Let’s start with the lock screen. Last time I was using a custom ROM with no way to customize it. However, since I am using a Nothing (3a) with NothingOS, I can add widgets! I have one for the weather and a global clock, both quite handy!
My wallpaper here is some official artwork from The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom—a game I have not played yet—I paid some silver points to download it from Nintendo’s rewards page because it’s just adorable and I had to have it. Not much else to comment on.
Now, the home screen itself does not have a lot going on! I am using a wallpaper featuring artwork from Into The Aether that is simply breathtaking to me. Best part? It was kind of made for me by the artist after they shared some versions where the artwork was squared or vertical with the planet at the very top. I wanted it centered and did my own version with Snapseed’s expansion tool. The artist took pity on me and gave me a proper one.
Now, the layout and mitself was made using KISS Launcher, which has been my choice for the last couple of years.
Nova Launcher is what I used back in the day, but after a whole mess that just keeps going, it’s just not worth it anymore.
KISS Launcher offers a minimal template to start building up from. I have the Minimalistic UI turned on, which let’s me add widgets to an otherwise empty screen. I just have a digital clock. I also have a row of favorite apps and the KISS search bar at the very bottom—with a three dot menu to see some settings and an app drawer button.
I set it up with a transparent theme, so it’s as simple as possible.
My row of favorites features six apps. I am starting to become a boring adult, so the first one from left to right is the phone app, I am currently using Fossify Phone, since it does what I need and not much more.
The next one is Fennec, a fork of Firefox for Android that has some extra plugins and honestly works just fine for all of my needs. I prefer to avoid Chromium browsers when I can. Fennec disables some of the telemetry of vanilla Firefox too, although I’ve heard there’s more privacy-focused alternative like IronFox, Ice Raven and iode Browser.
Next up, Signal, my favorite messaging platform. It just works and it has worked for many years now. Thanks to usernames, it has been easier than ever to make groups with the friends I’ve made online. It does everything I want it to do, and it does it very well. I have some other messaging apps but none of them I use as much as this one.
AntennaPod is simply the best podcast app for Android. It’s what got me interested into listening to podcasts in the first place. It has pretty much every feature you may need, and I like to see my stats on it every once in a while.
Besides Podcasts, there’s music! Although I grew fond of my Innioasis Y1, I still listen to music on my phone quite a bit, so I use Booming Music Player for that. I particuarly enjoy its feature to suffle albums (instead of shuffling all the songs and making a mess).
Last but not least, the Fossify Gallery app. It is the fastest and simplest of them all, loads super quick and has every feature I may ever need in a gallery.
Now, besides the minimal home screen, KISS Launcher has a History screen, which displays frequently used apps. These can be sorted in a variety of ways, but I just sort based on frequency, instead of recency, time of day, or other modes available.
Right now, my most frequent apps are the following:
These change every once in a while but it looks like a pretty accurate list of the sort of apps I use the most.
KISS Launcher has been around for ages. It is, in fact, featured on my very first proper blog post, and even though I have mentioned it in my uses page too, I thought it was worth sharing how my phone looks like thanks to it.
Of course, the icon pack featured here is Arcticons, the one I’ve made contributions to for a long time now, it just has everything I need, and if it doesn’t, I make the icon myself. Good stuff all around!
This is day 72 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>As soon as I turned it on, I knew it would be quite a treat to my eyes. The clean android experience that NothingOS has to offer is something I was missing since I had to switch to Xiaomi’s HyperOS because of my Poco F4 failing on me
Every time, it feels like a challenge, but one of the cool ones, where I try to stay as minimal as possible, installing as few apps as I can, logging it to the essential accounts only.
That threshold grows every time though, becoming a bit of a behemot, as I have to install a banking app, or as I log into another email address. But I still try, I slowly realize what programs I use less, and which ones I don’t really care about that much. I delete accounts for some videogame or some random service I no longer use. And at the same time, I add a new more grown-up account, for whatever alternative shopping website I choose to try instead of Amazon or the big online shops in my country.
So, setting up my phone and what’s on it went more or less like this:
And everything is pretty much done!
I’ve written a couple posts in the past about similar things, in case you want to check them out after this! (Or check the android tag)
This is day 95 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>My phone for a bit more than a year has been the Poco F4, a wonderful device with a great battery and good performance. Almost as soon as I acquired it, I installed ArrowOS on it, and got it working to a very nice state. However, I made the decision to keep Google services and use it as such. Something that gave me great functionality, at the cost of submitting myself to my data-selling overlords.
It wasn’t really that bad, I just kept using it and moved on, working just fine for a long while..
After arriving to my workplace on some uneventful day, I checked my phone for a bit, left it aside, and I noticed that it turned off out of nowhere, a few seconds later, it turned on again. Then it kept going, on and off, it was one of those dreaded bootloops.
I was worried. This was not the first time something like this happened. I immediately did a button combination to boot the recovery menu, I saw the TWRP logo show up, then it turned off again. It meant I could do nothing at all.
I decided to look up online “Poco F4 stuck on bootlop”, I found a few websites but nothing seemed to be related. I added “hardware” or “power button” or something like that, and I saw some interesting comments on reddit.
Apparently, the power button on some Poco phones can get faulty, and it was being detected as “pressed”. The solution: to press the button super hard to get whatever is inside it to “seat” properly, or if that didn’t work: to use my phone like a hammer against some table edge, hitting the power button with it. Basically, to do something that alters the internals somewhat.
And it worked!
It was all good and dandy, but it was a call for attention I couldn’t ignore for long.
A while back I had made a pretty dumb purchasing decision, I bought a used flagship Xiaomi phone, the 12T Pro.
I got it for real cheap, but I was sure I could use a custom rom on it. I didn’t do my research and didn’t realize that the new version of Xiaomi’s software, HyperOS, makes it even harder to unlock the device’s bootloader.
So, yeah, I decided to leave it unused for months, as my Poco F4 was still perfectly functional.
In a matter of weeks, the issue happened again. This time I didn’t get so worried, since I knew what I had to do, however, it meant that I should get started and move all my data to my new used phone. It was only a matter of time before my Poco got too unreliable to be backed up properly.
Even though I was tempted to buy something new like the CMF Phone 2 Pro or a Pixel 9 with this issue as an excuse, I managed to control myself and just stick with what I already had.
So, yeah the scare tactics my phone pulled on me actually worked this time, I have migrated to a new phone, much earlier than expected.
Of course, the phone is kind of a privacy nightmare out of the box, so I will follow up on this with another article sharing what I did, what’s on it, and how it’s going!
This is day 69 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>To get the specific storage usage by folder, I used Solid Explorer, which has a pretty simple setting to view it at a glance. The rest I got from Android’s app settings section.
For obvious privacy reasons—and lazyness to be honest—I won’t be too specific about everything, but I’ll share what isn’t that big of a deal.
My current phone has 128 GB of built-in memory, I remember back then how I was happy with my Redmi 5A’s 32 GB, and 16 GB MicroSD card sometimes. Oh how the times have changed…
Anyway, the Internal storage I have access to, consists of 105 GB, and I have 7.37 GB left for now.
.flac, the rest of artists are MP3 or have less songs.I have plenty of folders, but I still think most of my storage is being used by apps with a lot of internal data on them, so here are the top 10 just for fun. I’ll leave the few games I got for later, and I’ll skip system apps.
Most other games are well below 200 MB and I’d rather save them for a blog post focused on that later, if I feel like it. Right now all of them are in danger of deletion anyway since I barely play them.
When I was a youngling I remember being like “why do you need so much space in your phone?”, and well, look at me now, I am holding up just because I am not that big of a photo taker or a music listener. There’s people out there who need 256 GB on their phones, that’s crazy to me, but then again, needing more than 32 GB was crazy for me 7 years ago.
Still, I think I can clean this up pretty easily, maybe compressing some pictures or transferring them to some external storage medium.
I really should look into some backup solutions off-site and such, both for this and my laptop, could be fun to setup at some point.
This is day 53 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I remember being obsessed with stuff like Google Now,I did everything in my power to get it running on my Galaxy S3 mini back in the day, because it was really nice to use and it looked so clean, swipe away the stuff I didn’t care about, tailoring the algorithm to my needs, resulting on a pretty alright source of news. Of course RSS aggregators would become my choice over time, but I liked Now just fine. I have to say I was not around when Google Reader was a thing, so I didn’t know what I was missing.
Even when changes were met with criticism by some people, such as with Material Design back in Android Lollipop—don’t you miss those codenames for Android versions???—in the end, I’d say the majority loved those changes and how the OS kept feeling more and more integrated, with a standard design philosophy where all apps look like they are part of the same system, flashing early builds of Lineage OS or Resurrection Remix just to get that on my phone was my jam.
And of course, after every flash, it was unthinkable for me to not get the Google Apps; Gmail was neat, Google Calendar was neat, all of the apps followed Material Design perfectly and my phone just looked awesome and everything was synced together! None of those apps had any bloat, no useless features, they just did what they did and they did it well. Maybe it’s just my nostalgia talking, they are still not FOSS and they probably gathered lots of user data to sell to advertisers, but at least they were cool to use for ignorant young me.
Google Lens was incredible, even today, it was also built-in to Google Assistant, easy to access by holding my Home button—long live 3-button navigation—and I was using it for a while. Recently however, Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided to replace Assistant with Gemini, and decided to replace Google Lens—with its ability to turn images into text, search for similar images on the fly, and auto-translate text to different languages—into AI slop that will just spit out what it thinks is going on on screen, I can’t select text, I can’t do anything with that, it’s just a utterly useless description generator! Thankfully, I managed to find a way to get Assistant and Lens back on their settings,—Only for them to announce today that they are phasing out Assistant completely, ugh.
It’s weird for me to be writing and remembering how Google used to be, when they just keep messing things up so much today. Nowadays, other than Lens and YouTube, I barely use their services. But back then, I was a fan, I wanted them to make cool stuff and keep adding features to things. I didn’t get a chance to use Google Reader, which was apparently replaced with Now, which I liked, and then Discover, which I hated, and I never really got into Google+, their attempt at social media that nobody in my circle got to use but was apparently beloved by many communities of techies and the like that are now on Mastodon and the Fediverse.
Looking back, their fall from grace was probably something to be expected from the start, I’m sure they were criticized, obviously, people were warned to not get into their ecosystem, to not trust it. They are the reason self-hosted emails are barely a thing anymore, they’re the reason RSS started to lose popularity, they are the reason HTTPS became the standard and locked the web from older devices—maybe this one isn’t so bad but alas—they are the reason SEO and whatever is abused and so much trash is showing up in search results instead of real websites made by real people.
Ok, maybe they aren’t the only reason all of that happened, but surely they share part of the blame?
Despite this, I can probably find old blog posts from people in the 2000s that are like “oh Gmail is cool I don’t have to bother anymore with setting up my electronic mail” and “Google is awesome, Google Reader is great!” and “go follow me on Google+, it’s so cool!” because people are like that.
Still, now we know, they are evil.
Despite everything, people still go for the shiny new things, just look at X or Y or Z, there’s some people there who think it’s the next big thing. In a few years they will look back and write “I miss the old times when X, Y and Z was cool,” and there will be others who will say “see? that’s why I never trusted X, Y and Z.” And so on and so forth.
We just can’t help ourselves can we?
This is day 38 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Although I’ve shared some screenshots before, I’ve never really done full showcase of the whole thing with my gestures and shortcuts. So here it is!
The lockscreen doesn’t have anything special, but it’s there.
My current homescreen is quite simple. My setup is a single screen with a 12 by 7 grid, with a total of 15 app icons for quick access. I have the default clock widget on top that also shows the date and upcoming alarm. I also disabled the dock—I don’t have any use for it.
The icons I use are from Arcticons, a free and open source icon pack that I have contributed to for a few years already.
Anyway the apps I have on my homescreen are sorted in 5 columns with 3 rows each. Every column has a certain type of apps in it.
My most important apps are the ones closer to my right thumb, which are my default Phone app, Mihon for manga reading—an alternative to Tachiyomi that is the reader alone a integrated way to get the plugins to access manga from websites—and AntennaPod for Podcasts.
Making use of Nova Launcher’s shortcut gestures, some apps have an extra app I can access by swiping the icon up and down. Swiping down on Mihon will open Librera Reader, my book reader of choice, whenever I don’t use my Kobo. Swiping down on AntennaPod will open YT Music, and up will open Gramophone—or whatever local music player I use, I switch often.
Next column contains my communication apps. My big three are K-9 Mail, which has a swipe down gesture for Proton Mail, Discord that has gestures for Mattermost and Element; and Signal, with gestures for Threema and Conversations
My third column has apps that entertain me, which includes Tusky for mastodon and fediverse accounts (also a gesture for Bluesky), then Brawl Stars because I play it a bit. Cromite is there too (with a gesture for Firefox as well).
Next is my media column, which has Fossify Gallery, Binary Eye, to scan barcodes (for work) and Solid Explorer for file management, that is one of the few apps I paid for—back when I didn’t have a job for stuff like that—and has been worth every penny.
Finally, the last column has whatever other apps I use sometimes, which is KeepassDX (with a gesture for Aegis Authenticator), FeedMe, my feed reader of choice for Android since it integrates with my FreshRSS server, and Droid-ify (with a gesture for the regular Play Store).
All in all, I have access to a ton of apps with just 15 icons in my homescreen.
You may notice the abscence of WhatsApp and YouTube, which some of my regular readers might expect since they show in my usage stats every month. I actually have a gesture for them rather than an icon, so swiping up and down with two fingers will open one app or the other!
So, yeah, now you have seen through me. These are the icons and apps I use in my setup, quite a lot of stuff packed together, but the result is rather minimal I think.
This is day 29 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Apple vs Android: Why Apple is the Clear Winner in Security and Features
Smartphones have become an indispensable part of our lives. When it comes to the two major players in the market, Apple and Android, there’s no denying that Apple stands out as the clear winner in terms of security and overall features...
Yes I just stole that upper embbeded post thingy from Kev’s site.
Recently Kyle did an editorial piece on Apple, which is, in my opinion, quite interesting to say the least. After reading it a while ago and once again when writing this, I still think that Apple is NOT the clear winner in security and features.
This is going to be a bit of a rant, I ain’t gonna lie, but sometimes, you have to correct things you know are wrong. But hey, maybe I am not correct in many things either so, feel free to respond to this too.
Kyle, I am very grateful for everything you as a developer, and also co-administrating a pretty cozy instance on Mastodon, but this article didn’t really have that many good points—in the opinion of an Android fanboy such as me, lol.
So, since this is my blog, I’ll just write the reasons I consider many of the arguments brought up in this case are wrong—from a certain point of view.
I have to admit, that in a way, Security is the one factor where Apple has a certain advantage, but does it really?
Apple is a closed ecosystem, so, once its compromised, we have to rely on them to fix it. With Android, we can switch, we can upgrade, we can build from source, we can remove system apps and do whatever. Of course it is not always easy and its a burden on the regular user—one does have to get to work and get dirty with some things.
Also, in Android we can usually get apps (at least the FOSS ones) directly from developers and whatever distribution methods they provide (GitHub, F-Droid, Websites), without having to rely on the app store itself. This argument could be used against a Distro Repository, or F-Droid itself. But I would rather trust people and systems I can even contribute to, instead of a corporation.
Apple has a single point of failure and we have to put all our trust in them, simple as that.
I mean, Android has more features—and it is much more flexible. There is simply no comparison. When it comes to interface and design, it is just a matter of taste. Both old and young people can struggle using an Apple device just as much as they struggle with Android. And you can get Android phones with physical keyboards, different screen sizes and features according to your needs.
Apple likes to refine things to a level that sometimes makes no sense, and then they also like to pretend it never existed. Just look at the dynamic island, have you ever heard of any new uses for it since it came out? And look at widgets, they maybe more fancy, but they are nowhere near as useful as on Android, and their potential is very limited, they end up unnoticed and underused, unless they can make money out of it, I guess, like getting rid of the headphone jack, or having a bunch of MagSafe add-ons.
Privacy is a matter of scope nowadays, you can’t be fully private if you have a connection to the internet, but you can choose who you want to be private from.
I don’t trust Apple with my data, and I don’t trust Google with my data. Or maybe I do, I have YouTube, I can use YouTube, but I can also use a frontend for it if I want, which can also serve as a proxy and anonymize me.
But wait! Apple won’t let you install those app frontends like Newpipe or so. At least you can use the brower you want to check websites frontends right? NO, gotta stick to Safari. Or you can use a skin that is just frontend of Safari to watch a frontend of YouTube of course, very fun!—alright enough getting off topic.
Similarly, Android can be used in its AOSP form thanks to a good amount of custom ROMs, maintained by the community. Of course, you have to trust those random developers. But again, I’d rather trust them than Apple or any corporation.
Yes Apple has a bunch of privay claims and they somewhat fulfill them, but it really feels like a marketing strategy rather than something they do just because it is the right thing to do.
Android apps can support multiple Android versions, you can still install modern versions of many apps on Phones running versions like Android 8 (Oreo) or even older.
I may be wrong, but I think that as soon as an iOS version stops getting support, there are really no more app updates for it. Of course they give you a lot of updates for a long time, but Android is catching up on that regard too! At least with some vendors. Not to mention custom ROMs.
While interactions between devices is not as smooth as what Apple can do. Android has a lot of apps that help achieve similar functionality. Kyle mentions the seamlessness of Google products and services, but I don’t use either of them. I can do wit DAVx5 (Calendar and contact sync), Nextcloud (Cloud file storage, also interacts with DAVx5), KDE Connect (Computer and phone sync, share clipboard, and a lot more), Syncthing (Cloudless file sync) and similar tools that get the job done in many regards. And a bunch of these 3rd party apps can’t even work on iOS, so you are stuck with what Apple offers you and not much more.
App Store is controlled by Apple and they are evil.
Play Store is controlled by Google and they are evil.
Apple is barely following EU regulations in the worst possible way regarding their walled garden practices, and I don’t think any upcoming new changes they may have to do will still make it worth it.
Android let’s you install apps from 3rd party sources. You can use F-Droid (FOSS app store, I recommend the Droid-ify client), Obtainium (Fetch app updates from multiple sources, usually the developers themselves), Aurora Store (Get apps from Google servers, without a Google account), and many other options, some more trusted than others, of course.
There’s a lot not to like about Android as it is offered by Google and OEMs, but the community behind it offers a bunch of ways to stray away from the surveillance and data mining that goes on. Apple says they do things, and we have to trust them, but when they don’t, who can hold them accountable anyway? I just don’t trust Apple, and Google sucks too.
Give up on Google, give up on Apple, give up on an easy life and just install a Custom ROM on some random Xiaomi phone while you can, or get a used Pixel that works just as well if not better.
Just kidding, I have Google on my phone, I have to use banking apps now and I gave up on my privacy and freedom and we are all doomed.
This is day 19 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I was right, as soon as I got the phone, I got to experience some of the nice things that new phones today can offer, such as a 120 Hz refresh rate, an OLED screen, a power button fingerprint sensor and a faster performance overall.
As soon as I got this phone I had to go through the painful process of waiting for a week to be able to unlock my bootloader and free this phone from its painful stock MIUI rom.
However, I wasn’t going to not use it right? So I decided to try living with it and test things out despite the not so great stock experience.
Thankfully, despite it all, Xiaomi lets you disable pretty much every ad shown to you, and I was able to hide almost all of their annoyances, install Nova Launcher and do some other things to get closer to the AOSP experience.
The day to day experience was fairly smooth and felt quite lightweight, against my expectations, if it wasn’t because of the huge amount of annoying pop-ups and warnings showing up everytime I wanted to give any kind of permission to any app that did anything Xiaomi didn’t like.
As the saying goes: “A monkey in silk is a monkey no less”. Despite it all, I felt so dirty trying to cover up the reality, not to mention the surveillance and tracking going on in the background at every moment.
Because I was going to end up transferring all my data to this phone after installing a clean AOSP based rom, I didn’t install stuff such as Signal or WhatsApp, which meant I was carrying two phones for this week. That was annoying but it was a sacrifice I was willing to endure during this time, for the sake of a better future for myself
And finally, that future arrived.
After I was able to unlock my bootloader, I immediately did a quick backup of the few apps I actually installed—Tachiyomi, K-9 Mail and AntennaPod, pretty much. I proceeded to follow a guide online to install ArrowOS—the same rom I had on my Redmi Note 8—and I finally felt free.
Everything went smoothly during the installation, this is the first time this happens to me, there has always been some problem, but I guess I’m already a pretty experienced Android rom user, so I know the drill.
Of course, even if the installation went smoothly, I was expecting to find some bugs or functionality to be broken. In my case, the fingerprint sensor worked at first, but after setting up my fingerprint, the phone crashed and restarted. This happened only a couple times and since then it works as expected.
Another slight annoyance is the AOSP camera—it is quite useless. However, installing Simple Camera from F-Droid managed to overcome those issues, although I do not have access to the wide angle lens anymore. I have also tried to use the GCam, Leica Cam and other options. For now I don’t feel too pressured into getting this working properly, I’ll survive.
Overall though, the phone feels a lot smoother and lighter than before, most things work perfectly fine. This time I decided to install the rom edition with GAPPS preinstalled, because I needed them to get some apps working. However, The apps that came installed were just minimal—and also YouTube. 😬
Installing the stuff I use to have my setup working, like DAVx5 and Syncthing as well as the other apps was simple enough. It’s great to see all of my data being synchronized with such ease. It helps that I didn’t have to override anything, like I used to do when installing new roms in the same phone.
A Fun Fact that I didn’t know: Signal lets you transfer everything from one phone to another without any trouble at all, it was fast and simple and I’m glad I decided to check the settings and looking for exporting tools. WhatsApp can do that too—but nobody cares.
I am happy to say KeepassDX is still great, logging into stuff is a breeze, especially with their Magikeyboard feature that works in some of those apps that won’t let the autofill thing work properly.
Sadly, this phone does not have as many roms as the Poco F5 or the Poco F3, since it didn’t get too many sales when it came out. Still, development is slow and steady and I hope that the very few bugs I’ve encountered get fixed soon enough.
Getting Android 14 would be fun too…
This is day 80 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>This makes it so typing on a phone is not so bad of an experience, but the other factor is GBoard.
As a FOSS enthusiast, I tend to favor using FOSS apps on my phone. The reality is that quite a bunch of the alternative keyboards simply aren’t good enough, it wasn’t always that way though…
I’ll skip the T9 keyboards and the non-android phones, I already wrote about the phones I’ve had. All I remember is that at some point I tried predictive T9 and it was so fast it was amazing, but those times are long gone now.
In the beginning, the weird Chinese phone I had was the worst thing ever, it wasn’t a modern touch screen, I could push too hard and it would leave a mark, it also had no multi-touch functionality at all. I just used the default keyboard because the thing only had like 512 MB of storage.
The HTC Status had a pretty decent physical keyboard, it was not bad, but the keys were kinda mushy and it was getting worse over time. Regardless, it was pretty nifty and I was able to program all the keys on a GBA emulator and play games like that. It kinda sucked but I did it anyways, and for a turn based rpg like Pokemon, it didn’t matter how responsive those things were.
From there I got a Galaxy S3 mini, handed down by my dad. This phone was where I explored a bunch of different keyboard options all the time. The thing was rooted and modded to oblivion, it actually died because of that. Back then, my favorite keyboard was Fleksy, the ability to hide the space bar and use just gestures to move around was fantastic because of the small screen factor and the responsiveness of it all.
Sadly, later updates have made some random changes that I am not a fan of, they started trying to implement swipe typing (like most keyboards) instead of improving their existing gesture method, and it kinda broke it all.
After Fleksy, I became a huge fan of Openboard, it had some of the nice gestures of Gboard without all the fuss, it worked wonderfully and I didn’t have a need for much else for quite a while. However, something started to change…
I started to write in English more. After I started to interact on more diverse places like Discord and eventually Mastodon, I had the need to switch between keyboard languages, and Openboard or Fleksy just didn’t cut it anymore, nothing did.
That’s when GBoard won. Swiftkey was a contender and I’ve tried it multiple times, for months, but I just love the features and the smoothness GBoard brings. The Material You theming, the predictions and suggestions, and of course the fact that I don’t need to set my keyboard in a language or another, it will just work as I expect it to do so.
I would love to tell you I have it all locked down and without internet access, but honestly I just install it and don’t think much about that. It respects the privacy mode while filling password fields or using certain apps and the word suggestions just get better and better. The clipboard feature is also pretty good, as well as the built-in translator. So far it’s been a few years old things working just fine…
I still keep an eye on the FOSS alternatives, but it is how it is. 🤷♂️
This is post 70 of #100DaysToOffload. Have a good rest of your day, fellow reader. 😊
]]>Interestingly enough, most of the people doing these videos are female iPhone or Samsung owners who are usually kpop fans, they use tons of social media apps, camera filters, video editors. They’ll even mention the case they’re using, the stickers or pictures of their favorite idol they have on them and stuff like that which I honestly don’t care about. There’s nothing bad about any of this, it’s simply not interesting to me anymore.
Whatever, some of these already are in my uses page but others are not as important, but may be interesting to you. I’ll try to categorize the apps, but let’s start from the top.
I am currently using ArrowOS since its one of not so few official ROMs still supporting my device. It is a great rom with quite a lean set of features, more focused on performance than customization.
Most of my apps are indeed FOSS, but I still have some proprietary apps, I’ll make some keys to mark them a bit more, and also split them in categories. I am completely copying this from Dom Corriveau’s blogpost, which happened to have some great ideas when it comes to organizing this huge list, so there we go.
Categories
Social media, videos and stuff that entertains me, and sometimes annoys me.
The services I use to communicate with friends, family, work and internet strangers.
These app interact with Linux or help me manage my android system how I want
These apps need root access to work.
Whatever can access or create media and files.
What I play sometimes, interactive entertainment.
I like to rice my phone almost as much as I rice my laptop.
Other stuff that is useful to me or needed by the system or hardware I use. Kinda general.
Alright I think this is pretty much it. I skipped some things like banking apps and such because nobody cares.
This is day 62 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Look, I still love to play around with custom roms and rooting, I know a lot of people have accepted reality and stuck with whatever comes by default on their phones, maybe disabling google services and other things like that.
Others have gone with a Pixel, and I’ve even seen FOSS advocates and Linux users, going for the iPhone and calling it a day, its a very sad, yet common ocurrence.
What I want is very simple:
That’s it. I don’t care about the camera, a small size would be nice but I don’t care too much, I don’t particularly mind if rooting is annoying or difficult as long as its possible. I have asked in some places and have noted down some of my options.
The Pixel 6 or 6A is the easy choice when it comes to rooting and custom roms, but I give up my sd card slot, it probably have to be used so the battery may not be best and I would also lose a physical SIM. Besides, the Pixel is not easily available in Mexico and signal issues are common with them, which is pretty sad, still I would love to try the huge ROM catalog available for this.
Another one that has been in my list is the Nothing Phone, it would be a fun one, but I would lose my SD card slot, still everything else seems to be there and the design would be super unique, the only problem is that it is over my budget, but I can save for a bit more without trouble. I would love to have this fun just because I would be the only one with it, but still, it does not have everything I want.
Then there’s Xiaomi, be it the Poco F5, or the Redmi Note 12 Pro or something like that, their phones are cheap, and they have everything except maybe the SD card slot in some options, also the amount of roms is not as big when the phone’s new, or maybe they’re only limited to MIUI variants. Its also a bit more annoying to root, you have to wait around a week to unlock the bootloader, but it is posible. I quite like their phones, and since I would be using roms their buggyness and adware would not affect me that much.
Still, there are tons of other options to consider, maybe an older flagship device could be better, or a last gen Xiaomi phone too. Regardless, I am honestly not happy with anything. I think the only thing that would make this fun for me is if I go with the Pixel, give up on expansion storage and just enjoy the amount of personalization I will get out of it. Some people say they can have buggy updates, but I will be using my own roms and updating at my own pace anyways. If you have any phone suggestions please let me know!
This is day 52 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Maybe its patented, or something? Or maybe KWGT’s 5 million downloads are quite a low quantity for any developers to feel like there’s no market for this. Still, tools like Conky and Rainmeter still have quite a bit of activity as desktop widgets and monitoring tools, I am just, surprised.
Obviously I don’t want to force any devs to put work in something they don’t care about or whatever, I am just ranting to myself honestly. On yet another tangent, I found quite a nostalgic thread on XDA full of screenshots from people sharing their homescreens since 2009, and, well, its been quite a while since then and a bunch of the early posts are quite outdated. There’s a few people doxxing themselves back when Gallery widgets were a thing, but nowadays not even that is available in a presentable manner. Simple Gallery has a super bare widget, but, its not very good…
Anyways, widgets in general really need to make a comeback. PLEASE!, How is it that there is not a single RSS feed widget built-in on any reader available on F-Droid, why can’t we have a good player for AntennaPod with Material You, or at least make the cover art bigger. How is it that Gallery apps no longer have a single picture or carrousel mode widget? K-9 Mail’s widget is nice but it is still light mode only.
I am probably complaining too much for someone who is doing nothing about it, I know. But I just want this to come back. iOS is honestly winning right now, at least when it comes to quickly displaying information at a glance, all the widgets are cohesive and look nice. Even if they still don’t have the amount of power Android’s can manage, like scrollable content and other features.
After playing around with the proprietary KWGT app, you can actually make a pretty functional RSS widget! So yeah, I feel like there’s no excuse…
Anyway, just so I don’t end with a bunch of complaining, I like some widgets out there that some apps have (or are), such as:
Now that we are at it, allow me to showcase my homescreen, since its kinda nice right now, pretty inspired by old videos from Pro Android’s YouTube channel:
This is day 40 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>These are only a few of the tons of apps I used to try back then, most of this list was inspired by watching a lot of videos by the Spanish YouTube channel Pro Android that showcased some of the best app recommendations I’ve ever seen, even compared to similar channels today. I still go back to his old catalog and find a few great apps still working from time to time.
Quick Tip: YouTube removed sorting by oldest months ago in the web UI, you can however, use the search feature inside a Youtube channel and search for “before:20XX” as well as whatever term you want, and it will show videos from before that year. It is how it is, at least it works!
Before Simple Gallery, QuickPic was the top of the game, the simplest, lightest, fastest gallery app there was. To this day it remains one of the saddest downfalls when it comes to how good it used to be, before being acquired by Cheetah Mobile.
As soon as the acquisition took place, some mods made out of the last non-CM version have been released and the original APK still floats around in the Web. It still kind of rocks, its animations look great, and it is lighter than Simple Gallery, so maybe it’s still worth a shot for some, I decided to try the mod for a while.
This is the precursor to today’s navigation gestures, this was the ultimate way to go back in an app, even more functional than today. Back in the day there were a couple other apps like this. I also remember Navigation Layer, which I never got to use. SwipeBack would display an awesome animation that showed what was “behind” the current screen. It ended up dying for a while during the 4.0 days, but got resurrected with support up to Lollipop. It has been dead for a while, and it took until Android 13 for stuff like Predictive Bar Gestures to show up, even if they are still work in progress. I absolutely loved using this Magisk Module.
I was so happy when I finally got to try this module back in the day. The amount of tweaks this Xposed module provided was unmatched, probably the second-best one was XuiMod, which provided many awesome scrolling animations when opening apps, pop-ups or scrolling through lists. These things were super fancy and cool. Later one some Custom ROMs would begin adding these tweaks to the built-in settings, and eventually it stopped receiving support, at least for now, since the last Android version that it worked with was 11.
Back then pretty much all browsers sucked, except for this one. Later on, CM Browser was also pretty good (until Cheetah Mobile showed its true colors, of course). This app was light, fast and pretty customizable for its time. Reviews of it convinced me to try it out back then, and honestly, I wish browsers today were as good. Today we have DuckDuckGo, SmartCookieWeb or Via Browser, and while the quickness is there, they are just not as fun. There were gestures shortcuts, tabs and all sorts of cool little things that still didn’t slow down the device at all. I don’t understand how apps today are so heavy when stuff like this existed back then, but maybe it used the built-in WebView engine like many light browsers today. The app is still around, but it’s nowhere near as good as before. If I were to guess, its probably a security and privacy nightmare.
The list goes on. I guess this could be a bit of a semiregular series, there are still quite a bunch of apps from back then that aren’t needed or no longer work nowadays.
I have to admit, I feel like there are a lot missing, seriously I almost don’t want to post this one as is. But I already spent a while writing here,so it will have to do.
Anyway, I just wanted to share what used to be some of my favorite tools I used back in the day, such fun times. What are the apps you used that were awesome but ended up dying or retired from the Play Store? Please share your own list!
This is day 39 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>
Anyway, it was nowhere near as nice as using a proper charger, since the laptop’s output was incredibly slow. Thankfully I didn’t use it much, and if I did, it was still plugged, so I didn’t really care. The first night was alright, I left my phone connected through my sleep and nothing of interested happened when I woke up that day.
However, the morning after that one, I woke up to a phone that was incredibly hot. I felt it through my pillow, while it was still rather early. I immediately unplugged it and in my panic I decided to leave it in the freezer for a few minutes. I tooted about the event, and from there I’ve been a lot more worried about my phone’s longevity.
You may be wondering, why would my phone heat so much, since the previous day was fine? I had no idea. But I did something different. At first, I left my laptop on, and it went to sleep and turned off the display all by itself while still logged in. The next day, however, I logged off and closed the lid. Maybe some process or daemon that manages the USB port got interrupted or something, but it is what it is, and I can only wonder the exact reason behind the overheating. The worst thing is that the phone didn’t even charge to 100%, but I guess that was actually a good thing, maybe I would have ended up with an inflated battery, or worse.
After the incident, I installed a couple of apps, such as Battery Guru and GSam Battery Monitor. It had honestly been a while since I was so worried about battery life. My Redmi Note 8 has always been reliable, and I always have just enough battery, as long as I don’t play games for too long. So, with a bit of self-control it has never been that bad.
Now I started to feel like my battery lasts less time than before. I don’t trust myself of course, since I feel like it’s just a placebo and my battery is as good as it can be after 2 years of usage. Perhaps just a single day being super hot won’t actually affect the battery that much.
Honestly, I’ve been using my phone for 2 years already, living a life of Custom ROM hopping since its bootloader got unlocked, and it still rocks Android 13 like a champ. I can live charging it a bit more often anyway.
For now, I installed Battery Charge Limit to get it to never charge beyond 80% (it requires root access), to learn to live with a bit less, for a longer period of time. But who knows, its possible that I’ll get to get a new phone this year and pass this one down to my younger siblings. If you want to help with that you can always send me a tip or something ;)
Sorry for being shameless, but I had to try…
This is day 38 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Most of the crazy going on over on Mastodon as of now is the talk about Ivory and IceCubes, which are a couple of Mastodon clients for Apple devices that are quite awesome and good. I wanted to see if there were some shiny new stuff for Android too.
There are apps like Megalodon and Moshidon, which are forks of the official Mastodon app, they are not bad at all though. But I wanted to find some other clients that were built from the ground up, just to see if there was anything new.
To my knowledge, there are only two clients that have support for Material You and are also not based on the official app. Kaiteki, which is quite a promising new client that even has support for Misskey; and Meowstodon, an even newer client that only supports Mastodon as of now.
Honestly, both are still quite bare, but I’ve always loved being a beta and alpha tester for apps on Android. Right now Kaiteki feels a bit more mature but also too convoluted, it has a hamburger menu, and a ton of buttons at the top AND the bottom. This probably makes sense since its also works a desktop app, but I prefer my navigation to be reachable with my thumb, or with a gesture, which are usually broken due to Android’s navigation gesture being incompatible with sidebars after such a long time, hence my use of navigation buttons in 2023, they still rule!
Regardless, Meowstodon doesn’t have that problem, even if it still chooses to put my profile button at the top, I’ll give it a pass for now.
I have to say the spacing between posts is kind of crazy in both apps. I used to care a lot about the amount of text in my screen. Over time this was less of an issue, but still, as the image above shows, I can barely read 3 posts at a glance anywhere but on Tusky. I know Material You has some spacing guidelines and all, but a compact layout like the one Infinity for Reddit has would be quite ideal, especially being able to turn media into smaller thumbnails.
Kaiteki actually has quite a few layouts available, but its clear they are mostly intended for desktop usage, they are not ideal on mobile use as of now and their behavior is kinda wonky.
I can’t really judge much at this moment though, since there is quite a bit of active develpment going on and I expect these apps to change a lot in the following months. Meowstodon doesn’t even have a way to view profiles just yet. I can’t wait for whats coming up.
This is day 26 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Some examples are these:
And these are some features on many different apps that I just enjoy having around and I can’t help but keep tweaking all the time
This is day 25 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I change roms pretty much every semester, I think I’ve done a lot of posts regarding Android and my tendency to customize it and try out their latest versions using all kinds of roms from MSM Extended, to ArrowOS or CR Droid. I have never even installed LineageOS on this device, simply because I prefer customizability over privacy/security. At this point, I know what I’m looking for, and what I’m doing. I’ll settle for LineageOS once my device is approaching EOL on most of its official roms. Even so, I’ve lived through tons of unofficial roms in previous phones without a ton of trouble. Most of the time devs simply want to keep alive their device, and I choose to trust them.
Anyways, enough justifying myself for no reason. I installed the rom, I restored my apps, I installed some extra stuff and I was pretty happy. I was still a bit annoyed that notifications would not work in certain apps. I’ve known of MicroG for a long time, I even tried them a couple roms ago by installing them on F-Droid as suggested in the mastodon post I linked. It kind of worked. But the functionality was not as great as I thought.
This time, however, I decided to try again, after I found a Magisk Module to install MicroG, and decided to give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised, because it worked wonderfully, and after enabling its Cloud Messaging for push notifications, the apps started to work just fine, unlike last time. It is quite sad that not that many apps rely on open standards such as UnifiedPush just yet.
Regardless, now that notifications work perfectly fine on my proprietary apps, which are also containerized in a Work Profile using Shelter (F-Droid | Play Store). I feel really comfortable with my device.
I also found Iconify an app that lets me customize my phone’s quick settings, volume and notifications panel with absolute ease, its super beautiful!
The only problem right now is a bug in my rom that sometimes freezes it to a black screen after waking up the device. It usually happens while playing audio, but I still don’t find a solution and its bothering me just enough that I am considering switching to ArrowOS or something, which also has an Android 13 rom now.
Anyways, those were some thoughts about the latest update on my device’s rom. Thanks for reading!
This is day 19 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>After that paragraph, the zip got installed and its playing the boot animation as of right now. I hope it works alright, I have been waiting for a more mature release of my rom to be available. I have not installed Magisk yet, I just did a clean flash and booted from there.
It booted! Its all fine, I will flash Magisk in a moment, I will share a quick list of the things I cared about backing up.
I did not worry much about my Contacts, Calendar, Syncthing, Pictures and RSS feeds, since I have it all synced via DAV or in an external micro SD card.
I backed up stuff such as my AntennaPod database, WhatsApp chats (a must in México), Signal chats, my ActivityWatch buckets and PGP keys (with OpenKeychain).
I actually found a kinda new app that works great for backups. Or at least it did in Android 12. It has a few releases already, even though its still in beta, its also available on the IzzyOnDroid F-Droid repository.
Anyways, that’s it, I will now go play with Android 13 and see if I can restore everything.
This is day 15 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Fosstodon now has more than 40K users, that alone is insane, since I remember being impressed back in April at the amount of growth seen during that first wave of Twitter users migrated.
I think its important to bring up that the amount of users is still insignificant, Twitter is already the smallest of the big social network, even though it feels like a lot is shared and talked about on it, the reality is different.
My country, Mexico, is still big on Facebook and Instagram (lately, TikTok too) by an order of magnitude, that’s just how it is.
If you recently joined Mastodon or any node of the Fediverse, please do it for the right reason. I don’t like politics, I joined Fosstodon because I like software, coding, technology and the like, and I wanted to meet some like-minded people in that regard. I am not there to read about politics of foreign countries. Thankfully Mastodon is pretty useful at filtering stuff out, and I myself don’t care if I end up reading it, since I just forget about it.
I have hopes that Fosstodon will stay afloat and won’t lose its focus, some people are worried that the Twitter culture may stain the status quo of the overall community, but I think this is just momentary. And contrary to popular belief, trends and behaviour is not the same everywhere in the Fediverse, its tons of different communities interacting with each other, but there is still some independence, which makes this place more resilient than some may assume.
Besides, even though its userbase is not as big, I honestly prefer it that way.
For my Fuzzy Control class, the teacher challenged us to design a Fuzzy controller for our science fair project. I have to say, I am quite a fan of how fuzzy logic works. Being able to understand the magic behind it all was quite interesting.
We decided to use Matlab to design our system using the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox, and we also found a program online that would allow us to export that directly to code for Arduino.
We built a Temperature and Humidity controller system, be it for a room or maybe an incubator. I actually spent more time building the hardware to house our circuits and sensors when compared to the code itself.
I feel like we kinda cheated the system, but the teacher allowed us to use Matlab in the first place rather than coding from scratch, so we only expanded our toolset a bit and did it all in like, a couple hours.
When the event started we had to sit around in a place assigned to us for around 10 hours, explaining our project to whoever passed by, it was quite entertaining for me, but I couldn’t help but notice how everyone around it was tired already, I guess I like talking about stuff I like with strangers a little too much.
In the end the winners were some girls that attracted everyone’s attention, they combined extracts and chemicals to make colored markers to draw and stuff. Our place was right beside them and everyone went and drew stuff in pieces of paper that got given away by the end of the event. Some of those drawings were actually awesome, not gonna lie.
I unexpectedly started to use Discord more often, I joined a couple of interesting servers and I wanted to talk there a little more. However, notifications don’t work on a degoogled phone and I decided to try installing the Google Apps again on my device. I got told that it would work fine despite already having a ROM and apps installed. It was a lie.
I got stuck in a bootloop, thankfully a simple Factory Reset kept my internal storage intact (thanks to latest versions of TWRP being able to decrypt storage on Android 12) although I lost my app data.
Thanks to the power of being kinda careful, the biggest loss of mine was a dozen of Newpipe subscriptions and my list of read books and bookmarks (which I had already forgotten until I recalled them while writing this blogpost)
My manga progress is kept on Anilist, and I had backups enabled anyway on the Tachiyomi reader, so I didn’t have to build my library from scratch, I just imported it and logged in to my trackers.
WhatsApp Backups were enabled and since internal storage didn’t get wiped, reinstalling the app recognized the backup immediately, which was a couple hours old.
Signal Backups were enabled and no data was lost.
Passwords and 2FA were perfectly safe on a folder synced with Syncthing, but again, no data was lost anyway.
Pretty much all other apps required me to log in and stuff. I had a backup of my email accounts of K9 Mail, so readding them was not hard at all.
The saddest and biggest failure, is that I lost all my Wi-Fi passwords. Can someone tell me why is there no way to back them up already?
I decided to log in to my Google Account since I wanted to access some paid apps that I quite like. Sadly this also synced my contacts, which I had on my Nextcloud DAV already, and were annoyingly duplicating my list. Thankfully, @konstantin helped out and I quickly removed the dulplicates from my phone.
I am now waiting for Android 13 roms to become more stable, so I can degoogle my life again. Or maybe not, notifications are quite nice to be honest.
]]>Then I realized something that was quite revealing.
I don’t have a mobile data plan, and the wifi at school and most public places, sucks.
That’s a very valid question dear reader, but does it make sense for me to do it? My music collection is not that big, yeah I do have some flac files and others are just mp3, but the truth is I don’t even reach 10GB in total.
Besides, navidrome music clients, while quite good, are still not as feature rich, and navidrome itself limits the customization a lot, I would have to upload music to my server already fully tagged and such, since write access is not allowed, its a good security measure, but annoying when I realize I made a mistake when tagging my music and details like that.
Jellyfin is not much different, basic things like playlist creation tend to fail even with clients such as Finamp. The functionality is better when online, but since I would normally just download albums and create/edit playlists on the move (offline), its not really a good experience.
Well, first of all, back it all up properly. I already did a big mess one time where I lost like a fourth of my collection because of symlink shenanigans.
I decided to go with Syncthing, because its the best thing ever, and I will have 3 separate copies of my library. This means more storage is in use, but I don’t really have a problem with that, after all, if you don’t have 3 copies of something, it doesn’t exist, right?
Besides, this means any changes I do to the files from one device will reflect properly in the other 2, so I can use something like Kid3 or Picard on my desktop and make my phone pickup the metadata pretty much inmediately.
I can also make a decent folder structure, since I hate having a single Music folder with all the music all over the place, please don’t do that, but if you do, unsubscribe from my RSS immediately.
A neat feature that both Jellyfin and Navidrome had, and that I use during some of my Monthly Summaries is music scrobbling, which means keeping track of listened tracks. I was wondering if it was possible to do the same thing, and I realized that its actually really easy!
Installing Simple Scrobbler from F-Droid did the trick, I use Listenbrainz to track my music consumption, it works quite well.
For listening to my music, I use Retro Music Player, its pretty much the best looking player on F-Droid, and it also supports editing opus files. Phonograph Pro is another great option, but I could not edit opus files there, the interface is starting to look outdated to me too.
On my desktop, I am using Elisa, which is the default music player in KDE Plasma, which I am using on Fedora. It does not seem to recognize opus files as music files though, so I am looking for other options. I don’t really play music from my computer though.
Editing metadata is done, as I mentioned, with Kid3, but there are tons of other programs too, or just use the music player itself, as I do on Android.
I am pretty happy with my setup right now, it works, it backs my data on multiple places and keepts it synced, and the experience of playing music has improved a lot.
Once again, Syncthing comes to the rescue, one of the things I have doubts about is how much does it affect the performance and lifespan of hard disks. I hope not that much, its not like I’ll add music every day, I should probably pause the folder from time to time and just have my phone and laptop exchange data, since I download music from my computer most of the time anyways.
One last question remains: how do I get music? Well, I don’t know what to tell you, I usually seek into my soul to find the music I need. I’ve gotten music on Bandcamp too, ripping it from CDs a couple times, or using something like SpotDL may be up your alley if you don’t care about the quality as much.
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