this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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And just like that, all G Pay branding on every store window, door, or register is deprecated. I think they forgot how to make products.
There's a reason Apple sold 7 of the most-sold phones in America last year. They all have the latest OS available, have security patches for years to come, and use the same first-party apps. I beginning to think that Apple isn't necessarily doing anything specifically innovative, they just aren't constantly fucking with their customers (though they do still fuck OVER their customers regularly).
yeah. google just isn't a company you can rely on.
Even their search is going to shit (and with that google ads)
The past year, for multiple times i wanted an app, i couldn't find it on Google Play. The search is utter crap. I had to bing stuff with "google play" as a keyword to find what I was looking for. Ridiculous. In the original Play Store search they give three results that obviously have my search words substituted for more common ones, e.g. "music" instead of "sound", and give you a few most popular for that, which is of course bullshit, because of course music apps are more popular than sound apps, BUT I DON'T WANT ANOTHER GODDAM MUSIC PLAYER. Then they show some useless random shit in a carousel, like FUCKING GAMES LIKE HEARTHSTONE AND MINECEAFT, WHICH IS THE LAST THING I NEED NOW ... finally there is a "show more" button that triggers the actual search FOR THE SILLY SUBSTITUTED WORDS I DIDN'T ENTER, BUT THIS TIME WITH FUZZYNESS ON MAX SO IT DOESN'T EVEN MATCH THOSE ALL THE TIME.
I'm not a fan of MS, but: bing Play Store when?
Search used to be so useful 😑
https://youtu.be/Z3dSkkEr-wk
It's even affected YouTube.
At least YouTube is recommending videos by color now
But finding the two uploaders I watch daily is a chore.
Youtube has been a bitch and a half for a while now. It keeps showing me the same suggested videos over and over and over, most of them irrelevant to the search!
Do you pay for premium? I do and I feel like the experience I have on the platform is leaps and bounds better than what people describe on a free account. I wouldn’t put it past Google to actively make the product worse when you aren’t paying.
I pay and still get the color recommendation, garbage search, it auto plays videos when I search on a TV app, and auto plays a second time when I try to back out of the video it just auto played, it recommends the same channel 23 times in my recommended and half the time nothing I'm subscribed to which I still am and have to go hunting in subscriptions because of all the stupid fucking shorts that take up most of my subscription feed now and they raised my price just now because I was one of the first fucking YouTube red subscribers and they can't even respect their grandfathered plans!
Sorry. YouTube has been pissing me off for a while now. And no I don't think paying for it makes it better. But I can believe them making it somehow still worse if I didn't!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Z3dSkkEr-wk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Every time I want to search by date I have to open invidious because YouTube search by upload date only sorts like the last week and then past that it's back to just relevance
Apple doesn’t invent new products; they take good ideas that others did poorly and do them well.
I don't believe that. I don't think Apple innovates constantly, or that they are the most innovative, but they have their moments (Touch Bar, gigantic touchpad, one of the first laptop manufacturers to have insane display resolution, one of the first to take mobile audio quality seriously, Apple silicon, Vision Pro - which is NOT the same as Google Glass or HoloLens, AirPods).
That’s how they beat competition: by innovating in small-ways.
They didn’t make the first Laptop, but they innovate in ways like high-quality display and trackpad, and having a touch-bar.
They don’t always do it well. Touch-bar and pressure-sensitive trackpad have been hit-or-miss features.
AirPods weren’t the first Bluetooth earphones, but Apple managed to make them wildly popular.
Vision Pro is … honestly I’m not sure where they’re going with it. I think the most similar competing product is the Facebook/Meta/Oculus “Quest”, but that focuses on running games while the Apple Vision emphasizes anything but games.
The pressure sensitive trackpad has been a home run, nobody has better trackpads. Period.
But yeah the touchbar was pretty meh and poorly supported and ended up being half baked in the long run.
I love the pressure sensitive trackpad but my mom always complains when the force-click pop up appears when she tries to click normally but presses too hard. I’m pretty sure most users don’t take advantage of it.
A related feature was pressure sensitivity in their phones, which the removed because most users weren’t using it.
They really need to ship with the optional “bottom right corner is right click” as default, especially when I believe most people are conditioned to that. Fixes the accidental force-click pop ups imo.
Also one of the firsts to go all in on USBC on a laptop. Sure they spun their wheels on mobile but I gotta give them props for taking the plunge in their computers. Lotta people bitched about it but it needed to happen.
“one of the first to take mobile audio quality seriously”
Is this referring to iPods? If so, then I agree. Hell, the first gen iPods are super sought after because they can use FLAC audio files. Although Apple has their own “lostless” audio codec now, so idk if it’s that big of a deal.
AirPods? Sure it’s impressive the noice canceling features in such a small package, but Bluetooth audio was nothing new and now they’re required because Apple removed the headphone jack.
I loved my 2017 LG ThinQ because it not only had a headphone jack, but it had a built in audio DAC to provide extra power to my Sennheiser studio headphones and it sounded soooo good.
I was referring to their laptop speakers, which are some of the best in class speakers around. But Apple has put a heavy emphasis on audio for a while. Their DACs are pretty good for what they are. The HomePods and AirPods aren't bad either. They aren't audiophile-level, but they are pretty good. I do wish they had better BT support, and had AptX on MacOS though.
All examples you mention are just refinements of what others did, proving the point. Except the Vision Pro which is just factually a bad product and rightly getting lambasted by everyone for it. But eh, even Apple has their misses.
It's true, Apple stole ideas so much there is a term for it among the dev community: Sherlocking .
One of the most famous sherlocking case is Apple removing FlickType citing compliance with apple store guidelines, only to launch a similar app later: https://twitter.com/keleftheriou/status/1437845736951992321
waiting for them to cancel android already
Their business is advertising and Android is how they track an insane number of users. Like Chrome, they'll never kill it, it's far too valuable to them.
i was half joking, i'm expecting it to enshittify.
https://xkcd.com/1361/
Any Google tap and pay will still work under the Google Wallet umbrella. All they will do is add "Wallet" logos to future signage.
They really seem to have lost any semblance of vision
No, the G Pay logo and branding is entirely separate. It is and has always been the indication that you can pay with the Wallet app. Which sucks as far as naming goes, but at least it has been quite consistent.
...
Over here. I had no idea that in other countries they did all kinds of fuckery with their branding.
Individual phones sure, but much like windows vs Mac . There's way more android devices sold/out there.
The downside is relying on those non Google manufacturers to update those devices.
I wonder how much of that is because Apple doesn't compete in the sub-$400 market. I was surprised that my parents had a $100 Motorola Android that provided updates for something like 4 years, but yeah, some of the manufacturer's just give up on even supporting their flagship devices (I see you, LG G4).
That's a huge part of it. But it's like the PC thing all over where anyone can license and produce any kind of android device.
android should be like windows or even desktop linux for that matter, google should update it directly.
they look like they are moving in that direction with treble and planning to use mainline linux, but they sure are taking their sweet damn time
At the very least, manufacturers should be required to make their android build files available, even if they are kept in an escrow until the manufacturer stops selling that model (or they go out of business). Most of the phones going to the dump are because no updates are available, even though the hardware is still fine and any individual person (with a little patience) could build the latest release if they had the hardware bin files available.
For what it’s worth, that’s the goal behind GKI (generic kernel image)
It allows Google to update the phone without the manufacturer’s input
Would that also be available to individuals, or is something that only Google would have access to? There's at least a couple groups actively keeping maintained images available for various phones. I keep thinking I want to try one but never get around to it before the phone is fully in use.
It should make it somewhat easier for individuals as well
The idea is that you have the vendor image with Qualcomm or Samsung specific drivers, and you can build AOSP for everything else
The structs in the kernel have some extra GKI space so if they change, it can still support the older drivers
The downside is Google is planning on pushing the updates through the Play Store, so it will take some effort to make it work in AOSP for Lineage/Graphene, etc
Well it sounds like it's a step in the right direction at least. Thanks for the info.
I don't think they have really innovated for quite some time. But that said, they do know their market. They've got tons of people in the ecosystem and simply have to maintain them. It's a lot easier than courting new users.
Apple has never done anything innovative. They just take things other companies have done and sell it to people better. They have a fantastic marketing team, but they generally don't do new ideas.