I can’t speak for Canada but at least here in the US, I’ve used every Pixel on any carrier I wanted. And most of them were small ones. Straight Talk, Ting, T-Mobile, and one more I can’t even remember the name of.

IIRC, the “allowlist” stuff was just “known carriers that use towers that are compatible with this phone.” As in, different carriers use different “bands”, or frequency ranges, for their transmissions. Your phone has to have hardware support for those bands. So the “allowlist” is really just “we know these work.” I’m pretty sure neither Samsung nor Google will stop you from using an unlocked phone bought from them with any carrier that’ll accept it. These days, I just stick a SIM (or eSIM) into my phone and just go.

The people who want a world where iPhones are like Linux by default don’t use iPhones; they use Linux phones.

The vast majority of us just want to have the ability to use our devices to run what we want when we want to. The App Store is a good, fine thing. I like that it exists and I don’t want it to go away.

But I don’t think it’s fair that Apple gets to tell me I can’t run emulators on my phone. It’d be like Ford telling me I can’t drive my car on an interstate or something. The whole concept is weird.

Let me own my device, please. I paid for this hardware; why am I not allowed to choose the software that runs on it?

Android handles this in what I think is a great way. By default, you can’t install 3rd party apps. You have to dig into your settings to enable that and then your phone is unlocked. I do think that’s bad for alternative app stores (but that’s a whole ‘nother problem) but the vast majority of people who seek apps that aren’t available in the phone’s App Store do so because they’re more technically minded and so don’t mind a more technical solution. If you go take a random Android user off the street, 9 times out of 10, they won’t even know you can install apps from outside of the App Store and that’s a good thing.

Apple loves to tout “security” and “efficiency” for why they don’t allow 3rd party apps and that’s so silly to me. If I want a less secure and less efficient phone so that I can use features Apple doesn’t like, that should be purely my decision to make. It doesn’t affect anyone else but me.

Make sure you’re on 1.19.0 of F-Droid, which needs to be installed manually for now.

https://f-droid.org/de/2024/02/01/twif.html

It’s so unbelievably annoying that PayPal doesn’t let you use whatever display name you want to. Not everyone uses their legal name in their social life.

I understanding needing you know your customer, but why not let me set what my display name is?!

Obligatory link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XkKufyIiAY

I had to read the title three times before it clicked that it said 64 TERABYTES and not gigabytes.

Holy smokes.

You’re not wrong but it feels disingenuous to say this. The entire repo with all of its dependencies checked out for a large website can easily clock at half a gig but there’s no popular website now that’s asking any users to download half a gig worth of stuff before they can use it.

There ARE websites where, if you keep them open long enough, they’ll constantly pull more and more data (usually for ads) but even that is measured more so in tens of megabytes.

And none of this is to say that websites haven’t gotten too big, just that comparing a downloaded app’s size to the size of a website’s unbuilt unbundled source with all of its dependencies is an unfair comparison.

You were a good boy. RIP.

But that's Michelle Obama!

What's probably happening here is your adapter is signaling some button press when you connect it that's popping up the Assistant. Only way to fix that is to get a new adapter since you can't manually disable that input from triggering the Assistant without root.

However, you can completely disable the Google Assistant from appearing at all via:

Settings > Apps > Default Apps > Digital Assistant App > Default Digital Assistant App > None

That should fully disable it in all regards and it'll never pop up again.

why is this so funny?

Probably exactly what the cat was saying!

No one gets right on a bike and starts riding it perfectly. You're going to fail sometimes, and that's okay. Falling down is okay. Staying down isn't.

So long as you keep getting up and back on the bike, you haven't failed.

I believe in you. I know you can do this. One day, I promise you, you'll look back and how you're feeling right now will be so far away, it'll feel like a different person.

Keep pedaling, buddy.