home button brings up a new search, which isn’t an “assistant” at all but whatever.) at least, this is the case on GrapheneOS on my Pixel 8. the fun thing about Android is that every device and build combination presents a fun new adventure to discover how much agency you actually have!
@GFD Yes, the problem at the moment is that there is a "assistant button" on the Home screen I cannot disable. I can disable all methods of launching the assistant *except* for this one. There is what appears to be a switch in the settings to disable the Home screen assistant button, and I don't know what it does, but it doesn't disbale the assistant button. And users of every phone brand EXCEPT Sony report that they are able to disable the Home screen assistant button. Sony broke something :(
@mcc ah damn. i would just change my default home app in that case — except i can’t actually recommend doing that because every single third‐party home launcher i’ve tried is buggy in some way that’s totally unacceptable for a launcher that must work properly all the time or else my phone becomes unusable. and also recently Android/Google made every third‐party launcher work worse by giving the system launcher some special privileges? it breaks something in the app switching interface i think.
@GFD I tried an alternative launcher once and I got the impression that the alternative launcher was always kind of just a thin layer resting on top of the "real" launcher, which you'd always wind up dropping back into for various purposes.
LiquidParasyte
ᚳᚢᛚ᛫ᚻᚩᚱᛋyou may be grating up against more oem horseshit
@gutmunchies That much I know to be true :( https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113023646548461522
raphael-proust
@raphaelp Terrible, terrible news. If you disable the "Assistant" app without disabling Assistant first, assistant remains in place but now you can't disable it. The true "Assistant" lives inside the OS somewhere and the APK is just a sort of settings frontend.
@LiquidParasyte @raphaelp Whoa! Wait so does that mean I can kill Assistant by uninstalling *Google*? With that interfere with my ability to be logged into a Google account (eg in gmail/photos)?
@mcc @raphaelp soooo I haven't run a phone with Google Play services (phones allowed to use the Play Store) without the Google App and being signed into Google, so I'm not 100% sure what would happen but
The system framework (Google Play services) handles most of the Google Account sign in and single sign on, so it might work without the App, but multiple system settings and functions are related to somewhere inside the Google App, so some things might not work correctly.
TL;DR: ...Maybe?
gkrnours@mcc you could show a picture of a cat with a caption "stop bothering me" instead of immediately quitting so you know an assistant has been opened
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