geteilt von: https://lemmy.ml/post/38682476

(translated) Everyone has a phone. Whether it's an iPhone, where you can't install a better YouTube Music client without ads, or an Android, where you have pre-installed apps from three different manufacturers plus ads for new phones popping up as notifications. Anyone who reads my articles regularly knows what I'm talking about. Today, after a very long time, we're going to review a phone from Google, on which I installed GrapheneOS.

Use the translator in the sidebar to translate the page.

I've stopped using Google Photos but haven't really found a suitable android app (or two separate ones) which can replace two main features:

1. One-click post-processing - I think Google called it something like "auto awesome", basically a single button which slightly tweaked brightness, contrast, and presumably a few other things to make snaps look a bit better
2. Automatic backup - I've tried proton drive but the app is a bit slow to load thumbnails, and critically it's a one-way copy so you have to manually re-delete everything from your phone

Any recommendations for apps which can replace these features? Doesn't have to be all-in-one, and FOSS is preferred!

With the recent false banning of tech channels, such as Enderman, I really want to find alternative platforms to watch tech content. I know a few YouTubers who have channels on Odysee, PeerTube, etc. However, I would rather watch them in a desktop app as opposed to a web browser.

Is there any desktop QT applications for Linux (ideally Arch BTW) that allow me to watch videos from a decentralized video platform, such as PeerTube? Ideally, it would use QT as I'm using KDE Plasma, but if they're aren't many, then GTK is fine too.

As a bonus: Something similar to FreeTube, which is what I use for YouTube. If it's something similar, it doesn't have to be QT as I know FreeTube isn't.

Been putting a lot of work into degoogling my life, and I'm looking to move to GrapheneOS at some point in future. Still a total noob when it comes to tech, but more to the point...

I've been a Google Fi subscriber for a few years at this point, and was always a fan of how strong the cell service is. Now that I'm trying to drop google wherever possible, I feel kinda lost when it comes to what cell provider to switch over to. I feel like most everyone I've spoken to has a laundry list of complaints about their providers having terrible cell coverage or overpriced data rates. What do you people use for cell service? What's the best option if I'm looking for security and privacy as well as a decently strong cell coverage?

Hey everyone,

I have a promotion on my phone right now that is preventing me from unlocking my pixel to put GOS on. I can't unlock it until I pay it off.

I also noticed an option on T-Mobile in the US to temporarily unlock the device. Obviously this would be a loophole but my question is this:

Has anyone used the temporary unlock and been able to then OEM unlock the phone to install graphene?

It's so toxic how Youtube will remove your comment on a video if you mention "Lemmy" or any other suggestion to descentralized alternatives to Technofeudalism. This has also happened to me on Reddit.

It's frustrating that they treat the fediverse like a trigger word, it drowns the possibility to guide people to new communities.

Edit: Best guess is the VPN server that I was using was blacklisted. It's weird to believe the word 'Lemmy' or 'Fediverse' is blacklisted as well, but I cant find other reasons.

I see it coming, in a very short time every Android and iOS phone will come with AI built-in and so intertwined in the phone that it'll be impossible to remove. I would like to investigate alternatives. I do have a few requirements--

• Can run on ATT network (USA).

• WiFi hotspot is a feature.

• I need Ring Central for work. Therefore I would need to have some way of using Android apps, even if within a Linux or other system.

Within those confines, what are the most promising options?

Does anyone know of a keychain style bluetooth tracker (wallet and device trackers are a bonus) that works with Android that ideally doesn't require having an account with some company? And most definitely not with Google. Understanding that such a device probably won't have access to Google's Find My Device network or something similar. I haven't any luck finding anything definitive.

Here's the features I want in such a device:

• Find device via my phone (if in bluetooth range)
• Rechargeable/replaceable battery
• No subscription required

Less important but nice to have:

• Find my phone via the device (again, if in bluetooth range)

Here's the devices I've tried/researched. Seems unlikely any of these will work. I'm hoping I'm either wrong and/or there's some option I didn't find.

Tile

I bought some of these. I had a phone with a custom rom and microG. Which let me circumvent a google sign in (still need a vendor account, unfortunately). But I damaged that phone while traveling and had to replace it quickly and didn't research the replacement. This phone currently doesn't have any custom roms available. With regular Google Play services as opposed to microG, the Tile app also requires you be signed in to Google play to work. Maybe I could get around this via the unlock bootloader > Magisk > LSPosed > FakeGapps > MicroG route and perhaps I'll try, but I'd rather have a device that doesn't try to force me in the first place.

Samsung Galaxy SmartTag2

So far this seems like the best option. From what I've read it requires a Samsung account but not a Google one. Lesser of two evils.

Chipolo

The FAQ for all devices in their current product line say they work with Google’s Find My Device app and their app provides extra features. Which indicates to me a requirement on Google.

Pebblebee

Their current Clip (keychain) product lists Google's Find Hub app as a requirement. Their card and tag products do not.

Before anyone suggests using alternativeto.net, I checked over there but all it is showing are the usual document scanners. While both are similar, Photoscan deals with reflections better because it takes 4 different photos from different angles to the centre of the image and then merge it to give a clean scan of the image. And I couldn’t find any FOSS alternative which does the same.

"This is a project to research proprietary files in Android to work towards a long-term goal of free replacements." Meaning; to develop FOSS alternatives for the Google parts in the Android system.

I'd like to start a thread for people to share what they're using for search now that quality & relevance of results are in steep decline on all major search engines.

I'm doing this for selfish as well as altruistic reasons, mostly because my "stack" has gotten a lot less useful over the past year, because the search engines I use repackage Bing, whose ability to return relevant results at all seems to be cratering.

My (shitty and getting worse) solution:

• DuckDuckGo as default search engine mostly for bang commands, in my personal opinion DDG's relevance has been shit for its entire existence
• StartPage as where I direct most of my general searches (by appending !sp on DDG)
• currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results; this works, but it's not easy to set up if you don't use Google which seems to be the main search engine the developer tests with

The problem with this approach is that increasingly, Bing simply doesn't return hits on topics I know should have plenty to choose from. Filters only solve the issue of too many hits, not too few.

BTW I tried Qwant, but their claim of having their own index seems to be bullshit, the results look like repackaged Bing to me. And, the UX is terrible in Firefox for Android.

I'd love to hear suggestions.

tl;dr pls share what you are doing for web search these days in order to work around the rapidly declining quality of major search engines

i have been on GrapheneOS for around a year now but the default one feels lacking of features like searching for texts etc. so what other sms apos out there that are foss and feature-full.

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/30161321

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/30161320

I watch YouTube through newpipe, and recently tried pipepipe too. They work great, but lately I have been blocked on several occasions with a message that either says "content unavailable" or "your IP has been blocked by YouTube". I usually use a VPN which has helped but tried it today and still got this message :/

Finally changing the location on the VPN seemed to work. But seriously wtf is going on?

Don't know if this is the right comm. Let me know if there's a better one.

Inthe last few days I noticed that the results of some public searxng instances has gotten way worse (mostly cyrillic/chinese text when searching english text with :en).

Does anyone else have that problem? Die google start the next anti-consumer tactic to push their AI garbage?

I'm working thru a marketing cert via Google rn (working with the enemy) and I just learned how many ads we're exposed to on a daily basis!

Any guesses?

Fuck Google with a stiff wire brush.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/37051112