I like them. It spins, it makes a sound when being used, it looks cool, I have to be a bit more gentle with it.

I think this could rather be related to power saving if the screen is locked.

I prefer to use a dedicated internet radio app. VLC also works if you obtain the direct stream (check online or play around with element inspector).

Voyager

Have you replied to the wrong person?

If you were replying to me, the WebUI is best optimized for landscape use, and I don’t like using my phone in portrait mode much, especially if I want to type.
Plus I get tabs. The Android multitasking is unreliable, and switching is inconvenient. There’s no desktop-like panel, and background apps often die if more of them are open at once.
Lastly, embeds. Apps usually only work with images with regular URL, the WebUI works with Images, Video, Audio also in base64 data tag for tiny images, and images can be made into buttons.

Let me give you examples:

This is the Bulgarian Radio 1 stream:
Probably broken in most Lemmy apps.

And here’s a button, but in base64 so it’s directly in the comment, since it is pretty small:
Probably also broken in some apps.

These are edge cases, but an advantage too. If I wasn’t lazy, I could use animated bullets and lines like on the old web, but in Lemmy comments.

Welcome to this example comment

Make sure to:

Have fun
Use Linux
placeholder_text

bottom_text

Firefox on Android was a bit of pain for desktop sites. First the tabs on top were missing, and until recently, the scaling was screwed up compared to Opera/Chrome.

Holy hell, the Ubuntu ISO is 6.3GB now. Soon it may not even fit onto a DL DVD.

You guys have sound? I can’t unmute it in Lemmy, and directly on Imgur the unmute is grayed out.

Edit: Hmm, works on Firefox, again

Not the first time some media worked only in Firefox, but not Chrome. Embedded FLAC wouldn’t play (despite it being supported), WebSDR audio wouldn’t start, from the other times I recall.
Again being reminded to switch.

Advanced versions can even instruct your phone to change important settings under the hood and expose you to significant vulnerabilities.

The scariest thing for me.

At one point I got something along the lines of “Your carrier has changed some settings, tap to review.”, once again showing me that my phone isn’t mine.
In this case it was emergency alerts, but I don’t know what all they can change. It wasn’t a carrier phone, by the way.
I also found apps related to (I think) multiple carriers, just disabled by default on Moto G52 5G. Orange was definitely one of them.

Unfortunately, when buying a phone I always have to make some compromise. If I aim for hardware or very specific feature, there’s going to be a compromise in software.

If I was looking for software, Google Pixel with GrapheneOS looks quite nice.

To be specific with the key features/functionality of my phone:

Software: Surviving high DPI without the software falling apart (I hate how large everything is on phones by default, plus >=600dp the tablet mode is awesome), OMAPI (needed for external eUICC), manual band mode selection (indoors and in vehicles this can sometimes make a huge difference, like from 35Mbps to 150Mbps based on my tests), manual cell tower selection (I haven’t yet made much use of this apart from figuring out that towers in city seem to have 1km limit), and a lot of other stuff in Engineer Mode that I don’t yet understand so I won’t touch (some settings can persist factory reset).

Hardware: 85.14Wh battery (22,000mAh for the more marketable way to write it, and for comparison, my ThinkPad has a 45Wh battery), Dual SIM + SD card (not hybrid), IR blaster, headphone jack, custom button (short, long, double click), 1,000lm light that sucks up 6W (I don’t have a way to measure that though), night vision camera (IR), FM radio that works without earphones (still works better with them).

I honestly just fear updates at this point. They always seem to break more stuff than fix, the only exception to that for me has been PixelExperience custom ROM (discontinued).

Edit: Android is simply missing proper backups. Bad update on my laptop? Timeshift. Bad update on stock Android? It is what it is.

First Moto G5s Plus which got high battery drain, sluggishness and crashes after Android 8.1 update. This was bad enough I had to fix it with custom ROM. Then Poco X3 Pro which reportedly had issues with performance after MIUI 13 update, so I stayed on older software. Now my Ulefone Armor 24, which only has one update primarily to fix Google pay, but also brings a newer security patch, reportedly causing many crashes that make the phone unreliable and a bad experience.
Also many Samsung phones had an update that removed access to manual band mode selection, and if I recall correctly, that update didn’t even revert them to default.

It’s not the best for security, but I basically now just fear any updates. If everything works, then it can only be broken.

Maybe I should at least somehow start checking known vulnerabilities. As of recently, I should probably stop using applock on my outdated Ulefone

Exposed ”com.pri.applock.LockUI“ activity allows any other malicious application, with no granted Android system permissions, to inject an arbitrary intent with system-level privileges to a protected application. One must know the protecting PIN number (it might be revealed by exploiting CVE-2024-13916)

https://cert.pl/en/posts/2025/05/CVE-2024-13915/

Though my device has AppLock v14, so I am not sure.

This makes me worried about the ultra cheap Chinese manufacturers. I mean the likes of Unihertz, Umidigi, Ulefone, Doogee, Oukitel, etc

Usually these don’t get updates at all.
Even weirder, for example I have Ulefone Armor 24. They used to ship with Android 13. They still advertised it with Android 13 when I bought it. Mine like a few others have said arrived with Android 14, but the earlier ones aren’t offered A14 update.
Someone on Reddit contacted support about this and they replied that they don’t provide cross-level upgrades because Google doesn’t allow them to release those to end users.

Anyway, point is, they save on everything possible, starting with software updates. And I have doubts about them changing this, unless EU is a large market for them.

1. Second cellphone.
2. You don’t need a SIM card to call emergency numbers.

2nd is also important in that your phone is always connected (unless in airplane mode) to some cellular network, and can still be tracked the same way (unique IMEI).

There’s also MeshCore, and now the networks are split between these 2.

In a sort of way, yes. Everyone makes the decisions they feel a bit better with, even the selfless ones.

The way you describe, I don’t think so. Maybe if you include “for a good feeling”.

Did they say “six to seven”? Perhaps because it’s 6-7 MM-DD. Only idea.

“Basically nothing”
Felt mostly like a waste of time.

Just guessing what the links may have been…

Possibly my post on lemmy.world, removed due to breaking rule 2, “Only tech related news or articles”

I’ll copy paste my comment from there:

In the reply to Patreon they mentioned having some automated and manual ways of removing CSAM, plus “closely working with NCMEC”, but I have no idea what that means.
And these statistics of resolved reports: https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/cybertiplinedata2024/2024-notifications-by-ncmec-resulting-content-removal.pdf

Total number of reports of 128 resolved on average in 1.91 days. Less than half the time spent by Amazon, Google and Microsoft (for Bing).

The other link might have been to this comment:

Hard to tell, guesstimate €1,500.

I really only download music, mostly individual songs. I use sites like himovies.to for movies, and then if I like something enough, I buy a DVD, if available.
And some few “mod apks”, which yes, are a bit shady. I don’t know how to do that myself, so I just run them through VirusTotal and hope for the best if it’s all green (false negatives). Stuff like KineMaster because I am procrastinating to learn using Kdenlive, MLUSB Mounter and some games.

I haven’t purchased any media or software (excl. donations) that doesn’t come on a physical medium.

The biggest issue is probably the MediaTek chipsets. Unlike Qualcomm, they don’t provide the source code.

I only went with MTK based device for manual band selection. It can be done with root, but the only app for it I could find is network signal guru, and I am not sure about how trustworthy it is to give root access to.

I’d still be using my 2017 Moto G5s Plus if it weren’t for the dead battery and mostly gone (soldered-on) USB port.

It was fine with PixelExperience ROM, and I am sure I could still get something good onto it. But, it is what it is, an e-waste slab. I’ve run the battery down to 2 hours of standby time and the micro USB only works with very few cables at this point.

I do miss the 16:9 and separate navigation via the front fingerprint scanner.

I wonder where something like Unihertz phones could be. Recently a teardown video of one of those surprised me, and it seems they do quite a few phones that way. They have a bunch of rugged phones, and at least some of them appear to be screwed together rather than glued.

Honestly, I haven’t even considered that was a possibility nowadays. Otherwise I’d probably get one of those over Ulefone. Based on videos I’ve seen, my Armor 24 is virtually irrepairable. You have to enter through the screen which uses very strong glue and is recessed into the body. Disassembly thus basically requires destroying the screen.