Android

Criteria and absurd wishlist

Affordable, might find it used in a shop in the u.s. or from a reputable source online

Full Root

"Secure"

Quality build

Removable battery/sim/storage

Headphone jack

Tablet or phone

Runs something better than Android 7

Google’s post recapping Play Store and Android protections in 2024 is live, while highlighting new Play Protect features, like during calls.

There are some builds here or there posted on XDA, but they all have dead links. I’m still looking around to see if the files can be found on any live hosts, but if anyone has the files to custom ROM any of these… they’re decent hardware and shouldn’t have to be tossed in the ground just because the manufacturers are too greedy to give new Android versions for them.

The D415 is already rooted; none of the others have had any mods done yet. I’m hoping to find potentially a decent build of maybe CyanogenMod, Lineage, Havoc, Pixel, or any of the other quality builds.

I already ran the Droid bootloader code check and Motorola’s site says this one is not eligible to be unlocked. Must have been the typical control-freak contract that Verizon usually does. I guess at that time they wanted to nickel and dime every bit they could with this model. Quite a few Verizon phones were able to be unlocked, though, so with that unit there still could be a possibility. I’m not expecting so, though.

Is it true that the VPN apps distributed via Play Store are worse than those from F-droid with respect to security?

After introducing a “Government” badge last year, the Google Play Store is adding one called “Verified” for consumer-facing VPN apps.

Over the last day, Android devices have encountered a ‘Google Play Store keeps stopping’ system warning...

Hello! I recently faced an issue trying to upload big file to Android tablet. It doesn't detect with MTP so I tried to push it via ADB. But I get this error:

$ adb push myfile /sdcard
adb: error: 65544-byte write failed: Success

How can I fix it? Why is this happening? Storage space is enough:

EDIT: I want to use it for app devlopment, so I need ADB or quick MTP for app installing.

The Phone by Google app is adding filters to the “Recents” tabs that lets you sort your call history list...

(also see https://www.androidauthority.com/kiwi-browser-shutting-down-3519510/ )

A while ago Mull/Mulch (and DivestOS) died, and now this.. I wonder what I'll use now.

A long time ago, I owned a Motorola Droid 4 and Photon Q. Feeling so nostalgic now 🙂

The keyboard on this one is much better - it's full-sized, and the slider mechanism feels quite robust.

Hello, SmartPack Kernel-Mamager shows information about the battery. But the capacity (4370 out of 4500mAh) has never changed. My phone was refurbished and had its battery changed. I am wondering if the capacity might be spoofed by the refurber.

A while back, people here kindly explained how typical commercial Android apps get push notifications. Quick version: notifiications are sent through Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), which communicates with Google Message Services (GMS), an always-on Android client app preinstalled on most Android phones. There's a FOSS alternative to GMS called MicroG but it's still an FCM client, and FCM is an evil Google service that client apps that use it have to enroll with even if you escape GMS on the client side.

Right now I'm interested in sending myself push notifications from a self-hosted service that I run on a VPS. Of course I don't want to deal with FCM. I also prefer to not have to develop an Android app as opposed to running something like an XMPP client.

It looks like there are some alternatives like Iris and Unified Push (unifiedpush.org). It looks to me that UP becoming the preferred solution, is that right? UP has its own always-on client that can receive messages from a UP server that you can self-host. This sounds ok to me in principle.

My main question is whether UP is somehow worse than GMS, in terms of being a background app that keeps a network connection open. Is GMS anything special in that regard, besides being preinstalled by Google? Would GMS use less battery power or anything like that?

I may also have to look into how XMPP works, if my server program is going to send messages through it. I actually have an unrelated reason to be interested in XMPP. But does that approach sound reasonable? Are there XMPP clients that are non-bloaty, don't eat battery energy in the background, etc.? I'd like a loud audio alert if I get one of these notifications from my server. Can I usually easily set up XMPP clients to allow that only from my own service, while not making sounds for anything else? I'm luddite enough that I still use IRC for online chat, but maybe I have to catch up with the ~~20th~~ 21st century about this. Is there a good community to discuss XMPP development and self-hosting? I.e. I'd want to self-host the XMPP server and use it to send messages to my phone from my own (also self-hosted) server app.

The simplest alternative I can think of is for my server program to just sometimes send me SMS messages through Twilio or similar. The alerts will be infrequent enough that I don't mind going this route. Does that sound easier? It's less in the self-hosted spirit but it gets rid of a lot of software on both the server and the phone, I guess.

Thanks!

Still in testing, Google Messages has made a small color tweak to the upcoming redesign of RCS read receipts that makes them bolder.

I have a degoogled phone (GrapheneOS), and therefore, the slot that is usually taken up by Google Assistant (or whatever "AI"/ voice control your manufacturer uses) is free.

On Android, you can manually select what tool you want to activate when swiping from the edge up or holding the power button. At least on my device.

Right now, it's only Firefox (search) and Kvaesitso, my home screen, but not much more.
This means, that this system is very modular, and there can be quite a few apps around there that also have this feature!

Currently, I've set Kvaesitso as "assistant", so when I swipe up from the edge, the search opens up instantly. This enables me to instantly search and open apps, perform basic calculations, search the web, and some more. Sounds neat, but I can also achieve that by just swiping down on my home screen.

This however feels unnecessary, and I'd like to replace it by something more useful.

It doesn't need to be an alternative to Siri or whatever voice assistants you think of, it can be whatever you think is useful.
For example, a search bar, some quick access, cool tool, whatever.
I've already heard of Mycroft, but I think I don't need that tbh.

I'm also intrigued by the smart AI picker (circle whatever you see on your screen, and it tells you what it is) Google introduced, but I never tried that to begin with. It just looked cool in the ads, but that's their purpose I suppose.

My only limitation is that it's FOSS. Sure, I could just download Google Assistant or whatever myself, but I don't want to defy the progress I made with all the privacy and security implications. Those assistants often need quite a few privileges, and I don't want to give some proprietary app my screen information for example.

I'm working with limited battery duration but Launchy would be immensely useful for my home screens. I don't want to use it, though, if it is heavy on the battery.

A reward-based habit tracker for android.

Have you found it difficult to build new habits? Habit-Maker uses rewards and encouragements to help get over initial willpower required to form new habits.

Following the announcement in December, Google is now widely rolling out Android’s Identity Check feature to Pixel devices...

Although it's only been a few weeks since Google Photos started testing its new Quick Edit feature, the app may soon give users the option to disable it.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24616958

Just wanna post to share my joy. The 3 have the Snapdragon 8 elite globally. Maybe Samsung couldn't make an Exynos that was on par with the 8 elite. Props to Snapdragon. Fast and efficient. Chip improvements like this don't oft come.

If the other brands can't make a better phone, the S25 ultra will probably be the best big phone of 2025.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24607994

Currently, you are unable to view the APKMirror web page. Instead, you get the following message shown in the screenshot below.

Tiktok downloads are currently blocked in the United States due to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

The link in this statement leads to the following page, containing the bill that was passed:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521

This sets a dangerous precedent going forward for the Android community which sideloads applications onto their phones, being that APKMirror is the largest mirror of APKs for Android phones. It's also possible for them to add more apps to be included under this bill, and possible for another bill to be passed which may act as an even more broad blanket to target specific groups of people (e.g. LGBTQ+, people of color), messaging applications that are truly secure (e.g. Signal), and so on.

Then of course there a very real possibility of our president forcing the integration of software updates into both Android (and possibly even iOS smartphones) that can forcibly remove applications for the "sake of national security".

Blocked APKMirror links:

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/tiktok-pte-ltd/tik-tok/

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/tiktok-pte-ltd/lemon8/

Google has released Android 15 QPR2 Beta 3 with loads of bog fixes for both user and developer-reported issues.

Google is preparing to roll out a new shortcut for launching Google Wallet, and it could arrive in this year's Android 16 update.

Last year, Google Maps on Android was revamped so that the main view displayed info using sheets, and the full app is getting this redesign.