It's very interesting because 1/4 of Pixel 6a would be around 80 EUR... so I wonder about your environment and what workarounds you have for these problems.
Interesting. This might not be a bug in Google's dialer (or the OS, or hardware). Based on my past experience building B2B SIP clients, I remember that there are ways to intercept many of the Android system broadcasts. I'd bet on that being the root cause. Intercepting would look like the app is crashing, when instead it would be attempting to re-route requests to a different app; someone else mentioned they detected Microsoft Teams doing that. I remember Skype also had this feature, so it sounds plausible.
In the B2B world, we often had weird requests e.g. to take over the whole phone experience and do something different – this was made possible by the same core Android SDKs that they ship both to business devices and personal devices.
For example, we were required to move each 911 call to our app first, then check if we can route it quicker through the internal PBXs, and if not – send it back to the native/built-in dialer. This was possible a couple of years ago, we built it. I assume it's still possible because it's really rare that you need this kind of functionality... releasing such an app also requires a special review from Google. Maybe Google sees it as a low risk to the user experience and allows some apps to still do it, at least until something like this issue happes.
It is possible to intercept a lot of Android system broadcasts. In the B2B world, we often had weird requests to take over the whole phone experience and do something different – made possible by the same core Android APIs that they ship both to business devices and personal devices.
I'm also not surprised to read that Teams was to blame, because Skype had the same functionality back in the days.
Nexus 4, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 4 XL, Pixel 6 Pro – never had any issues whatsoever, all phones still alive and kicking at my grandparents' places. Yes, most of them tied to the wall now... but hey, they're fine for showing some photos and displaying current time or setting alarms.
Interestingly, I also used Samsung's Note 9 and 10+, iPhone 12, iPhone 14 Pro Max – daily, also with no issues... other than disliking Samsung's software.
(I was/am doing a lot of mobile work so I test a lot of phones)
After years of doing this kind of testing, it's hard for me to believe that the entire batches of phones are so fundamentally broken... I'd rather bet on software issues, but who knows.
I remember from my days building SIP clients that a lot of carriers support 933, which is exactly what you're asking about. You can try googling a bit to see if your carrier supports it.
But overall, nowadays it's at least possible to limit the impact – compared to Lollipop era for example, when everything suddenly started to look modern, unified and nice, but still full of the same old holes.
> Kotlin as a platform is not mature enough to deserve the same qualification.
With
(1) a lot of Java backend projects migrating to Kotlin (let's be negative and assume 20%); (2) all of Android running Kotlin, which is around 80% of the world's mobile phones; (3) the world's best IDE authors building features and improving Kotlin; (4) the language being almost 13 years old at this point; and (5) Kotlin being 100% compatible with Java in both directions,
I wonder what additional maturity would you be looking for. Can you point to a specific problem?
I mean, of course, Java has been here since forever and we've made careers out of programming for JVM. I'm wondering if you are referring to a specific maturity issue, or just want to highlight that Java was here for longer... if it's the latter, I don't think it can be a valid argument against Kotlin or in favor of Java.
What can I do as a developer to offer that choice to the user, before it loads? What can I do about the transitive dependencies that my dependencies load?
That research was conducted on the 2018 version of the OS, and also at a time when Google Play's distribution agreement was much more relaxed (close to zero app checks).
As far as I know, most (if not all) of the concerns shared have been addressed in the following 2 years, so I would assume that this is not an issue anymore in 2023 - or at least not as severe. I believe that new loopholes exist, but this one seems outdated to me.
I uninstalled that malware a long time ago despite everyone around me using it. Years ago when I still had it, I found that they've been transmitting all my data - including messages apparently - to Facebook. I found this in the FB privacy console, as Viber would have never told me explicitly.
To your second concern... can't you now disable all those permissions individually? Not allowing you to then proceed with using the app would break their Google Play developers agreement, I assume. I hope.
That's a good tip because it is in fact the same language with various dialect and naming differences, similar to the many flavors of English we have today or different variants of German. Montenegrian is the latest addition to the family.
However, everyone I know has a common understanding about this, so I'm not sure who would be reluctant to admit that it is the same language... outside of the very few extremist groups of course :)
Isn't ChatGPT still like super expensive to use and run? At least compared to Google queries, but maybe in general too? While Google still pays Apple a ton od money to remain the default search engine... which is close to zero work on Apple's side.
Microsoft would then need to pay for ChatGPT computation, model retraining, maybe testing of deployments/upgrades, maybe sponsor Apple's initial development efforts, plus pay for the expensive deal to be Apple's default choice.
Am I understanding the problem correctly? It looks like a lot of work and very expensive if I'm getting it right.
I tried this a couple of times and I was never able to completely turn off YouTube ads on my LG TV, no matter how many blocklists I pulled. I wonder... is there's a special setting for DNS routing inside of the TV that allows YT to bypass pi-hole?
To forward your secrets to your family (shared vaults) you need a remote vault that both sides connect to. That's their implementation choice... but given that BW is OSS, you could theoretically change that behavior if you know how.
I've never heard of mobile OS being THE barrier for using password managers. It's usually a ton of other things... after all, both of our favorite OSs use autofill from the keyboard bar, so it should be straightforward. But hey, I have a similar parent. I just installed it for him and told him this is the new way... "computer programmers made it this way now".
Used BitWarden for years, happy with it. Recently switched to Nord Pass, also happy with it. Not sure about feature disparity though, just mentioning some ideas in case you're researching alternatives.
It's very interesting because 1/4 of Pixel 6a would be around 80 EUR... so I wonder about your environment and what workarounds you have for these problems.