Syncthing-For
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There's so much worse out there. This at least looks functional and shouldn't hurt anyones' eyes.
Anyway, this is a FOSS project. Anyone could go and work with them to clean up the design.
https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose/text/style-...
The old f-droid client made selecting app updates easy. With both v2 and droid-ify, you have to click through for each app. Not a great interface decision :( Why do updates always dumb interfaces down these days?
After 10 years of F-droid, I'm bummed I only found droid-ify a couple of months ago. Sooo much better than F-droid.
That newspeak term should just disappeared. It only contributes to the image that downloading and installing an app is something that is outside the "happy path". Installing software of your choice on a device you own shouldn't be demonised
Those of us who want to can easily bypass it. My mom who doesn't know what she's doing and gets a phishing email with a fancy apk attached should probably have a hard time using it.
I'd see it the other way around and say that a device running an operating system controlled by some company shouldn't hold your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.
Blocking apps is like blocking buying of knifes because one can hurt themselves.
There's not an easy answer, but the non-answer of "people just need to be educated" is trivially dismissed.
That device was called personal computer for decades, and the world didn't end for the simplicity of installing software on it.
To be fair, mobile phones being locked down probably contributed to the mass adoption of e.g. mobile payments and banking.
The move to apps made things more difficult, if anything
The "personal computer" has a terrible track record.
Society didn't ban doing it, but put up barriers that help the average person from doing something dangerous.
It doesn't mean one can't buy nice things because one is afraid of being robbed.
The Play Store's scanning is very far from perfect, and the amount of crap that's on it, combined with the trust that people have towards it, and apps' unfettered access to internet, makes malicious software easily more common than on PCs.
Even without considering as malicious the enormous data collection that almost everything on the Play Store does, encouraged by Google
Google's own Play Store is filled with outright malware too, no ads needed. The idea that Google has to control what people are allowed to install on their phones isn't really for the protection of anyone except Google.
Knowing Google, that's a big assumption
There are occasional good deals for (unused) older models on eBay, but they're surprisingly rare.
I wonder if Google demands stores to give the old models back, after the release of newer ones; they disappear from every store extremely quickly.
In short, google has referred to this as "increased user friction" to try and deter people from doing this. Essentially not making it impossible; just really frustrating for users so they get sick of the process and just install verified apps through them.
The only way I know around this is to install a custom rom like GrapheneOS or Lineage OS since this change targets Because the policy targets the Google Mobile Services (GMS) framework rather than the foundational Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
Irrespective, people should probably be migrating to a GrapheneOS or similar OS asap once the OS ships with a device.
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.koreader.launcher.fdroid...
Once your used to it, the controls are a lot better than stock kindle as well imo.
The only options are stripping the DRM from kobo books or piracy, last I checked.
haha, I kid. I... kid. :(
# update repo lists
fdr update
# upgrade all apps on the connected device
fdr upgrade
# search packages
fdr search vlc # lists org.videolan.vlc
# install on the device
fdr install org.mozilla.firefox
# download the apk
fdr download org.mozilla.firefox
# uninstall
fdr uninstall org.mozilla.firefox
A few days passed, and I eventually get a notification from NewPipe prompting for an update. But I can't install it just yet, because of mismatching signatures between the F-Droid and GitHub versions (yes, that's the point, I know...). The F-Droid build took so long to release, that in the meantime, another version of NewPipe came out...
It would perhaps be nice if yt-dlp could eject it's youtube api handling into it's own project that is then augmented to handle anything youtube related and turns into THE library for dealing with youtube.. maybe even call it libyt :)
I tried it with 3 random apps for a while, but instantly got into issues. Two stopped updating due to Obtanium falling behind how app releases - for instance, developer changed version numbering scheme but Obtanium didn't expect that, so an outdated version was always presented. It wasn't fixed for quite a while.
Then I discovered https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/ which makes it very easy. I feel like Obtainium should make this more obvious. It would help adoption a lot.
And if you see anything is missing, you can always add it!