No, I'm not hacking.
No Linux is not a movie.
No, you are not a developer because you can put "Hello World" on a website.
No, this isn't a waste of my time.
Yes, I will use it.
Yes, I'll make you a website for free. NOT!
Your phone is both Android and Samsung.
No, what they did in the movie is impossible.
No, I can't predict the stock market.
No, I'm not Mr. Robot, but I know him...

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

Storytime
A story about an Android TVbox which decided to become an iPad

Several years ago we've bought an android tv-box. 

It served me and my family well for several years.

Specs are not that important in this story, but there they are:

Android 4.4 
1GB RAM
Amlogic quadcore 1.4HGz
8GB memory.

This device served us well - online TV, browsing, music, file sharing and so on. But recently cheap Chinese memory deciteed to take a break and damaged ROM. Because of that device won't boot. The only option was to take it apart and "short circuit" certain legs on memory chip and make it boot from SD card and install new firmware. After such operations tv-box worked well again. 

Hoverer, memory glitched again and again and this algorithm was repeated for several months.

But that is not what is this story about.

One day memory went completely crazy and there was no way to install new firmware on it. It just hanged on install. (BTW, it was official firmware for this device)

But after countless attempts it finally worked! It installed the firmware and booted into launcher and connected to WiFi! 

But now comes the most interesting part. 

It was not android anymore.

It decided to became an iPad.

My dad logged in to his Google account via tv-box and got mail that someboby connected from our IP via iPad (we don't have an iPad) and using safari browser! Stock browser is not safari browser.....

"Ok, nvm, crazy glitch." - we thought.

But preinstalled play marked wont launch. Because he told us, that we're trying to connect from iPad.

And Google chrome page suggested to download chrome for iPad

And everything was acting like it is an iPad.

OK, downloaded iTunes, why not??? ._.

Tried to install elixir for android via apk from flash, but then memory glitched one more time, everything went black and tv-box had damaged ROM again...

After that we decided to not torment it anymore...

That's it. Poor Android TVbox that all his life dreamed to become an iPad. Rest in peace.

Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!

The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.

I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.

The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.

When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.

That's when the nerdgasm happened.

The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!

That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.

Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.

Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.

Love stock android, doesn't have the bloatware shit

This probably isn't the coolest bug I've ever solved, but surely the one with the biggest faceplam
So I was building a Bluetooth smart watch that pairs with your Android device for the final year bachelor's project. The submission was in a 2 days and it was all ready and it suddenly stopped working.. Spent hours trying to fix it, even tried to get a replacement Bluetooth module (was out of stock -_-).. After a day's worth of freaking out I discovered that Android phones (at least the OnePlus X) don't connect to Bluetooth modules when their battery is below 15% -_- and since I was freaking out I would let the phone charge a bit and get back to debugging and it never crossed 15% so it never worked.. One day of debugging attempts later it suddenly struck me that low battery might be an issue.. And voila! It worked after charging the phone

Shouldn't such things be clearly mentioned in documentation :/

(Btw, got full for the project, got a 10/10 GPA for the semester)

Word of advice: never buy the UMIDICI C Note 2.

Bought it myself and it's an utter piece of garbage.

Just bought another phone which runs stock android 7 and Lineage OS might be installable.
Also it can be rooted, good enough for me!

Devrant and pickpockets

A week ago on Tuesday was heading to meet my client for a demo presentation.Once in town and few metres from our meeting point thought of checking some few rants only for my device to be snatched from my hands and the pick pocket sublimes away.
I composed myself and went to the agreed meeting point only not to meet my client and they was no way I would reach out to him.After making few rounds waiting for him finally gave up and headed for home.
Fast forward I made a resolution not to get a new device till a week ends and had to roll back to a simple device till today.
With today being the D-day I did head to my carrier to get a new device and once the phone was being set up the customer care agent asks which app do you need set up.With no hesitation I gladly say DevRant and she got no idea what's that then after some explaining she says all give it a try with a smile.
I later leave the store a happy man with DevRant being the first app on my device as I ran stock android.

Glad to be back family.

Huawei will shut down Bootloader unlocker Site = Dead Brand for me!

Sorry but this is censoring. Sure Stock Android matured over the years, but ROOT IS STILL A THING!

I've I buy a device, I also wanna have full rule over it.

Please stop saying, "stock Android." What you mean is AOSP, and no phones from any manufacturer come with it. Stock means it's in the original state that the manufacturer intended, filled with bloat, whether it's Samsung, Google, LG, Xiaomi, or whatever.

Set out to copy the iOS alarm on android because a) android's stock alarm is fugly and b) all other sleep reminder apps either offer me way too much or no functionality.

Week 1: "Oh, custom UIs need a lot of math... Ok."
Week 2 "Why on earth is my ram usage at 400 mb?!"
Week 6: "I have come to the realisation that android's ByteArrayDecoder should burn in hell.
Week 7: "Man... They sure made the management of intents and pending intents a pain."
Week 10: There. It works. Two classes, 7000 lines of code.... Hmmmm maybe apply MVP."
Week 11: I discovered embarrassment driven development, throw away all my code and start from scratch.
Week 12: Oh ButterKnife, where have you been all my life?
Week 17: I might actually finish this in my life time!
Week 28: Man, this MVP and managing Context, intents, SQLITE DB and pending intents do not mix well.
Week 46: I discover RxJava and Dagger 2
Week 47: I discover that the 'V' in MVP does not refer to an 'Activity'
Week 48: My StudyBudy says to me "Man, exams are only a month away!"
Week 49: I put all your code in my github, delete it locally and focus back on being a student.

Google

I used to be a fan, but recently they really stopped listening to users. No one asked for a wide angle selfie cam. If you give us that huge notch at least provide a FaceID equivalent or something that makes up for the notch.

Remove the headphone jack, cool. But then make the adapter and Bluetooth reliable. Even after a year the adapter isn’t working and the Bluetooth doesn’t connect on the first attempt. Never. The fix is constantly “coming”.

Google copies Apple without thinking. Apple gets away with shit because they provide something in return.

I was an Android user for almost 10 years, and I’ll say this: I bought the iPhone XS (I’m a purist, non-stock OS is a massive no-no) and it’s a much more usable device than the Pixels or other Android devices I used. It’s lacking in a lot of ways, but overall it’s a much better phone.

Google really needs to hire people who understand what people actually want. An amazing camera on its own isn’t enough these days.

Must nearly every recently-made piece of software be terrible?

Firefox runs terribly slowly on a four-core 1.6GHz processor when given eight (8) gigabytes of RAM. Discord's user interface is awfully slow and uses unnecessary animations. Google's stuff is just falling apart; a toaster notification regarding MRO stock was recently pushed such that some markup elements of this notification were visible in the notification, the download links which are generated by Google Drive have sometimes returned error 404, and Google's software is overall sluggish and somewhat unstable. Today, an Android phone failed to update the Google Drive application... and failed to return a meaningful error message. Comprehensive manuals appear to be increasingly often not provided. Microsoft began to digest Windows after Windows XP was released.

Laziness is not virtuous.

For all computer programs, a computer program should be written such that this computer program performs well on reasonably terrible hardware... and kept simple. The UNIX philosophy is woefully underappreciated.

!Rant
I think that Google has alien employee's.
NOW Why Do I Say that???

Because all the stock Android versions do not have a "DARK MODE".

If they were human developer's they would have included it.

Same statement is Worthy to all their apps.

Light is killing me !!!

I belive that except stock android, every other custom android UI sucks.
Especially Samsung UI and MIUI

Who else shares my opinion?

I've had a Xiaomi Mi 8 for a few months now. Although I'm impressed by what I got for the amount I paid (a phone that cost about $250 for 6GB RAM, Snapdragon 845, Android 9 and premium build quality is quite a steal), it definitely comes with a consequence.

MIUI (specifically MIUI 11) is godawful. It is single-handedly the worst Android ROM I've ever used since my shitty Android 2.2 phone back around 2010. If you're gonna buy a Xiaomi phone, plan to install Lineage OS on it (but even that's a pain which I'll explain why later).

- Navigation buttons don't hide while watching a video.

Why? God only knows. The ONLY way to bypass without root this is to use its garbage fullscreen mode with gestures, which is annoying as all hell.

- 2 app info pages?

Yeah, the first one you can access just by going to its disaster of a settings app, apps, manage apps and tap on any one.

The 2nd one you can access through the app info button in any 3rd party launcher. Try this: Download Nova launcher, go to the app drawer, hold on any app and tap "app info", and you'll see the 2nd one.

Basically, instead of modifying Android's FOSS source code, they made a shitty overlay. These people are really ahead of their time.

- Can only set lock screen wallpapers using the stock Gallery app

It's not that big an issue, until it is, when whatever wallpaper app you're using only allows you to set the wallpaper and not download them. I think this is both a fuckup on Xiaomi and (insert wallpaper app name here), but why Xiaomi can't include this basic essential feature that every other Android ROM ever made has is beyond me.

- Theming on MIUI 11 is broken

Why do they even bother having a section to customize the boot animation and status bar when there's not one goddamn theme that supports it? At this point you're only changing the wallpaper and icon pack which you can do on any Android phone ever. Why even bother?

They really, REALLY want to be Apple.

Just look at their phones. They're well designed and got good specs, but they don't even care anymore about being original. The notch and lack of a headphone jack aren't features, they're tremendous fuckups by the dead rotting horse known as Apple that died when Steve Jobs did.

Xiaomi tries to build a walled garden around an inherently customizable OS, and the end result is a warzone of an Android ROM that begs for mercy from its creator. Launchers integrate horribly (Does any power user actually use anything that isn't Nova or Microsoft launcher?), 3rd party themes and customization apps need workarounds, some apps don't work at all. People buy from Xiaomi to get a high end budget Android phone at the price of some ads and data collection, not a shitter iOS wannabe.

They really, REALLY want you to have a sim card

If you don't have a sim card and you're using your phone for dev stuff, you're a 2nd class citizen to Xiaomi. Without one, you can't:

- Install adb through adb
- Write to secure settings
- Unlock your bootloader and get away from this trash Android ROM

What's the point? Are they gonna shadow ban you? Does anyone contact them to unlock their bootloader saying "yeah I wanna use a custom rom to pirate lizard porn and buy drugs"? They made this 1000000000x harder than it needs to be for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah and you gotta wait like a week or something for them to unlock it. How they fucked up this bad is beyond me.

So yeah. Xiaomi. Great phones, atrocious OS.

That awkward moment when you're trying to find patterns to pin point trade ahead transactions on stock market and you realized that you were hired as Android developer.

everytime i buy a new phone ,i feel this sense of extreme regret :(

i bought a moto g 5g phone last year in feb, it was so good . it didn't had any out of the world cameras or some funky stuff, but it gave a decent performance and i couldn't want any other phone.

In October my mom's phone started giving issues so i bought a realme phone for her that was half my phone's price. i couldn't spent any mor e because otherwise she wouldn't take it. she accepted the cheaper phone and within 4 days sue was cursing it. the phone had decent specs but would lag in certain apps like zoom, and won't run some call recorder apps. at the end i swapped my phone with mom's since i didn't cared about zoom or the recorder.

now this shit realme phone's memory has gone around 60% full of my stuff, and its showing its limitations. this shit auto relaunches insta after a few minutes of usage, probably because its runtime memory gets short( 4gb 128gb device gets memory shortages. nice). its video quality is shit and camera also takes rarely good pics.

the worst thing i like about smartphones today is how they over optimise the ui. this insta issue and auto call recorders not working is simply because of the realme skin running over the stock android. i had similar issues with a xiaomi device i bought for my dad sometime ago. (fortunately my dad is more medieval so that crap has not came back to me :'/ )

so overall i am buying a 3rd phone in 17 months.
This time it's Samsung f23 and am worried that it's also going to suck. i was this 🤏close to buying a pixel 6 or even an iphone coz i can afford them.

but the regret of buying such an expensive phone that will need replacement in 2 years made me rethink.

the only android os that have suited me the best is stock and as of now only 2 companies are making it : google and moto(* it's 100% aosp with 3 extra apps but they can't say that, so they also state that they are not stock os) . one plus is also a brand that i have heard makes a good os . but recently i also heard that they have completely scrapped their os and using oppo's softwares . plus the amount of tickets we get for notifications not working in oneplus, am sure their optimization is extremely aggressive.

so everything between a moderate price phone ( that will need a replacement in 2 years ) to a flagship felt unnecessary to me, so i went ahead with a Samsung's shit phone. f23 has almost same specs as moto but it's again a heavily customised os. i wanna waste my money on trying a custom os and declare it shitty.

most of my friends that use Samsung are fan of it but they are also not very techy so i guess it suits them well. i am the guy who first installs nova launcher in his device, so let's see what it brings on the table. from the 3rd person p.o.v, i felt its screen and camera images to he nice whenever i used their mobiles, so let's see what this brings to the table :(

Motorola:
It was the only company which used to provide great budget android smartphone with stock android and regular updates. (ranting this on my Moto G3) But from moto G3, they fucked up with promised android OS upgrade (shitty Lenovo)

Microsoft (for fucking with windows 10):
Still remember that first stable build of windows 10 released in 2015. After the first update they never stopped fucking with user's computer with different bugs. Still I haven't seen any build as stable as first one.

Okay then, ex-android user there.

It started with Xperia TX - it was flagship Sony phone back then. It blew my mind when I touched it for the first time. You know, exploring android for the first time in my life was amazing.

It ran just well for about a year. Then it started to fall apart. I need to clarify that I kept it non-rooted, full stock. I'm not into that customization things.

At first, I noticed significant lags. They were everywhere. The longer I used smartphone, the more lags I encountered. I did factory reset, but lags haven't gone anywhere.

Year 2. Front camera stopped working. Battery became unreliable as fuck, going down to 40% and then instantly to zero. What?

Year 3. Camera broke. It refused to start, just giving me "Camera is not available" error.

I tried factory reset again. It helped at first, but month have passed and all that issues came back. And it also became sluggish as fuck.

Got Meizu m3s year ago. The exact same story. Long story short, in one year I got this:
1. Black spots on every picture I take. Much likely a matrix issue.
2. Camera also became slow as fuck, requiring about 10 seconds to even start.
3. Vertical stripes all along the screen. I never dropped my phone, it just appeared once and became brighter and brighter every day I used the phone.
4. Two huge yellow spots on screen. I think it happened because phone's cpu heat up the screen and it broke.

But the most important thing is that fucking lags chased me in every app, they were everywhere. Fucking tiny-ass lags. And they're not going anywhere, they're become more and more significant with time.

Don't say me about oneplus, samsungs and other top android phones. They are conceptually the same, the only different thing is hardware.

That's why I switched. IPhone has its downsides, but it's silky smooth. And my friend's iPhone 4 (not s) feels just as smooth as my brand new se.

I'm not going to jailbreak it. I don't need customizing the hell out of it.

I just needed quick and reliable phone, and SE seems to be exactly what I wanted.

Peace to android folks tho✌️

Lets talk about our dream phone!

Here's what mine would be...

Screen: 1440p AMOLED highly saturated screen.
CPU: Snapdragon 845 (Or whatever is on top)
RAM: 4-6 GB
Storage: 16 GB internal OS reserved storage for the OS only but on the side would have 2 slots with the same locking mechanism as the sim tray to hold 2 hot swapable storage or battery modules.
OS: A modular version of stock android (By modular i mean a version of stock android that is designed to be installed on any device)
Speaker: Dual front facing stereo
Ports: 2 usb-c ports on the bottom.

Special features: A portable desktop experience that when plugged into a monitor would give a chromeOS style experience with the phone acting as a touchpad.

Stock Android rant

Friend: your phone looks different
Me: yah running stock android
Friend:where is the file manager and it looks weird
Me:that's the price of using stock android
Friend:what's stock android btw
Me:it's clutter free software from Google
Friend:what is clutter free and I don't like it though

Me:I finally give up on him and have my phone back

IOS keyboard is utter garbage. IOS as a whole is utter garbage, but the keyboard is the cream of the crop of garbage.

Wasting a user's time and destroying/changing the user's input against their wishes is malicious design of the highest order and this dumpster fire excels in it.

Type something completely valid and autocomplete changes it to something that doesn't makes sense. It not only gives you a terrible suggestion half the time, it will also change previous parts of the sentence that it somehow allowed you to keep. If you reject its suggestion, it deletes your current word and previous word(s), instead of restoring it to what it was before it made the terrible suggestion, like every other keyboard does.

Need to go back and adjust your sentence? If you tap it will hijack the cursor and highlight the nearest word it doesn't like instead of moving the cursor where you touch. If you accidentally hit a character on the cramped and unusable keyboard, congrats, you get to type the word again.

I know about hold space to drag the cursor.

I don't want Apple to decide for me that I actually wanted to go to the closest word it doesn't like, or the current word, or the next word based on a dice roll. I want the cursor to go where I tap. Like literally every other input device functions.

Want readily accessible numbers and punctuation? lol no

I know there's gboard, but compared to Android it's also almost unusable. This leads me to believe the keyboard is little more than a skin over the IOS keyboard engine, like Safari, another IOS dumpster fire. But, it is slightly better than the stock keyboard, which isn't saying much.

I yearn, minute by minute, for the time I can ditch this dumpster fire for a real phone.

So I bought a new phone, I was super excited getting it, I even got to open it at work with my colleagues watching. It was really nice, the S8 is an attractive phone... Until it started crashing very very regularly. I want to go back to my old phone, that's how bad it is. Turns out this is a common experience, how can this be at the top of all the review lists if it has this problem? Is the assumption that you are going to install stock android as soon as you get it? Or is someone paying for reviews?

I gues devrant android app got an update recently [last week?]? Notifications suddenly started to work. Yayy!

But in-app notifications broke. More often than not either tab in notifs [all, ++, comments, etc.] loads nothing and there's no way to re-fetch data manually. If _all_ breaks I have to browse each category manually to see what's new.

Is it just me or is anyone else experiencing this?

Galaxy s7 edge, stock everything.

P.S. I rarely get to rant about devrant :)

yesterday, I just swapped my sim card for some time with another. Placed it back....and voila! I can't enable data connection. I lost all my apn settings. To add to this, neither is it auto fetching the apns, nor i can manually change it! It shows some fucking error "apn settings not available for this user". I have another phone with same android version (lollipop) and everything works smoothly on it. These guys just broke everything after giving an upgrade from kitkat. Auto brightness stops working after a few hours, random reboots.... This is it... bye bye stock rom!

So everyone I know that has an iPhone is always mad at it because it randomly freezes or it is slow. I've yet to get my Moto G to freeze or to lag at all. Gotta love almost stock Android experience.

This morning I had an update to my one plus 3t

I now have face unlock...
And the latest (almost every few months) Android security updates

This is how software should be, this is how phone manufacturers should utilize their os, not by slapping some heavyweight skin on it. But by keeping it stock with added features. And when the time is right new features, most importantly security updates

The biggest dilemma for me has always been whether to switch my Android device to a sleek beautiful customisable AOSP based ROM or keep the stock ROM with all the amazing drivers and features, but with crappy bloatware.

Been sticking with CM/Lineage for years, amazing experience with Xposed & Viper4Android, but at expense of things like 4K and slow motion video and other stuff.

Help!
I am trying to update android on my Nexus 10 to 5.5. it is stock other than twrp for recovery and an unlocked bootloader.
Below is the error I get when trying to install the update.
Any ideas?
Ps. Sorry it's literally a screen picture

got access to a data feed from US stock markets, personalized an algorithm to compare fundamental data/enterprise value, run it continuously, get good investment ideas and feed an android app.

watch my money growing

I'm a huge fan of stock android but it's getting worse and worse now. Stupid fucking bugs everyday that I discover.

!rant

My stock hp 2000-369wm notebook laptop with 4GBmem won't boot (from USB) ReactOS, RemixOS, or Android-x86

Is there any way to change the location of this back button to right side? I am tired of this button. I have got Android pie now but still this shit shows up at far left of the screen.
Ps : am on stock android

Some mobile file managers kick me back to the beginning after selecting items for copying or moving.

When tapping on "copy" or "move" after selecting files/folders, some file managers like ES File Explorer (back when it was popular) conveniently remain in the current directory, whereas the stock Android file manager and many vendors' pre-installed file managers like that of Samsung kick me back to the initial directory. On phones with MicroSD, that's the storage selector, and on phones without, that's /storage/emulated/0/.

If I wanted to move files into a sub folder of the currently viewed directory, I have to navigate all the way back to that current directory, which is, needless to say, annoying.

Who thought it was a smart idea to kick the user back to the initial directory? But vendors' pre-installed file managers tend to be garbage anyway. Samsung's "My Files" file manager does not let me enter file names longer than 50 characters, does not let me change the extensions of files, does not support selecting files from search results or jumping to their parent directory, does obviously lack range selection, hides the status bar while opened (what's the point of that?!), its search feature is slow and sometimes crashes, and it can only search the entire device storage or memory card and not individual directories.

It's almost like Samsung deliberately tried to design a file manager as terrible as they possibly could.

anyone else having issues with starting the app since build 1.14.0.2? did not find another rant and filed an issue.
xperia z5 compact with stock android 7.1.1, switching on and off did not help.

feels bad when the front door of home is closed.

Anyone have any decent Android apps for showing bluetooth headset's battery level info on status bar? (It can be a non-closeable notif)

FYI, an iPhone can detect this knock-off headphone's battery level. My phone doesn't have a viewing option as a stock widget/app.

Anyone using a newish Android One phone right now who'd care to comment on the experience?

How are the updates? Stock Android work well?

After reading through an article by EFF about Google's new FLoC technology, I finally woke up and realized that Google isn't any different from the other huge organizations, and that it isn't here to fight for greater user privacy and rights... As such, I made a switch, going from Google to DuckDuckGo.

Sure, I still use YT, but other than that, I don't have a gmail address that'd be of importance, don't use their search engine, and now...

Got any tips on how to minimize tracking potential of an android-based rooted smartphone? (Stock rom, Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro). I know using a custom rom is an option, however, Lineage isn't officially supported for this model of phone, and I still value functionality over anything else, so... Unofficial daily drive OS is sub-optimal.

Alternative hardware solutions like PinePhone, although nice in theory, are way too behind the commercial brands in terms of technology and features, so that's a no go.

Wondering if I should install adb and android dev drivers on my dad's laptop just so I can reflash and upgrade OpenGApps, LOS.

The locations services didn't seem to be working well, seems it may not be using the GPS,. just wifi...

I don't have all the backups, stock images I have at home either and not sure I want him to see me fucking up my phone...

Convo I had last time:

Me: Oh I bricked my phone again, for now you can reach me by email
Dad: wtf? Why?
Me: well it's complicated... Wasnt working and so I wanted to reflash and upgrade everything but ...
Dad: stop buying shitty phones
Me: ....

What's your Android setup?
On Google Pixel 4XL and stock launcher

Another severe UI fail by Google:

On stock Android 7, the expanded system control menu only shows FOUR controls per page in horizontal view.

Compare that to superior TouchWiz (by Samsung), which showed all 23 controls at once, as seen in the screenshot attached in a comment.

In addition, on TouchWiz, the user could tap multiple options at once. Tapping on a toggle would just turn a feature on or off, and opening a menu would require holding the toggle for a second.

On stock Android, tapping opens the menu, so turning a feature off requires three more taps to reach a toggle located inside the submenu and to then go back.

This makes deactivating multiple features on stock Android a finger workout.

I am not sure which other stock Android versions are like that because I couldn't find horizontal screenshots of the system control menu (or toggle menu, or whatever it is called).

Only four controls per page? Seriously, Google?

TouchWiz Android > stock Android > iOS.

Hey, just need a little advice regarding android kernels.
Does anyone know a simple way to download either pre-compiled or source code of stock kernels delivered with phones?
I flashed one, but have some System UI problems, so I want to go back to stock, but I can't find any download.

I'm running a Samsung Galaxy S6 (zerofltexx).