In Android 13 they made it even harder to disable Google Assistant. I activated it by accident like 3 times trying to disable. The first thing I did was uninstall Google Assistant, but this turns out not to disable Google Assistant instead it shuts you out from disabling Google Assistant. That is, to disable Google Assistant you must first install Google Assistant. Then you have to be careful not to tap it— that activates it— you MUST long-press and tap "Settings"
In the process of setting up my new phone, I at one point had to answer a nightmare CAPTCHA where the question was "Please select all objects crafted by humans", and then all the options were either fish or clocks, and that was was a fine question, except one of the clocks I was clearly required to select was clearly an image generated by "AI", meaning no it was not crafted by humans,
@mcc no, yeah. we refuse to play along with that shit. usually it makes us do like ten more CAPTCHAs as punishment, which isn't really any better. maybe next time we'll abandon our effort to do the thing, instead.
In other news, it turns out on stock Android now, disabling animations adds an additional, extremely disruptive animation. Everytime you home button it flashes the icon of the app you're leaving huge, blurry and screen size for exactly 1 frame. It's glitchy and photosensitivity-unfriendly
I thought this was an Android 13 thing, but no, appears it's stock Android and Sony had somehow disabled it on my main phone. People have been flagging this issue for two years.
I like limiting animations, but the reason I HAVE to disable animations is the grotesque, nauseating full screen overscroll animation in Android where everything stretches oddy. So now it's like they give me a Pavlovian punishment for doing that. Periodic bright flashes in my eyes. I'd consider this frustrating but acceptable if this happened because I used the "Developer" reduce animation options, which naturally aren't QAed, but it happens with the builtin accessibility "reduce animation" too!
Anyway sorry I spend so much of my time on this account complaining about computers, but is just the thing is, there are so many horrible things about them,
It may be that after all the many gross indignities I have solemnly endured at the hands of Google, Android 13 is the thing that finally drives me to build my own rom.
The full screen flicker is enough by itself, and on top of that, the thing where it displays a mandatory popup you must swipe to clear every time you copy anything is really bad. I thought it was gonna be bad and it really was
@pettter it's not really a dialog but every time you copy something in Android 13 this bubble appears in the bottom left corner and you MUST swipe to make it go away or it covers whatever you were doing
@mcc For me this one starts at the accept screen at the start of most software. No I do not accept. Nor do I accept that supposedly there is no alternative. I hereby do not waive all rights. If you write your program to force overclock my CPU against my will and run constant AVX2 instructions, I do not waive the right to sue when it catches on fire. And forcing me to click "accept" on a screen claiming that I do doesn't change that I do not.
@mcc I got one of those the other day and it was several pictures of fish and a snowman and I couldn't tell if they were paintings of fish or not because of the interference pattern they overlayed, but the snowman looked plausibly AI generated. I sat their bewildered for a moment until a friend informed me that I probably just needed to click on the snowman.
@mcc ITs funny though, there seems to be too types of people; you either love google and all the comfy convenient services, or you hate them xD
I am the former ; all my anime convention photos are in google maps and I literally take time at the end of a day I went somewhere to make the google maps timeline perfect just so I can look back later LMAO
@mcc Well, tbf, it takes one easy click (location on/off) to disable that feature. I never use the stupid assistant and I agree it's not very good design to make it so hard to turn off...
@mcc I got lost in this convo honestly. Minus the headphone jack, I would just get a Google Pixel (I typically find them $325ish new) and install something like GrapheneOS.
Get rid of all the bloat. Its super fast, snappy as any other modern phone. Top of the line camera. Check out MKBHD videos. Pixel always wins in blind tests.
If you want a removable battery and headphone jack , last one is LG V20 I think. I had one before Pixel but too slow and laggy for me now.
@Elextra I don't want a phone with curved edges or holes on the screen. As far as I've seen this excludes all Pixels. This is more important to me than almost anything else.
If I install Graphene can I still install Google Play apps?
@mcc Oh I didn't understand the holes part. You can install something like CalyxOS and still have microG services so yes, you can still have google apps.
The aurora store is just like the Google play store and you can download whatever apps you want
@mcc
[3] & [2] are regarded as hallmarks of cheapness; [1] is a direct side effect of trying to minimize bezel.
(Had no headphone jack on my last & swore never again. [2] wasn't something I'd thought much about but since you mention, holding the phone has been interfering a lot with using it, of late.)
@Snoeksen in fact my main phone is an Xperia. But to my extreme frustration, the screen is not rectangular. It's merely almost rectangular. I paid a lot (and went to a lot of trouble— I had to get it special shipped from the USA) believing I was getting a rectangular screen for the money but instead I got a phone which merely had curved edges too slight to be visible in online product photos. Better than big curves. But not worth what I paid for it.
@mcc
I want these and physical navigation buttons. No on-screen buttons that either are easy to hit on accident or add an extra step, and no gestures that can overlap with other inputs. Why must high-end phones be so frustrating to use?
@mcc hm, I usually use gsmarena to find the next phone that fits my requirements. Does that not work for you? (At least I share 1 and 3 and don't care about 2 since I always put my phone into a folding case.)
@mcc for reference, in electronics it's "bezel," a term taken from jewelry making for the metal piece that holds the glass front of a watch. "Bevel" refers specifically to a slanted surface and they get confused a lot because a bezel will grip a gem by its beveled edge.
@alexhammy no holes in screen is very important to me. I break my phones frequently. I dont want a screen that has holes in it ALREADY. It's like pre ripped jeans
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