This is why I only buy Androids with MicroSD. This problem was solved in the 1980s with the invention of floppy disks. Now it seems they have worked hard to “uninvent it” so your data needs to go through their servers before you are allowed to have a copy.
MTP* and if you don’t understand why plugging a chonker into USB-C might be a bad idea you probably haven’t had decades of repair experience and “accidents”.
You should see what people do to their DC-AC ports.
Fair enough, I understand your view. For my use case I will vote with my dollar for 3.5mm and MicroSD.
Data recovery pulling a MicroSD from a phone is much easier than trying to desolder a memory chip with a hotair gun and figure out how to download it.
Also I am not cool with Google and Microsoft and Apple stacking the deck to send all the data to their headquarters, but that’s just me.
YMMV. Choice is good. And yes I got what you meant about people. USB-C is engineered better than predecessor ports still without a proper stand or attentive care I can’t see average user wear and tear not breaking some ports assuming they knew how to do it to begin with.
Maybe you could argue that a external NVME would be less hazardous but a stiff Flash is going to be harder to make a case for. I’ve seen people have more problems with USBC than USBA despite its improvements.
But that’s just my view and if you have your own and we disagree I understand and that’s okay.
AFAIK this is entirely dependent on where you bought the S9. If you bought it from Samsung or otherwise with an unlocked bootloader, probably. If you bought it from a carrier, probably not.
AOSP was never about consumers. Google used it as a trojan horse to gain massive marketshare and use it as a platform to run their surveillance software on the biggest possible scale.
The fact that it’s open source helped AOSP succeed at first and gave Google a good corporate image. Then, slowly over the years, Google moved more and more open-source features behind their proprietary stack, and now AOSP is only nominally open source: look at the state of the dialer, the contact list… in a vanilla AOSP installation, like on most deGoogle phones: it’s quite pathetic compared to modern, privacy-invading phones.
So yes: AOSP has failed consumers because it was designed to serve Google and nobody else from the get-go.
I think I sorta used it in the early 2010s but with 3rd party apps to transfer larger files phone to phone instead of bluetooth.
Nowadays NFC does it fine enough but I rarely have the need to share files outside of my home.
I think it depends on the app though. I use obtainium and it can download and update Firefox Nightly without any input from me, but for Mastodon I need to manually download and install it
i was wondering what’s up with that, so i took a look at the source code of aurora, and it seems they don’t even call the requireUserAction thing that’s supposed to disable the prompt. As far as I can tell it should just always require the prompt the way the app is built now. Wonder why it doesn’t do it for me then.
Wow, nice digging. That is so bizarre. If I were you, I’d check to make sure that you do get thT prompt normally with other apps, since that might be a security hazard.
Google Play already does this, though. Well, it used to, but now it’s throwing errors when I try to update apps.
I think this just changes the installer package stored by the package manager API so they can skip a permission prompt somewhere. Without that, you’d need to hit “OK” for every update you receive, like on older alternative app stores that don’t have the Android 12 API enabled yet (F-Droid, for instance).
Unless Google is willing to risk a DMA fine, other app stores should be able to do the same.
I nixed the Play store and its related gpservices. Google doesn’t own my phone, and they can stay the hell away from from my sideloaded manually installed apps.
I think it’s already available. I was able to update a sideloaded app via the play store just the other day. (Blackmagic camera, since officially the play store says it’s incompatible with my device. It wouldn’t let me install it, but it was happy to update it.)
Really wish there was a real third OS choice. Hilarious that Apple (by force) is having to open up their platform to third-party stores. Meanwhile Google is continuing their enshittification of the entire platform full steam ahead. At this point, Samsung, bring back Tizen, or…someone do anything.
I really wonder how this is going to work, there are odd scenarios like the offline Wiki app Kiwix. If you install it from the Play Store, it can’t see your filesystem and you can only download wiki images in the app itself and they live in the container directory with their own user:group assigned by the app. (One is also not even allowed to modify the user:group on files even via ADB anymore without root, so copying a sideload into the app container directory still won’t work, as the app won’t “see” it.)
If you sideload from the Kiwix web site, the app is then allowed to have access to what remnants of the filesystem apps are still allowed to see, and you can just copy the 100GB wiki file to your phone over USB and access it in the app.
If the app is then updated in the Play Store, will it inherit the neutered permissions of the Play Store variant and suddenly not see your wiki images?
Only on new phones that ship with 6.1.1, so your existing phone won't change this setting with the update. There's also a page during the OOBE setup with a toggle for this block where you can simply tap to disable it before proceeding.
I cam vouch for Snapdrop/Pairdrop or whatever it is called nowadays. Requires opening a browser and being on the same network. Snapdrop does support sending files over the internet, but I couldn’t get it to work last time I tried.
But since we’re here, I use an SSH server app worth about $3 on my phone to access it from other devices with an SFTP or SSHFS client. The app is literally called “SSH Server”. Once the server is active I can use an app like Solid Explorer (free with ads or paying for a license) on another Android device to connect to my phone on the same Wi-Fi network. Or from Windows I can just map a network drive using the format \sshfs\user@ip. And on Linux just find the “Connect to server” option in your favorite file explorer to use SSHFS. Or any SFTP client of your choice.
I’m not familiar with Wi-Fi Direct since I’ve been using SSH for years now, and certainly much more work this way, but it works okay across all my devices.
Thanks, that’s an interesting option. It reminded me that I used primitive ftpd a long time ago, which is a Foss app to create a local ftp server, which you can then browse from other devices. I had forgotten as it was probably 6 or 7 years ago, and I’m happy to see it’s still being developed. This still relies on a local network of course, like yours. I don’t know if it could work over mobile data, I suppose you would need to run a full server and a domain name. Mind you it is feasible
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