They are hiding it deliberately if people are more likely to leave critical or negative reviews.
I can't leave reviews through the Google maps app either, the function is gone. If I open the mobile website, it's there again.
Fucking hypocrites.
The maps is annoying, look up hotels, they hide the website behind a drop down in the hopes you book through google...will I fuck.
If OSM had speed trap warnings I would be gone.
OSM does have speed trap warnings but someone would have had to add the speed trap for it to work. Organic Maps (or rather CoMaps, which I now use) shows me when there's a spred trap.
Waze has speed trap warnings. They don't have anything else (and were also bought out by Google), but for navigation, it rocks.
But then... It's just Google.
The Play Store works exactly as designed.
It takes a search term, turns it into a list of completely random apps sorted by whatever makes Google the most money in in app payments and adverts, and then shows it to you.
What more did you want from a store run by the world's biggest advertising company?
I avoid the play store as much as reasonably possible. F-Droid, Github/lab/etc, and FOSS alternatives are my first choices before venturing into that cesspit.
Yeah I have droidify on my phone but I had not installed a new app in a bit and my work profile blocked it. I deleted the work profile.
It was the mastodon app I wanted to review
Dunno when, but been using Android since around Android 2, and I remember it only worsening over the years.
I like the more plain approach that Aurora Store is going for. It is an alternative Frontend to the Google Play API, but has just apps and nothing else. Posting reviews seems pretty straight forward although I never did it.
It also let's you spoof some devices to download "incompatible" apps.
Thank you, I have seen it mentioned and nevwr pulled the trigger. Just installed and replaced default open links.
Some apps can detect they have not been installed through the play store and will refuse to work. My banking app pulls this bullshit, among others.
This has been happening more and more to me lately. Not the end of the world, and I still use Aurora Store for the majority of my apps, but it's concerning.
chatgpt does too and for some reason it doesn't work on rooted phones which makes no sense so gemini it is
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.mistral.chat
Try this one, personality is a bit more brief.
i mean you could just not have an AI app on your phone? i think you can live without that
I mean, I can live without for the brief period where we'll be needing our AIs to run remotely. It would be within months probably that we'll have some free GPT4All implementation (or similar) running on a phone. There's already whisperAI running locally at decent speeds on a phone for STT, and there's SherpaTTS running Kaldi TTS also with pretty realistic results...all fully local, all available in f-Droid. I don't think there's anything stopping your phone from running a lower distilled model locally, if your RAM allows it.
my point is why the fuck would one need any sort of gpt-like thing? are we seriously already at the point where people feel that is a necessary thing in daily life?
Another route one can go that takes a bit of work is Obtainium. Hand-pick the apps you want to show up and feed their GitHub, F-Droid, etc. links to manage them. Since F-Droid has some issues with how they build packages, it can be used sparingly but not avoided then.
Go app by app until your dependence on the Play Store goes away. Then disable or uninstall (probably can only disable on most phones, I've seen anyway) the Play Store completely. Slow way to gain independence from crapware. You can then export your Obtainium config to a JSON file to import on future phones/other phones so you don't have to duplicate the work.
Some bonus points, the non-Play version of one app I use shrinks from 120MB to 30MB when all the Google dependencies are stripped. You also gain back functionality like full filesystem access and other things Google forces apps to remove from the Play Store flavor.
More freedom. Faster apps. Less overhead. Less Google crap. Not a big scary transition.
Thanks I just installed obtainium from fdroid. I've been using it and Izzy for a while. Can you list a few apps that you use obtainium to manage as examples of apps that you prefer to manage that way?
I do agree. Also the change log for all app updates now are: stability and performance improvements
That's been like 10 years by now or more
Ditto for YouTube. I always struggle to find my watch history and saved videos. And the fact search defaults to those stupid shorts.
I like to think it's because YouTube are trying to force new content on me, but it's probably partly just that I'm old.
I get "sign in to prove you're not a bot". Nah bud. It's bad when this is key information that should be publicly accessible. Like just now the video of Leavitt announcing Trump's decision on whether to get US directly involved in Iran/Israel war. This was a link from PBS.
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