Yes, that was what I was getting at. Not having true random is one thing, I understand (and like) that implementation. Apple has been doing it since the first few iPods. But Spotify “shuffle” isn’t near even, it is exactly even, as in “if you shuffle play this playlist twice two days in a row, it will play the exact same order”. Which is why people are complaining about Spotify specifically.
The problem isn’t that their random is biased or has rules, the is that it is entirely deterministic, to the point where it will play the same exact songs, in the same exact order for days. It’s as if shuffle just activates a hidden “shuffle” playlist that only updates once a week.
No chat app needs a desktop App, they need a WEB app. Generally I’m against them, but in this case it makes sense. It makes cross platform trivial, and you would never really need to use a messaging app offline anyway, browser APIs have come a LONG way. It’s also Google’s core competency. So yes, I believe they 100% have the tools if they wanted to try.
As for integration, my point is: why would Apple bother integrating with Google’s suggestions? Google has a track record of abandoning standards and ideas at the drop of a hat. Why on earth would Apple spend time, money, and engineering talent on something that’s likely to become abandonware in 2-4 years time? That’s also assuming it’s a GOOD standard, most of the previous attempts had fatal flaws that made the product dead on arrival. If Google had something compelling, and gave us a reason to believe it would be around for more than a few years, I’m sure adoption would go through the roof, and Apple would want to integrate— Because it would now benefit them, they would be getting something out of the deal; More features, an established user base, etc.
Regardless, my point still stands. The reason folks on Andriod are hopping around between different chat apps every few years is because Google refuses to create a robust chat app, and commit to it. Apple has power in this space because Google has refused to seriously, honestly try. If Google had a GOOD chat app, and a track record to prove it’s going to stick around, Apple would be much more open to integrating with another ecosystem, because it would be beneficial for them to do so.
I am fully in the Apple ecosystem, including my phone, work laptop, personal laptop, and an Apple watch. I pretty much exclusively use telegram, and sometimes Discord, not iMessage— and that’s not a niche or unpopular opinion in my experience either. This is absolutely because Google can’t stick with one app or product long enough to gain any market share. Each time they have tried, it’s lasted barely a year or so before they killed it.
Is it really tin foil at this point? Their core business model is hoovering up data to serve advertisements.
The GM software will ALWAYS be better than Carplay/Andriod Auto, because the metric they are optimizing for is being able to add microtransactions to your car after you’ve bought it, not optimizing for the user experience.
They can be far more predatory on their own you see.
If someone thinks AirPods Max sound amazing, they’re agreeing how good compressed audio can sound, whether they realize it or not.
Yes! (Kinda) I’m not saying lossless music is the end all be all, and honestly in normal life I prefer non-lossless, because its SOO much less data, and you can hardly tell the difference in normal listening anyway. What I was trying to express was how bad badly done compression can sound. Good compression exists, and it can sound nearly identical anecdotally, but there is a limit to how low you can go before you start hearing it, and I’m trying to say that I think Spotify has chosen a rate below that level by default. I switched to a higher profile and the problem is mostly gone.
There may be other factors at play, Apple quite likes to compress stream data between their own devices, even on “standard” protocols (just look at their monitor collaboration with LG where they did the same thing to exceed the max resolution of an existing display signal). Regardless, there is a difference, and it is not a small one. It was immediately obvious to me after listening to a single song. Something about the pipeline is crunching audio to the level where it’s obviously degraded. This isn’t audiophile grade splitting hairs and “I think it sounds ever so slightly better with these gold cables” it was like the difference between 480p and 1080p video to me, enough to be actually annoying during normal listening, even if I was actively trying to forget about it.
I wholeheartedly disagree. I have more trained ears then most (worked in video production), but not by much, and when i got my AirPods Max, I thought they sounded awful at first. They were crunchy and dithered sounding in this weird way. I was gonna return them, but I did some testing, and discovered that I was hearing Spotify compression. I turned up the quality as high as it would go in the settings, and that made it a little bit better, but I could still hear it, and can to this day. I did some further testing by signing up for a tidal free trial, in addition to Apple Music. Listening in lossless was an entirely different experience, I could definitely tell the two apart blindly, without even specifically looking for sound quality. There were like 2 to 3 instruments in a given song that I wouldn’t be able to pick out in the lower quality audio, that I could easily pick out in the lossless audio. You have to have a pretty decent pair of headphones to be able to hear it, but some of the higher and consumer stuff can definitely hit that level, and when you do, it’s not something you have to go looking for, it sounds very obvious.
By doing it that way, you are all the sudden generating tens, if not hundreds of requests per minute to grab notifications for every platform and service, rather than just the one. With a unified approach, the phone can wake up in the background every 5 minutes and ping Google to ask for notifications. If everyone did it individually, your phone would never be able to go to sleep, and would CONSTANTLY be sending out requests to random servers. That also brings up security concerns, since you can get a vague idea of location data from a request, any app that can send notifs can soft track users. They would also open the door for one to be compromised, and send malicious info much easier than it would be to do thru Google. All around, its just a worse solution to the problem with one very small benefit.
Rooted, degoogled AOSP is definitively not “mainstream”. Mainstream to me means something you can but off the shelf and start using without having to modify it.
Perhaps not, but it’s not just the act of making the service worse, it’s doing so measurably to paying customers ONLY when using a competitors product. With those caveats, I think you could at least argue standing. Winning is a whole other battle.
Perhaps YouTube premium subscribers would have standing as a class action, since Google is materially worsening the experience of a paid product if you don’t use their browser
Oh, did we start requiring criminal background checks for pipes and metal stock too? This is the same problem we’re facing in the rest of the country, everything can be used as a weapon, and requiring background checks on all of them is gonna do nothing to stop gun crime. Regulate the damn guns, that is the only thing that will help.
I had a call last week where T Mobile SWORE to me up and down that I ran out of data on my 5 GB of LTE, then unlimited 3G speed plan. Which went down like this:
“right, and I’m out of LTE speed data, that’s fine, but you’ve throttled me to UNDER 10 Kbps, that’s emphatically not 3G speeds, I can’t even complete a speedtest”
“Sir it’s showing me that you’re out of data”
“Out of LTE data, but I still have unlimited 3G, thats the plan I bought”
“Sir you’ve hit the limit on your unlimited plan”
“If you are ceasing usable service at a certain limit, what part of this plan is unlimited?”
“Your data is unlimited sir, but you’ve hit your data limit for the month”
This kinda shit is straight up fraud, and clearly designed to con people who don’t know any better out of their money. I read the fine print, all of it, and their full corporate policy. I’m also technical, and I can see I have an RSSI to the tower of higher than -40, my signal is great. They advertised, and I paid for far more. That’s beside the fact that “unlimited” data literally doesn’t exist, there is a line speed to every uplink, you can’t physically download more than that a month. The government needs to get off their ass and prosecute these motherfuckers.
If you don’t get a physical piece of media that can be viewed offline indefinitely, you don’t own anything, you’re just renting. Services revoking even bought and paid for content is not unheard of, digital purchasing gives every streaming company the ability to do that.
The US is indeed part of the world. I would be fine with similar coverage if this were to happen somewhere else like Germany or Turkey.
My understanding is that this alert is mandatory, and will sound no matter what unless the phone is fully off. You can turn off things like Amber and Weather alerts, but my understanding is that this one (by design) cannot be disabled.
There are multiple other browser startups in development that are not Chromium based. Like LadyBird (which is completely independant), and Zen browser (which started as a FF fork)