I'm on this path too. Waiting a few more months to see what happens. If they indeed block my 4 apps on my phone (which aren't published anywhere), I will simply move to Apple.
I used a New+Unlocked+Pixel+X on eBay to find a rough price of the phone.
Most people get scammed by their carrier and pay $25-45 per month just for their wireless subscription, and many more get caught up in the device bundles which gets you the "latest and greatest", at a huge price. So people are paying, per month, what you can pay, per year for a Pixel.
You can use Silent Link to pay by the gigabyte with no expiration date. Most people don't need unlimited—I use a maximum of 5 GB per month, and my average is around 3. At $1.60 per month, that is $60 per YEAR for me.
Swap in https://jmp.chat for another 60 dollars per year for calls/texts and you get a $120/year phone bill which is just $10/month.
I will be moving from US Mobile to Jmp.chat once my plan expires.
You could also use US Mobile for $17/month which is unlimited and is user friendly. They also often have Pixels for a significant discount with no lock-in.
eBay International exists and I've shipped my laptops from the US to Bolivia, Guam, Sweden, and before the war, Russia. You can definitely get a Pixel unless maybe you live in the DRC or the PRK
I bought an 8a new when it launched for the express purpose of installing GOS. It cost like $450, and will last me most of a decade. If you are using a phone that costs significantly less than that (and I am speaking from personal experience! I had an Obamaphone that I got at a foodbank for many years, as well as a number of crappy used Androids!) your phone storage is so limiting that you are struggling to install more than a few apps.
> If you are using a phone that costs significantly less than that (and I am speaking from personal experience! I had an Obamaphone that I got at a foodbank for many years, as well as a number of crappy used Androids!) your phone storage is so limiting that you are struggling to install more than a few apps.
The only phone I've ever had trouble installing more than a few apps was one with 512MB of storage. If I go check the second result on amazon for android phone it's a solid motorola option, unlocked for $127 and with 128GB. That's more than enough; even some flagships have 128GB.
The "just over $100" range has multiple options with good storage. Below that is a sea of locked/refurbished phones that are also good options in many cases.
Digging deeper I eventually hit a "BLU" brand phone for $50 with only 16GB, and that leaves you with not very much after the OS takes its space. But then you can add $10 to get another 16GB and have more than enough room for apps.
So you have to go really low to have the problem you're describing.
I'm used to fixed partition sizes. The OS eating into user space sounds pretty ugly. And updates to builtin apps since the last OS update eat space, but only so much.
Regardless, since they have a 16GB model I strongly doubt the 32GB model would ever have less than 16GB of usable space.
I've bought Motorola phones that cost less than half of that and still last for 3-5 years and I've been able to install far more than "a few" apps. Having an SD card slot is great for offloading the big storage uses like photos/video.
I get you. I used to buy Nexus devices as well as some of the first Pixels, until at some point the prices shot up to ridiculous levels for a phone and I went with other brands.
Last year though the Pixel 8a was selling for 350€ and I got one. Luckily, given the recent developments. Will be installing GrapheneOS.
Will your 4 unpublished apps be in your android-alternative apple device?
Android will still have the ability to install non-google-distributed programs. The problem is the ominous momentum, but it is still more open than the apple alternative
I'm not the commenter you replied to, but I'm doing the same math they are and coming up with the same answer.
From my perspective iOS is better than Android in a number of ways but Android always won out overall for me, in large part because of the freedom regarding software. Remove that freedom from the equation, I think the balance tips towards iOS.
For me, Google services are not an option, so my Android experience is sans-Google.
Until September 2025, I'd say iOS had actually gotten better than Android.
CalDAV, CardDAV, and SMB are baked into iOS, whereas these are onerous to set up on Android. These are very very nice protocols, and I use them all daily. (Contacts, Calendars, Notes, Reminders, and Files.)
Apple's developer ecosystem lacks the FOSS devs that make F-Droid so good, but they do have a number of devs who release paid apps with zero tracking, which is very nice. It's often the case an app exists on iOS as a $5 one-time fee with a two-paragraph privacy policy for which one does not exist on Fdroid.
Shortcuts work well enough, homescreen customization is good enough, etc. that a number of the original Android draws are gone. There are a number of points where iOS and Android are equals now.
iCloud's E2EE photo backup is something I reluctantly started using and found to be very nice, after having had de-Googled in 2018. I miss having my photos auto-upload and be available on other devices, and Apple has had iCloud Web for awhile. This is nicer than the options I have on Android.
And while Android's notification-panel tiles have gotten worse over the years (down from six to two controls on the first swipe, this was what alienated me and got me to try iOS), iOS now has a much denser "control center".
The big caveat is the gigantic regression that is iOS 26. The phone is slower, it kills battery, the native apps are constantly crashing, the lockscreen and homescreen often have broken navigation flows, etc. It's a travesty that never should have been released and iOS is easily worse than Android right now. If someone needed a phone today, I couldn't recommend an iPhone, but that might change with iOS 27.
>CalDAV, CardDAV, and SMB are baked into iOS, whereas these are onerous to set up on Android
I can only speak to SMB but it is not hard on Android. I use a longtime third party app so not sure what the state of native support is but it works just fine for me, including over VPN
Its more about the principle for me.I know I can jump through hoops for google but I prefer to say no-thank-you.
The long term fear/plan for google is that they know they days of SAAS and Apps are obsolete. People will just write their own platforms, apps, websites all from scratch using AI, which means the app stores becomes obsolete, which means no more ad revenue from shitty ads and no more control and unfettered tracking of your behaviour. AI will make these guys obsolete, they know it, this is them fighting back.
I've had the same experience. Caffeine is super addicting, the ritual & habits surrounding it is a potent pull. For myself, it makes me erratic, impulsive, more reactive and agitated. One cup a day puts me on edge, makes me sweat more, makes me more intolerant, makes everything feel too slow. It such a sneaky drug and it can really get under your skin without you realizing how much it changes you.
I don't have the same experience, and I drink one cup of coffee (270 ml) almost every day. No agitation, no impulsiveness. I can drink coffee in late evening (let's say 8 pm) and sleep well. I guess I'm trying to say that we should not project our own experience on others, everyone is different.
In my experience, this is common among people with ADHD (myself, friends with ADHD, family with ADHD, psychologist’s patients anecdotal evidence). YMMV
I have adhd too, but cannot use stimulant medications (they are too strong). I've had to use non-stim meds.
What if long term caffeine use causes some of the adhd symptoms? It interesting to ponder because if I stop using caffeine for a month, some of my adhd symtoms go away completely. I've done stints of complete caffeine breaks, content consumption breaks (one week or more without screens) and I felt amazing and alive. The first couple of days of using caffeine feels amazing but then I feel dead inside again and live like a robot. So in my mind, caffeine is my main target when I try to adjust my routine/behaviours.
I really only started drinking coffee at my first real job after grad school. They had free coffee in the kitchen, so I'd occassionally have one. Maybe once or twice a week. I was like that for several years, and would occassionally go weeks without a coffee. During that time, I was very productive and went from being a new grad to leading the entire team of veterans in less than five years.
After leaving that job, I now consume fairly regularly (for the past decade at least). I can still easily skip days without coffee, though I do prefer having it daily. I literally see no difference in my day to day between having coffee and not throughout my two decades of experience with coffee. I can just as easily fall asleep after a coffee and I rarely feel amped up from a coffee (if I do, then I just stop drinking it). I've certainly never felt anhedonia like many others have mentioned in the comments when I've taken breaks from coffee.
I think it's clear that people have different experiences with substances. Whether mine is a common one or not, I cannot say. But I do have a baseline to compare to and I can legitimately say the only thing that has ever caused me anhedonia was burning out from too much work (during burn out I was still consuming coffee and it didn't improve my mental state at all).
This is so dumb. There are 100 other ways to protect children that would be more effective than this. Not only will this approach not actually protect children, this will violate the privacy of billions of people. It will introduce identity theft at mass scale (good luck solving that on short notice) and it will make activist/journalists/military/political opposition vulnerable. Perhaps this is the purpose. Who would benefit from such a scenario...mmm?
As a parent this is perfect. I am baffled why this is not a standard yet. So setting an account age in Netflix works but the child can access anything. Make new accounts even. So I have to block half the internet. Somehow. On a shared computer. And all companies would have to get your ID and track that. It's crazy.
This compromises 0 privacy until it requires an ID. EU solution actually does and only supports specific devices.
This is exactly what I do too. Works very well. I have a whole bunch of scripts and cli tools that claude can use, most of them was built by claude too. I very rarely need to use my IDE because of this, as I've replicated some of Jetbrains refactorings so claude doens't have to burn tokens to do the same work. It also turns a 5 minute claude session into a 10 second one, as the scripts/tools are purpose made. Its reallly cool.
edit: just want to add, i still haven't implemented a single mcp related thing. Don't see the point at all. REST + Swagger + codegen + claude + skills/tools works fine enough.
Nope, I just dump it all in a folder (~/scripts) that claude can read & it picks them up as skills. A good chunk of them are regex based, many are find/replace type tools, some are small code generators & template inflators, some are deployment tools, some are audit tools. I cannot release them at this time, most of them are specific to our company, infra and codebase (main codebase is 1MLoC), sorry about that.
Start with a simple "Let me build a script for claude that can rename the namespace for all the file in a folder". If you have 100K+ plus files, it effort is worth it and your tools start getting chained together too. So make sure each tool only has one purpose for existing and that its output is perfect. So when claude start chaining them and you see what is possible, the mind opens up even more to possibilities.
claude can use worktrees.. so if you have a system with say 10 agents, each one can use a worktree per session.. no need to clone the the repo 10 times or work on branches. Worktreeees.
Just the attack on data centers has caused certain conversations in my circles that basically comes to down to some guys will try to get off of foreign clouds and into local hosting in their own countries (most seems keen for co-location hosting because of the static ip ranges & other admin sugar and reliable power; not concerned about hardware pricing as the hardware is less than 10% of the equation). All thanks to a couple attacks on data centers that we are not even hosting on.
Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages. I use Fedora + KDE and everything just works. Fedora's packages are at most a month behind but usually get updates within a week of upstream changes. Debian can be months behind (which makes it rock solid for server workloads). So give Fedora+KDE a try, it works great. It's the one combo that solves all problems for me and stopped me from distro-hopping: media consumption, software dev tooling, system admin tooling, gaming - all just works. My current install is about a year old without breaking itself (still on Fedora 42). I gave gnome a couple of tries, but the plugin system is a crapshoot as they broken an install for me once after an update. Come to think of it, I haven't manage to break KDE yet.
Then in steam itself, you can swap different versions of proton. I like to set the base version to one of the newer versions, but if a game doesn't work, I check on protondb which versions work so I override it per game. You can also give lutris a try as it has a few extra advanced levers that you can to get things working.
> don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind
I use Debian stable on my laptop and testing on desktop. It is fine. Only the newest games that need a specific 0 day patch may suffer a bit but that's only for 1-2 weeks even on testing. You want a stable system first, then to unlock the full performance out of everything, and most bleeding edge fail in the former and are a coin toss on the later.
> Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.
Not sure I agree. I've been gaming on Debian since 2005, and while it certainly was some work in the beginning, it's been pretty painless for the last five years or so. I'm on Debian stable (mostly) at the moment, and don't really know what "bleeding edge" packages I would be missing.
> Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.
Please stop spreading this misconception. There are only a tiny handful of packages that a Debian gamer might need to update, and those are generally available in Debian Backports. It's not what I would call a beginner distro for any purpose, but gaming on it is perfectly viable.
I'm having a good time in games, still getting other computing tasks done, and enjoying Debian's low-maintenance respect for my time. AMA.
This is true, but you may be missing out on performance and compatibility improvements from recent ("bleeding edge") drivers. You need recent hardware for this to be relevant.
Generally speaking, you don't need rock-solid stability on a gaming rig or even a "workstation," since uptime isn't really a consideration. I run Debian on my home server, but my other machines, including a backup laptop, all run Arch. A good Arch setup is incredibly solid.
> This is true, but you may be missing out on performance and compatibility improvements from recent ("bleeding edge") drivers.
No, not missing out. Just waiting a few weeks longer than I would on a rolling distro, until the improvements arrive in Debian Backports. (If I'm really impatient, I can install something manually or make my own backport, but I'm assuming most people won't do that.) I have experienced cases like you describe, such as when I bought an RDNA3 GPU shortly after the platform was released, but they have been infrequent in my experience, and never so urgent that I couldn't wait a few weeks.
> you don't need rock-solid stability on a gaming rig or even a "workstation," since uptime isn't really a consideration.
System uptime is a consideration whenever I need my computer for something immediately, but my choice of Debian is not only about that. It's also about my time. Debian generally requires attention less often than other distros. Less time spent troubleshooting when things break. Less time re-learning things or adjusting workflows when new software versions change their behavior or interface. Fewer annoying interruptions. A low-maintenance system leaves me more time to get work done, or play games.
Also worth noting: These days, a lot of the components that games use are provided by the likes of Steam or Flatpak, which means they will be at exactly the same version and updated exactly as often on every Linux distro.
> System uptime is a consideration whenever I need my computer for something immediately, but my choice of Debian is not only about that.
Maybe you should try Arch on one of your machines. I have a lot of experience with both Debian and Arch, having used both extensively on all kinds of hardware over long periods of time, and have found Arch to be ideal on desktop. Having access to the latest software and drivers is a huge plus with recent hardware. I have never encountered breaking changes.
Since I used Linux Mint before and since this issue has been going on for years, I don't think lagging behind a few months is the reason for it. 1 or 2 years ago people also already proclaimed that now most games just work for them out of the box. Not so for me and my system. There is something that Steam overlooks and does not isolate from, is my guess.
Agree. I've had generally good experience with Fedora and Steam + tips from ProtonDB
Only have had 1 snafu with Steam i386 dependencies causing issues with x86_64 packages. I think there's a Flatpak of Steam available that should help isolate that but iirc there was some caveat
This is correct, if you want a good desktop Linux experience, you want to use a rolling release distribution.
Debian will ship with old pieces of software that are updated and fixed on a daily basis upstream. Some of those changes and bug fixes really are showstoppers and you'll be stuck with them for months/years. Same thing with older kernels.
Debian is great for servers, but if you're doing graphics, sound or multimedia heavy tasks, you want the latest Wayland, Pipewire and driver support at the bare minimum.
Good job google. You just convinced our entire business to abandon our app (utilities company) and only target web. We are done with this shit. All our resources the next two weeks will be to fill in the gaps in our web clientzone so our thousands of customers can still buy electricity and pay water bill and have a similar experience than the app (it's 90% the same anyway).
Oh and my three personal apps that I installed via adb (not released on playstore) - the moment they stop working on my phone or hassle me about verification, I will get in my car and go buy an iPhone.
Next will be to degoogle the rest of my life, which is luckily only gmail. Guess how long it will take me to port out? Less than two days.
I only let companies violate me once. Then I'm out.
Play store is the biggest piece of trash malware system that exists today, but us normal businesses have to pull teeth and spend days jumping through hoops to get an app out, but the playstore is filled with infinite garbage that rot childrens brains.
I was planning on building a PC toward the end of last year, but several life things and the need for an inverter (I live in India now, and power is regularly off for hours) complicated and delayed it, and when I came back to it in December, RAM had got super expensive, and I just couldn’t justify the 50% increase in total price. Now if this laptop stopped working more…
If you can afford it, a small or medium ecoflow battery and one or two 200W solar panels with solve a ton of your issues in India, if nobody steals it. I'm in Africa and have frequent load shedding too, and I've replaced so many devices in my home with rechargeable/outdoor variants that can be recharged/powered by solar if needed.
Also, don't buy asus again. If you are looking for repairable laptops, dell, hp and lenovo are the only decent brands when it comes to repairs & parts (make sure the not to buy the cheapest consumer models).
If you want a fixed installation, EcoFlow products seem rather expensive. You look to pay a huge premium for the portability, which is actually less convenient than the traditional inverter design if you don’t need it. Simplifying things to a single number for their cheapest vaguely-comparable products, 1 kWh, LiFePO₄, solar-capable: EcoFlow Delta 3 1000 Air is ₹60,000, Livsol L-iON1500 is ₹27,500.
The only reason why I mentioned the brand, is because most of their battery systems have the yellow solar port - so you can plug solar directly into the system, some have two ports. They also have built-in inverters, so you can plug the laptop directly into that. There are probably other brands that offer a similar setup.
If your laptop can be powered by USB-C, even better. If the battery system doesn't have usb-c output, buy a GaN charger (mine is a 140W GaN charger and its amazing). They are super efficient and don't generate much heat.
Fixed-installs (or grid tie-in) requires electricians and sometimes rewiring some parts of your home's circuitry. Huge operation if done right but generally not needed if you only have one or two panels and a portable battery system.
There are very good benchmarks on youtube with the portable solar + battery setups.
Why would someone down vote this comment? Its perfectly reasonable to reuse old hardware with broken components (screens, keyboards) into server/passive devices that sits in the corner and still being useful, instead of going to the trash. Removing old battery is good advice as they are a fire hazard if you keep them plugged in and they are degraded - best to remove it completely and run the laptop off main power and/or add an external UPS if you can afford it.
Please let me know why this specific comment was down voted.
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