Why spend all that money when you can spend less for a device by Withings that you piss on?

There are cheap Chinese ODMs that make trackers for companies. Used to be a “cube” branded tracker that was for keys, not sure there still is. Never used the app, just used LightBlue explorer (free app) to scan for BLE devices and noted its MAC address. The app shows signal strength.

If you have to find your thing, you just point your phone around and watch the signal until it gets stronger. Same process the fancy apps use without the creeper crap. This app also let’s you find any of your devices broadcasting a beacon. Fitbit, watch, whatever.

I only decided to set up a personal AWS for some minor things after having worked on it at employers for many years, after watching employers accidentally spend $3000 a day or $1 million a month or $35,000 in error. Cloud is the devil, bring back servers. One flat piece of hardware you can do whatever with…but even that’s not sacred. If you use hosted servers, the hosts often still charge for ingress/egress and other things now, so you still fall into traps if not careful. Simpler though.

So I guess, storing your own server in your office is the way to go, but then the ISP issues…

Let us all just go back to paper, actually.

Play store does the same game. Google always sucks worse these days, sadly. Not pro-Apple, just use Linux.

For apps with generic update messages that also have source control and changelogs available: check to see how often the updates are just a manifest version bump and nothing more. Way greater than zero.

Most version revs for apps are just to reset review count and bury negative reviews with “review of an older version”.

It’s all gamification of walled gardens. Walled gardens that need to die.

Not trying to sound negative in tone, to prefix. Just more factual.

Need is a strong word. Browser can do banking. So can computer, tablet, the bank itself. Check deposit is one thing that an “app” is needed for but happens exceedingly rarely these days. One could also keep an old Android phone around just for that banking app if the usage was important enough. One could also go back to cash, although that has other bulky/theft issues.

Maps also can be done in browser, or open Android map apps like Organic Maps ported.

Digital wallets aren’t really “needed” in the world, there are still non-phone-based techs to replace them. Sure, it’s great having an empty pocket with nothing but a phone, but that is a pure luxury, not a need. Might actually be a good time for more people to stop using “smart” tech to keep non-smart tech in prevalence.

Remember too, all these finance-based “conveniences” are there just so every company along the way can vacuum up all your transactions. Google Wallet gets to see every card/purchase you use/do, for example, even when not using the phone for the purchase.

Fund a dev, volunteer time, and devs need to drop iOS and Android projects and focus on this.

That’s a good point. Although living in the now, what did old Series 40 or Series 60 do behind the scenes? Probably not much because the extra power to mine user data wasn’t there yet. Also HMD could have made the “+” telemetry. Not to diss it though. I’d much rather risk their software than any other right now.

Yeah, the hardware realm is the real difficult piece, and even if one can manufacture a device with off-the-shelf parts and manage to find chips with enough support for bands/modes for usability on carriers, getting carrier certification is a PITA.

Good luck with that too, with carriers sunsetting legacy networks, old dedicated dumbphones will no longer work in most cases. KaiOS is sometimes used on dumbphones, but most these days just run a fork of Android designed for dumbphones.

Maybe Meshtastic with an SMS API gateway is the way to go. Or cans and string.

That is an amazing dedicated ride. Kudos to your ingenuity!

And zero SIM in America so they can force their controlling narrative rather than consumer choice.

Leave Google.

Google hasn’t released Pixel 10 binary blobs with Android 16 AOSP, so unless they can be reverse-extracted out of Google Android and backported, Pixel 9 series will be the last to run Graphene.

Custom ROMs will no longer exist. Google is no longer sharing drivers for Pixel hardware on AOSP and they only release it public very late now. Samsung phones blow a fuse if you unlock them. Not many android brands left. Reverse-engineering and swiping of drivers will work for a time on older models, but it will become increasingly impossible.

Permanently Deleted

I’d argue as a transitional device / threaten the shit out of Google.

In the mean time, governments that still function should fine Google for purposely generating millions of eWaste devices in software.

Maybe they’ll correct, maybe not, but in the mean time, one can spend the time on iOS to pare back what they do on a phone, with the end goal of ending up on a dumbphone/home brewed/linux/alt phone that will then be available.

Some really sweet simple phones like light phone, keyphone, minimal phone, punk mp02 and more already.

He furiously masturbates to the suffering of others. His only skill, if called that.

Needs to be taken to Noemees gravel pit.

For what it’s worth, that app can’t access battery management stats at the system level. It just estimates based on factory specs and basic battery telemetry accessible to userspace apps like charge percent. The app power usage stats the OS provides is heavily flawed at the OS level, not all power consumption like modem behavior is captured accurately or at all.

So, tl;dr, just guesses and is of very limited usefulness. It does increase battery consumption slightly though, which… doesn’t really help.

It did sell. And it seems the vendor’s plan was to use it to promote their software platform and nothing more.