Almost three screens of apps, none of which require Google.
I had a good discussion on Twitter today with Peter Lambrechtsen, and if you want to have a peek, it’s here. He’s a really decent guy who makes some good points. But it does annoy me that my partner, whose phone is a stock standard one, with all the Google and Vodafone spyware, cannot run Ćber, either, and that it wasted half an hour of her life yesterday. Between us we’ve lost 90 minutes because of programs in two days that don’t do what they say on the tin.
I have several theories about this, and one of Peter’s suggestions was to get a new phoneāwhich is actually quite reasonable given what he knows about it, though not realistic for everyone.
Theory 1: the people who make these apps just have the latest gear, and to hell with anyone who owns a phone from 2017. (Silicon Valley is woke? Not with this attitude.)
Theory 2: the apps just aren’t tested.
Theory 3: the apps are developed by people who have little idea about how non-tech people use things.
We got on to rooting phones and how some apps detect this, and won’t function as a result.
I’d never have rooted mine if there wasn’t an easy manufacturer’s method of doing so, and if I could easily remove Google from it (services, search, Gmail, YouTube, Play, etc.). Nor would I have touched it had Meizu allowed us to install the Chinese operating system on to a western phone.
I wager that over 99 per cent of Android apps do not need Google servicesāI run plenty without any problemsābut there’s less than 1 per cent that do, including Zoomy and Snapchat. I live without both, and, in fact, as the 2020s begin, I find less and less utility from a cellphone. So much for these devices somehow taking over our lives. You get to a point where they just aren’t interesting.
So why does the 1 per cent become so wedded to Google?
You’d think that app developers would believe in consumer choice and could see the writing on the wall. A generation ago, Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer got them into hot water. More recently, the EU fined Google for violating their monopoly laws. People are waking up to the fact that Google is wielding monopoly power and it’s bad for society. Why contribute to it, when the other 99 per cent don’t?
If I build a website, I don’t say that you need to have used something else to browse it: there’s an agreed set of standards.
And I bet it’s the same for Android development, which is why there are now superior Chinese app stores, filled with stuff that doesn’t need Google.
We prefer open standards, thank you.
While these tech players are at it, let us choose whether we want Google’s spyware on our phonesāand if we don’t, let us banish it to hell without rooting them. (Next time, I’m just going to have to ask friends visiting Chinaāwhenever that will beāto get me my next phone, if I haven’t moved back to land lines by then. Just makes life easier.)
Growing up in a relatively wealthy country in the 1980s, after getting through most of the 1970s, youād be forgiven for thinking that the world would just keep getting better and things would make more sense as humans evolved.
From a teenagerās perspective: home computers, with a modulatorādemodulator (modem), could bring you information instantaneously and from around the world. As an immigrant kid, that excited me: contact with people āback homeā and from other places, making communication quicker. You could hear from others, and you could help others who needed you. And if you didnāt have a computer that could connect to a bulletin board, there was Teletext, which gave you regularly updated information through your TV set.
Cars were getting more aerodynamic, which meant they would use less fuel, and that was understood universally to be a good thing. MPVs were very practical vehicles that had small footprints yet fitted a lot of people, or stuff, inside. Here in New Zealand, natural gas-powered dual-fuel cars were mainstream, and that meant we werenāt reliant on overseas oil. They also didnāt pollute anywhere near what petrol didāthey burned cleanly.
And since saving energy was understood to be a good thing, who knew? Before long solar power would be the norm for new homes and weād be putting electricity back into the grid.
I also heard about recycling for the first time as a teen, and that seemed like a good thingāall that old paper and plastic could have a second life.
People were interested in being more efficient because no one wanted a repeat of the oil shocks of the 1970s. Nor did we want the government imposing carless days on us again.
That same teenager would have thought that by the dawn of the 21st centuryāif the US and Soviet Union behavedāweād have evolved to have recognized that we had the tools to make things better.
When the internet came to our house in the 1990s, I saw it as a direct evolution of the 1980sā optimism. It made sense.
So through that lens, a lot of what the world looks like today doesnāt make sense.
We have connected computers, milliards which are handheld, yet some of us are addicted to them and others use them to express outrage, rather than delight in having any contact at all with people thousands of miles away.
SUVs outsell regular cars in some size segments. They are less aerodynamic, use more fuel, and are less efficient. We have American companiesāFord in the US and Holden hereāsaying that theyāll stop selling cars in most segments in favour of utility trucks, crossovers and SUVs. Petrol is expensive, and I complain about it, but I guess no one else thinks itās expensive. Dual-fuel cars are a thing of the past here, for the most part, yet lots of people marvel at hybrids, conveniently forgetting we were decades ahead in the 1980s.
And solar power isnāt the norm.
We still, happily, recycleābut not everything we collect winds up being recycled. We have an awareness, but if we kept on progressing as I expected us to when I was Greta Thunbergās age, then we wouldnāt have Greta Thunberg reminding us that we havenāt.
I wonder if others in middle age realize that humans have the potential to go forward, and in many respects we doābut collectively there are enough of us who go backward and prevent any real advance in society.
I like to have the same optimism as teenage me about the future. In terms of myself, many things bring me happiness, particularly in my personal and work lives. Yet in terms of society, I wonder if I can be as optimistic. I know deep down that we are interested in efficiency and treating our planet better (or we say we are), so then who are the ones holding us back, and what are we doing that stops us moving forward? Is it personal greed, hoping others will pick up the slack? Many of us choose products and services from companies that align with our views about what we wantāyet are we doing the same when it comes to politicians?
Over the last few years, Iāve had some USB memory sticks go bad. There was one particular typeāa cheap one from the Warehouseāthat failed once on Windows 10. The error was āThe last USB device you connected to this computer malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it.ā The problem was that any other USB stick of the same brand would return the same error, even non-faulty ones, from then on.
I took them back to the Warehouse and while one of them actually was kaput, the others I alleged were faulty werenāt. The trouble was that there was no way to make Windows 10 forget the error.
I did the usual ways you find on the internet: going to the device manager, removing the device drivers, scanning for hardware changes, etc., to no avail. Once guilty, forever guilty. There was no turning back.
Tonight, I encountered the same error when plugging in my phone. However, the last time I had plugged it in, there were no errors, so something already was amiss. When probing more, the error was āWindows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)ā, and again, every bit of advice online was useless.
These included: restarting your PC; uninstalling the affected device driver; installing generic Android drivers (none were available at Meizu directly); checking all cables; using different USB ports. Two hours later, which included contemplating getting a Bluetooth dongle for my PC, I came across a solution that should have been obvious much earlier: reboot the phone.
Thatās all it took.
Iām putting this here since no one else seems to have suggested this, of all the pages I read over the last few hours. Itās obvious now with hindsight, but not when youāre following well meaning advice online and trying to do it all procedurally. I knew instinctively I didnāt have to uninstall everything that was USB-related, and Iām glad I never made it that complicated for myself. Hopefully this blog post will save others two hoursā trial and error.
I see Googleās going to stop supporting Huawei as a developer. How is this a bad thing?
First, Huawei can still get the public parts of Android, since theyāre open-source. Secondly, if they donāt get updates ahead of time, so what? When have western software companies rolled out bug-free updates? Based on my own experience, Chinese cellphone developers make stuff that just works, and Iām inclined to trust them more these days.
Thirdly, no one needs all that Google crap anyway: I always said that if it disappeared overnight, weād all find replacements within a week. Now Huawei has toāin fact, it already has them.
Anyone who owns a Chinese phone made for the Chinese market already knows that they have their own app stores. Why do you actually need YouTube through an app when you can browse to the website? Maybe Huawei will do a tiny YouTube app that only surfs to their site for those keen on getting into the Google snooping network. Is a Gmail app really a must if you can set up your phone really easily as an email client to pull from Gmail? As to maps, Iāve been using Here Maps since Iāve had my Meizu M2 Note in 2016, and while it isnāt perfect, itās more than adequate. Recently I found they had maps of the Chatham Islands when the carsā sat-nav didnāt.
All Huawei really needs to do is roll out its own app store to its western phones with decent enough translations, and make sure itās updated with the APKs.
I have a better Meizu weather app on my phone than anything Iāve ever found on Google, and Iām sure Huawei has its version. I owned a Huawei phone many years ago, although it was from my telco and I never had it rooted. It came with a suite of battery-draining Google junk, including services that you could switch off only to have them restart; but when I was able to get a Google-free phone, Iāve never looked back. When that phone was replaced, I made sure the next one was Google-free as well.
Whatās going to happen is that Google and the US will lose out as Huawei might find itself zooming ahead with a superior app store, and its own developments may outpace the Americansā.
Corporate America may be patting itself on the back, and their president may think he was doing their bidding, but I think theyāll find themselves weakened.
Since (mostly) leaving Facebook, and cutting down on Twitter, Iāve come to realize the extent of how outdated traditional computing definitions have become. To help those who need to get up to speed, Iāve compiled a few technobabble words and translated them into normal English.
app: in many cases, an extremely limited web browser for your cellphone that only works with one site, as opposed to a proper web browser that works with many sites.
bots: fake, computer-driven profiles masquerading as real humans on, predominantly, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
clean install: something entirely unnecessary, but suggested by tech support people who want to cover up buggy operating systems (q.v. Windows 10).
cloud: hackable online repository of naughty photos of celebrities.
comments’ section: when you see this while surfing, it’s a reminder to leave the web page you are on and make up your own mind.
Facebook: a website where bots live, where post-sharing is intentionally broken to ensure you need to pay for attention. Once paid, your posts are shared with bots, so even fewer humans actually see them.
Facebook friend: (a) a friend; (b) a total stranger; (c) a bot.
Google: (a) a virtual hole into which you dump all your private information, to be sold on to corporations, but feel good doing it because you gave it up to a private company to use against you rather than have the state take it to use against you; (b) a cult that supports (a), whose members will think you have a degenerative brain disease if you dare question the perfection of their god.
malware scanner: malware (especially when offered by Facebook, q.v.).
messenger app: an inefficient messaging program where typing takes 10 times as long as on a desktop or laptop computer. Designed to dissuade you from actually calling the person.
phone: portable computing device, not used to make calls.
remote desktop: when your operating system fails, and the odds of you seeing your familiar screen are remote.
social media: media where people are antisocial.
Twitter: (a) social media with no discernible rules on who gets kicked off and why; (b) where the US president gets angry.
white balance: when racists attack people of colour but pretend they are noble and against racism.
Weibo: a website monitored by the Chinese Communist Party, where users have more freedom than on Facebook and Twitter.
Windows 10: a buggy operating system that requires 10 goes at any updates or patches, hence the name.
The Associated Press had an exclusive this week: Google does not obey your opt-out preferences.
I could have told you that in 2011. Oh wait, I did. And I pointed out other instances where Google ignored your request to pause your history, continuing to track you either through its main site or its properties such as YouTube.
This latest story related to Google tracking peopleās movements on their Android phones.
The AP found that Google lies: what it claims Location History does on its website is not what it actually does.
In 2011, I proved that Google lied about its Ads Preferences Manager (no, it doesn’t use apostrophes): it said one thing on its website and did another. In 2014 and 2015 I showed Google lied about what it would do with your search histories. Instagram does that these days with its advertising preferences, saying you can control them via Facebook when, in fact, it stores another set altogether which you have no control over. If I get time I’ll post my proof. It makes you wonder if the same dishonest programmers are running things, or whether itās part of Big Techās culture to lie.
This is nothing new: they all lie, especially about unwanted surveillance, and have been doing so for a long time. Itās just that mainstream media are finally waking up to it.
The EU gets it when it comes to fines. Rather than the paltry US$17 million certain US statesā attorneys-general stung Google with some years ago for hacking Iphones, theyāve now fined the search engine giant ā¬4,340 million, on top of its earlier fine of ā¬2,420 million over anticompetitive behaviour.
That US$17 million, I mentioned at the time, amounted to a few hoursā income at Google.
As the EUās competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager noted on Twitter, āFine of ā¬4,34 bn to @Google for 3 types of illegal restrictions on the use of Android. In this way it has cemented the dominance of its search engine. Denying rivals a chance to innovate and compete on the merits. Itās illegal under EU antitrust rules. @Google now has to stop itā.
Google forces manufacturers to preinstall Chrome if they want to install Google Play. The EU also notes that virtually all Android devices have Google Search preinstalled, and most users never download competing apps, furthering Googleās dominance of search. Google pays manufacturers and cellphone networks to preinstall the Google search app on their phones, and prevented manufacturers from installing Google apps if their versions of Android were not approved by Google. DuckDuckGo, my search engine of choice, welcomed the decision. It noted:
Up until just last year, it was impossible to add DuckDuckGo to Chrome on Android, and it is still impossible on Chrome on iOS. We are also not included in the default list of search options like we are in Safari, even though we are among the top search engines in many countries.
Their anti-competitive search behavior isn't limited to Android. Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they'd like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension.
Thatās consumer confusion on top of restrictive contracts that promote market dominance and anti-competitive behaviour.
This is a very petty company, one that shut down Vivaldiās Adwords accountafter its CEO gave some interviews about privacy.
Of course Iām biased, and I make no apology for itāand anyone who has followed my journey on this blog from being a Google fan to a Google-sceptic over the last decade and a half will know just how Googleās own misleading and deceptive conduct helped changed my mind.
Googleās argument, that many Android manufacturers installed rival apps, clearly fell on deaf ears, and understandably so. While Iām sure Android experts can think up examples, as a regular person who occasionally looks at phones, even those ones with rival apps still ship with the Google ones. In other words, thereās simply more bloat. Iāve yet to see one in this country ship without a Chrome default and Google Play installed, often in such a way that you canāt delete it, and Google Services, without getting your phone rooted.
I did read this in the Murdoch Press and thought it was a bit of a laugh, but then maybe my own experience isnāt typical:
The impact of any changes mandated by the EU decision on Googleās ability to target ads to usersāand to its profitabilityāis an open question. The two apps targeted in the EU decision, Googleās search and its Chrome browser, are extremely popular in their own right. Consumers are likely to seek them out from an app store even if they werenāt preinstalled on the phone, said Tarun Pathak, an analyst at research firm Counterpoint.
I just donāt believe they would, and I made it a point to get a phone that would, happily, have neither. By buying a Chinese Android phone, I escape Googleās tracking; by seeking out the Firefox browser, I get to surf the way I want. That choice is going to create competition, something that Google is worried about. The Wall Street Journal also states that despite the earlier fine, Googleās shopping rivals said little or nothing has actually happened.
With all of Googleās misdeeds uncovered on this blog over the years, Iām really not surprised.
The EU is, at the very least, forcing some to examine just how intrusive Google is. It might soon discover how uncooperative Google can be.
I see the media (led by the Murdoch Press) have been reporting that Instagram plans to let people upload videos of an hour long. Itās a ārumourā at the moment, apparently.
As those of you who follow this blog know, Iāve been able to upload videos exceeding one minute since April, and one theory that Justin Bgoni, whoās the bursar at my Alma Mater, St Markās Church School, advanced when I mentioned it to him was that I must be part of a trial.
That makes perfect sense and it shouldnāt be a surprise that someone with a great financial mind like Justinās would conclude this. He says: weāre in New Zealand, itās a small country, and there are probably 10,000 people who have been given the capability in advance. Soon, he theorized weeks ago, Instagram will roll it out to the general public. I think heās right.
Iāve so far fielded two questions from strangers on how I do this, and I tell them the truth: Iāve just been able to, and I was as surprised as anyone else.
I donāt claim to have āspecial super powerā like this user doesāand when I visited his Instagram, he doesnāt have a single video over a minute, so goodness knows what heās talking about. (Having said that, I do like a lot of his uploads.) If youāre uploading 10 one-minute videos into a single post, that doesnāt count: almost anyone can do that, and it doesnāt take special powers, just patience.
There is a limit for me, however. Iāve attempted four times to upload a 9ā²3ā³ video to Instagram, and have failed each time, so we can conclude that thatās too long. However, I have managed 8ā²37ā³ as of today, so the present maximum length on Instagram must be between the two times.
I havenāt discovered too much more since I last posted on this topic, other than enjoying the freedom of having the greater length. (Instagramās probably noted that, which is why the rumours have begun surfacing.) Engagement is still rather low on the long videos, for starters. Instagram only (rightly) counts full views, so there are videos with likes but 0 views recorded.
Itās nice, once again, to be ahead of the ball when it comes to these technologies, just as I have been with Google and Facebook. The exception here is that itās been a positive feature rather than the usual negative ones, though I realize that since itās Instagram, it comes with a load of Facebook-linked privacy issues. Just today it fired through another alcohol ad despite my having turned them off in my settings, again underlining Facebookās blatant dishonesty.
Yet here I am, still using one of their services despite having mostly de-Facebooked (and de-Googled years before that). Like millions of others, Iām still a sucker because I continue to use a service they own.
Speaking of the Murdoch Press and Google, we (at work) actually deal with the former when it comes to advertising. Let that sink in for a moment: I trust Murdochs more than I trust Google when it comes to our usersā privacy. Thatās saying something.
So I signed up for 2 factor auth on Facebook and they used it as an opportunity to spam me notifications. Then they posted my replies on my wall. 🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/Fy44b07wNg
