Captive audience on the contracts side, so they can do whatever they want as crappy as they want and the contracts still generate revenue.

You wanted a usable product? Stay away from Big Tech anymore.

If apps didn’t suck, and app devs weren’t manipulative shits, updates would be rare anyway.

Awesome, so pointless manifest revisions to manipulate store reviews and falsify user engagement will update even faster? (Which are most “Bug fixes and quality improvements!” updates these days.)

Really can’t wait for this terrible “app” update concept to go away. The market manipulation aspect drove shipping shittier code out the gate and generalized FOMO.

Or better, apps can go away entirely, lets go back to everything lives in the browser, it’s generally safer, and most “apps” are just browser containers that only exist to harvest device telemetry.

Google could, and probably would become more malicious on deprecating and obsoleting old hardware, but that’d be a huge revenue loss for them. They tend to actively support the app layer on older Android OS versions (here’s an arbitrary breakdown from some web search: https://composables.com/android-distribution-chart ) for a very long time, as older Android is used in many embedded devices, inexpensive devices, purpose-built devices, and other places.

Keeping the Play Services and Play Store up to date on older phones means they can continue a metadata-gathering and app-sale revenue stream on older phones for many years after they “age out”.

Couple that with the fact that most “reasonable” vendors now try to support 3, 5, or more years on a piece of hardware, you should at least be able to get almost half a decade out of a phone before it no longer receives primary OS updates, and likely then another 5 or so years until they stop updating for that API level.

The ELI5-ish version of it is Android is composed of a few layers. The stuff that makes the hardware work, the stuff that makes the OS work (drawing on screen, install/remove programs, texting, calls), and the stuff that makes the software (apps, etc.) work. The part they stop updating is the stuff that makes the hardware work, and the stuff that makes the OS work. However, it’s already working, soo… Over the years, Google spent a lot of time migrating as much of Android as they could so that the apps, some bits of OS, and other things like app security could be updated even on very old versions of Android. You could turn on a phone from 2015 like the BlackBerry Priv right now, and install current apps and most things would run without issue.

Yes, there could be a slight risk that some malware comes out targeting older phones with older OSes and older hardware support, but that’s generally a smaller audience than targeting the latest and greatest phones that are way more “popular” - so not really worth it to malware peeps. The hack targets would most frequently be at the app layer to cast as wide a net as possible. Since Google continues updating Play Services and the Play Store software at the app layer, this would mostly keep people safe from the majority of attack vectors. The diversity of phone hardware really helps here.

Mostly though, mobile marketing just tries as hard as they can to create FOMO that you might be missing out on something by using an older phone.

This is in every way superior.

They used to have very comprehensive automated testing processes to exercise all sorts of things. Unfortunately, like many tech companies these days like Apple, Google, etc., they’re all punting QA as a concept because they just don’t care - what are you going to do, go use another oligopoly platform?

Hopefully Lemmyists will stop citing them as a news source which still seems way too frequent.

The American version of those are fun. Two months before the expiration date, stored in a dark space around 50F or less, they separate into globs. Not spoiled, just separated. Globs settle in the bottom of coffee. Once you get enough air in there, you can shake the everloving shit out of it, and the globs break apart into a delightful foam that floats on top.

As long as humans have to be the ones to drive their vehicles, down with this distractive nonsense.

All these brainwashed AI-obsessed people should be required to watch I, Robot on loop for a month or two.

Best thing to do is just stop buying new phones. Play Services and apps will still work and receive updates for years. Swap that old battery and keep chugging for a few years.

Starving all the tech brah corpos of money is the only message we plebs have the power to send. Bouncing to their competitor in a duopoly isn’t actually “showing them” anything.

There sure are, and if necessary they can be applied and are good practices in general. As long as these web sites still see user traffic, monetized or not, even with users using workarounds, they’ll keep thinking what they are doing is cool, and the only problem is that they just have to monetize harder, and then “obviously” all those workaround users will fall in line and monetize like everyone else once they’ve “fixed the glitch”.

If they see a void of user traffic, that gets their attention. Of course, for the person viewing the content, the person has to make a conscious choice to go elsewhere/watch something else/do something else. Would be a good time for content creators to start shifting as well. Patreon even lists a bunch of video services that are not YouTube: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360046704651-What-are-my-video-hosting-options

When I see content blocks like that anymore, I just leave the content behind and go elsewhere. Malicious companies will not get my clicks. They can fuck right off.

Good sign though, means they are getting desperate. It is our duty to starve them of traffic.

Rabbit ears are cheap and don’t need internet. PlutoTV, Samsung TV, Roku TV all exist. So many free choices.

And yet, the Patriot Act and all its evil also still exists.

This isn’t worse as much as it can extend those already unconstitutional evil things for yet more unconstitutional evil.

Best thing to do is just choose an MVNO or prepaid that uses one of the other networks. That’s the problem with boycotts in an oligopoly of something “needed” - one can’t easily full-boycott.

Choosing something that costs you $25/mon versus a $110/mon post-paid plan hits them in their ARPU (average revenue per user) which is a metric carriers heavily try to keep looking good to make shareholders happy.

Only caveats, is MVNOs often do not have domestic roaming, nor access to accessory products you might need for service. Carrier prepaid often does, although sometimes it is a bit less. They also tend to have less priority, and some will plug their QCI level as being on par with a carrier plan (which is a network priority tier at the radio level) but they can and do still get traffic-shaped below primary carrier/post-paid/business/responder traffic.

Domestic roaming is not such a big concern in most developed areas of the country these days, but some places like the Intermountain West do still have a lot of off-carrier roaming where your phone will just stop working when you are domestic roaming.

Some sources from that “other” social site to compare:

https://prepaidcompare.net/

https://www.bestphoneplans.net/

Also, while AT&T and Verizon have storied histories for various reasons, they at least haven’t used mango 1.0 and mango 2.0 to manipulate their position in the market like T-Mobile did. They’re greedy shits and do terrible things themselves, but somehow the mostly German- and partly Japanese-owned (not a bias against those two nations, just pointing out the odd hypocrisy, looking down upon us while profiting from our wallets) T-Mobile is capitalizing on manipulating our markets, regs, and laws to give themselves a leg up above the other two.

FWIW, AT&T has the most square miles of coverage in the US, but it tends to be razor thin in rural areas. AT&T has been very sluggish on upgrading their network, in many markets they broadcast the 5G network flag so your phone says 5G, but they run on old LTE equipment, or run a tiny 5G carrier on ancient hardware on their old 850MHz band to claim it is “real”. They always tend to work for basic voice and text, and some data just about anywhere. Verizon hasn’t ever back-filled their CDMA holes across the US after their 2023 CDMA shutdown, and actually roam on AT&T in places where their gaps are huge. They have done a great job of updating their network in populated or even semi-populated areas, on par with or surpassing T-Mobile. They also didn’t buy spectrum for 12 years, so they have a huge spectrum gap compared to the other two, so if you’re in a busy traffic market, you may have a poor experience.

Wireless in the US is stupid, for so many reasons.

The fart telemetry from the in-seat methane detector is off the chain.

Changing your workflow is work, but those apps, and Paypal, Stripe, Plaid, and bank account linking services all really exist to harvest all your personal transaction data under the guise of making your life “easier”. There are banking regulations governing (somewhat) how older style payment methods can be tracked. These apps circumvent those regs. Those services are best used with throwaway money accounts not bound to your normal accounts, and at the end of a very long pole, but mostly not at all.

However, even credit card companies like MasterCard and American Express are in on it as well, further limiting options. AmEx is an interesting one, as they marketed themselves as a more premium card, housing most services in-house, and keeping transaction data in-house…only to turn around and profit off of it just the same.

Might as well go back to cash and paper checks at this point. Although a realistic lesser perspective is just to minimize which of these services one uses, and be sure that when paying on a web site to not check the “remember you for next time” checkbox that gathers further information to cross-link your purchases. Can’t block it all, but starve them of what one can.

LOL, and no sense to…I don’t know, unplug it and use body heat like we have for centuries?

Campaigned like shit, arrogant enough to think they were a slam dunk, no platform, didn’t even investigate the very vocal voter fraud the R’s said they did. Why ever trust Dems?