taylor Mar 24

RE: https://tech.lgbt/@tay/116284872470093680

on an entirely unrelated note: trying to set up a device (OnePlus 6) with de-Googled Android: not going to go into the setup process, despite mainly using an iPhone for the past 8 years, i've still `fastboot flash boot.img boot` and `adb sideload lineage-*.zip` more times than i've had hot dinners (even if this time it was a bit more involved as most of the phone's storage was consumed with a NTFS partition)

but i'm pleasantly surprised by just how many apps just work (even without microG).
discord, 1password, even my bank app worked without complaint.

however, issues:
- notifications are really fucking broken (pretty important).
- autofill from password manager is really fucking broken
- my yubikey doesn't work
- the stock keyboard is arse
- i am going to really miss apple pay, and not just for the convenience, having it anonymise my details (especially when paying online) is also nice

and also, it still annoys me that Signal only lets you sign into one device that they classify as 'phone' at a time.

Show threadtaylor Mar 24
ok, it appears i can work around the signal issue: there's a fork of the signal app called molly which flips the feature flag to 'being able to be a secondary device' to just, always be on
Show threadtaylor Mar 24

installed thrunderbird and tried to sign into icloud mail

which i can't because my apple account is set to use my yubikey for 2FA... and you can't use 2FA security keys on Android without Google Play Services

Show threadtaylor Mar 24
spend the time to sync my entire music library over to the thing... only to discover the stock Lineage music app doesn't support Apple Lossless files, which all my music is in
Show threadtaylor 

its been a few more days and i think my overall thoughts are, "this is more useful than i expected, but there are still some annoyances", like i was fully expecting my bank app to just not work at all, and i'll get onto that but like. this is mainable. this 8 year old phone midranger (which released the same year as when I switched to iPhone funnily enough), with LineageOS 22 (which is still getting weekly updates), and even without any Google apps*, it is good enough to be the majority of people's main phone.

i still don't think it covers 100% of my needs. i wouldn't give up my iphone yet, a large part of that is the health app, which I would absolutely not trust Google with that level of data, and i dont think there could be a smaller/OSS competitor with the amount of data processing & algorithms required, and of course, most of this data comes from my Apple Watch, which I am still wearing as I wouldn't want to actually spend the money to buy a new watch right now, and my old Pebble Time can't compare

Mar 28 at 2:10pmWeb
Show threadtaylor 3d ago

but generally my annoyances are more 'android as a platform is kinda annoying', less 'life without GMS is annoying'.

and while I said I was expecting my bank app to just say 'no' on a de-googled device, it still has problems - I had to disable extra security on my account due to it not being able to verify my location or do QR code scanning. it also complains about using biometrics, while good enough to unlock the app, if I try and make a"wo payment, it says it had to disable biometrics and I have to use my PIN. not a huge problem but still kinda annoying.

and also, having yo manually add my card details to book train tickets was annoying when I'm so used to Apple Pay.

Show threadtaylor 3d ago

and of course, the whole "working with other devices" sketch is so much better on the iPhone, which granted is because a lot of my other devices are Apple, my watch obviously won't work, my AirPods work, even if I have to manually reconnect every time, and while there are apps to unlock some of the integration features on Android, there seems to be limitations preventing me from, for example, disabling noise cancellation (https://github.com/d4rken-org/capod/issues/25) so I have to pair to my watch, turn noise cancellation off, and reconnect to the phone which is a bit annoying

KDE Connect & scrcpy on my Mac, filling the Continuity & iPhone Mirroring shaped holes (hurray for open platforms, smartphones were a mistake!)

Show threadtaylor 3d ago

and also the problems that seem to just be general to Android/this phone.

When you hear Android users glaze the universal back button on this platform, you'd think itd be, yknow, actually good? But, it just isn't. At least as an iPhone user, I'm used to the back gesture generally going upwards in the navigation hierarchy, and as such a usage pattern I do a lot is, find an app I want (such as Settings) in the app switcher and swipe back until, or hit the tab bar along the bottom I get to the root page and then go from there, but on Android, there are many cases where switching to an app and hitting back just sends me back to the home screen, and sometimes, especially when an app requests a permission, the settings app "lives" inside the app, so I try and find the original app in the app switcher and it just isn't there

Show threadtaylor 3d ago

Also does auto brightness just universally suck on Android? It's constantly going up and down, and while you can set it to only apply when you turn the phone on, but then you unlock the phone with fingerprint while still pulling out your pocket and the brightness is set to zero because it was still in the pocket when you unlocked it.

WiFi seems to be broken on this phone too - I get really high latency and seem to be capped to about 20mbps, on both 5GHz and 2.4, and while I don't expect WiFi 6E ass 700mbps, at least matching the 50mbps APs older than me can achieve would be nice. I'm not sure if this is hardware, or firmware (admittedly I ignored the "flash this specific stock firmware version for its firmware" in the LOS install guide, but 4G works fine so IDK)

Maybe I should have done this on my slightly newer Android phone (a Poco F3 from 2021), which has a bit nicer screen, more battery, faster CPU but less RAM. Maybe I'll have to test LOS' backup & restore functionality

Show threadtaylor 3d ago
(oh and that * refers to me caving and installing Gboard, because touch keyboards are just one of those things that only big massive tech companies can do well)
Show threadSP⟁CED GO⟁T3d ago
@tay it took me a long time to move away from gboard because I could never find another keyboard that did swipe typing as good, but I've been using #heliboard for quite a while now and find it to be very good. Might be worth a look if you haven't tried it yet. Open source and privacy focused.