exactly this. My Galaxy Wear sits in a drawer 10 months per year, as I only use it as a wrist-strapped mini-smartphone when I go to the beach. It's too bulky and cumbersome to wear every day. The Pebble Time 2 I plan to use every day, as it does exactly what I want in a smartwatch sans wireless payments
In the beginning I thought my IP fell on the wrong side of Cloudflare and thought I was being blocked from ~80% of the internet. I was starting to panic
it's been years since the last time I go to zdnet. My experience when opening the link: I've been greeted by a dialog asking me to enable notifications, then the classic cookie dialog, and 5 seconds into reading the article, an auto-playing video with sound shows up pinned to the bottom of my screen. No thank you. Tab closed.
The OS on desktop situation isn't comparable to the OS on mobile situation. You can buy any PC and expect being able to replace its OS. On phones, you have to look for the ones where it's possible, and depending on the phone, it's possible despite the efforts from the manufacturers for not allowing it.
Also in PC OSs, there isn't a corporation dictating what programs you are allowed to install. In iOS there is, and soon in Android too.
IMO, these corporations have managed to amass an amount of power where there's no longer consumer freedom. Therefore, there's no free market. We have reached a point where the law must intervene to restore capitalism.
Mozilla did an expose a while back on what's hidden in those terms, IIRC. Things like "we want to know do you use the heated seats" (okay... useful free market research maybe) but also "we store personality profiles including your sexual preferences"
Somewhere I hope a PM is deliberating the intricacies of automotive teledildonics. I hope.
OMG! thank you! I was unaware this was possible. I can't stand the fact that my expensive TV came with ads built-in. I use it in "only apps mode" so at least the only ad id showed is the top third of the screen one, but not the "recommended" content tiles. I'll do this instead once I go back home
> I’ve tried to use my feed reader to segregate by 'frequency' before, but I haven't really given it a full trial—it still feels a bit awkward.
I'm in the middle of that myself. I have folders labelled rarely, weekly, frequent and social. Rarely and weekly I tend to read most of it, as they are the folders I open first. I only open frequent once I'm done with the others and I usually scroll through the titles and only read very few articles. Social is for mastodon and bluesky accounts, which I open when I only have 5 minutes to kill and I know I won't have time to finish reading long posts/articles.
I liked Newsblur's approach to this when I was using a firehose (I dropped most of my firehose-like feeds a couple years ago for various reasons including I didn't actually like most of them all that much). Newsblur has Focused versus Disliked and you can "train" all sorts of things to Like or Unlike about an article. You can Like an entire feed, but you can also Like things like specific authors or tags in a feed or words in a headline. Similarly you can use all the same tools to Unlike an article. If an article has more Likes than Unlikes it shows up in a Focused view and if an article has more Unlikes than Likes it shows up only in an "All" view, meaning it disappears from the default Unread view. When you have a limited amount of time you read Focused, when you have more time you read Unread, and if you want to check on spam or topics you dislike you can zoom out to "All" and spot-check feeds for Unliked articles.
Additionally, Newsblur added an automated "Infrequent Site Stories" for things it knows come from feeds that don't update all that frequently. (Which you can use in tandem with Focused view for even less time.)
I don't know about "the best", but I'm very happy with Fastmail. It has a very nice UI, it has contacts and calendar, uses open standards, and their privacy policy is fine.
On Android WhatsApp also requires access to all media files on the phone in order to use certain features that don't really need them, but that sound plausible.
For example, when you receive an audio message, if you want to listen to it, it will request full media access. Android apps can access media files they have created, so this permission isn't needed. But without granting media access (or tricking it into thinking it has it, like with GrapheneOS' storage scopes), WhatsApp won't let you listen to the audio. Same when trying to open an image full screen instead of just the in-chat preview.
If this were a small developer, I could assume it was done that way accidentally or to cut some corners. Coming from Meta, I can only assume malice.
A similar anti-pattern - WhatsApp has it's own contact list and list of users. However, you can't use it without granting the Contacts permissions. On my phone, though I have WhatsApp installed, I can't create a new chat - It just brings up the "Enable Contacts" dialogue. I can however use their web-client to initiate a chat, and when people can message me I can respond.
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