or, the alternative title: lug rants about the current state of smartphones yet again

obsidian says this takes 10 minutes to read

When I was a kid, I was so excited about the idea of the smartphone, and I was over the moon when I got my first phone back in 2013. I finally had this small computer in my hands that can do some stuff, play games (i used to play old MCPE back in the day on this thing, lmao) and generally just do whatever. Devices back then used to also have removable batteries, headphone jacks, and expandable storage. As I learned about Android, I started to try to do whatever I could to make the phone feel more like my own. I installed some themes with Xposed, I could make the notification shade look transparent or a different color on KitKat and I thought it looked cool. There were custom fonts, custom boot animations, custom kernels that allowed you to overclock if you so wanted too, there was root access where you can do crazy shit to your phone or just fuck around with Lucky Patcher to give yourself more coins in some random mobile game. If you ask me, this era was the golden era of Android. Peak Android, if you will. However stuff started to go downhill fast.

First it was SafetyNet, then more and more manufacturers started to crack down on bootloader unlocking for “security reasons”. Material You offered fake customization to their users, like “oh yeah you can now make everything tinted with a certain color!” and then you ask “can i install a custom icon pack system wide, or a font that isn’t regular Roboto, Sans Serif or Discount Store Product Sans1, or even pick custom quick actions from the lock screen?” and they just look at you with the most biggest angry frown you’ve ever seen (not to mention how much fucking wasted space there is everywhere, goddamn). Later we saw stuff like Play Integrity, which was SafetyNet but reloaded and significantly more awful. If you wanted to install a custom ROM and still maintain full features, you now needed to jump though hundreds of loops and workarounds and patches and this and that and all this, just so Google can blacklist the config and now you’re back to square one.

On the hardware side, we started to see the removable battery go away. So now a repair that would take 30 seconds, would now take 30 minutes, up to two hours for someone who has never done it before. There are phones that take mercy upon you, like something like the OnePlus Nord N10, which only requires the back to be removed just to replace the battery. There are other phones, however, like the HTC 10, whose insides look like a nightmare, and require an experienced technician to replace the battery. For some reason, the battery was sandwiched between two (2) motherboards, and are crossed by many fragile wires and other horrible shit. Not to mention the way you access everything, by removing a screen, a screen that could easily break and shatter if you do something wrong.

Then it was the disappearance of the headphone jack, with Apple starting the charge and replacing the headphone jack with the god awful Airpods. Originally Samsung had made an ad making fun of Apple for removing the headphone jack, just to change their minds not one year later, and follow in Apple’s footsteps on removing the headphone jack by removing it themselves, like the spineless fucks that they are. Once Samsung did this, more Android manufacturers started to follow suit, removing the headphone jack entirely, but hey, at least some of them at least offered a shitty dongle in the box like a “oh we fucked you over by removing the headphone jack, here is an fake apology for that in dongle form!” and then that dongle breaks in a couple months because it was made from shit. But don’t worry, you can buy these awful, non-recyclable, irreparable wireless earbuds that you have to keep buying every couple of years, because the battery degrades after use! Like, Isn’t it crazy that somehow these companies, that often say shit like “oh we care about the environment, that is why your brand new $700 dollar phone has no charging brick or cable” or are like “we hired a shitload of designers to design this box without using plastic” or whatever but at the same time they decide to sell wireless earbuds that you pretty much need if you don’t want to deal with a dongle? You know, those earbuds that have batteries inside them? Those same batteries that degrade over time, and once they fully degrade you now need another pair because they are sometimes permanently glued into place? Meanwhile you can get a pair of cheap ass IEMs2 for barely 25 dollars, which will last you for much longer, have a replaceable cable, and have very very decent sound, not to mention that they will last you for years, or at least longer compared to what the battery inside a wireless earbud would last.

Then came the SD card’s death, with those disappearing from most high end phones around 2021-2023. They never really gave an explanation on why they had to get rid of the SD card but I have an idea why it went away. The SD card was the most cheapest way to get as much storage on a phone as possible, and now it is gone. The solution now? Buy as much storage as you can up-front, and then get jumpscared at the massive price because phone companies know that you are gonna want storage, and therefore they price the next storage up with a much larger price tag. If you end up running out of storage, your options now are to move everything to a USB drive and then forget that exists in a couple months, deal with cloud storage or delete everything you don’t need, possibly losing files in the process, especially if you’re not careful.

And while you can still find headphone jacks and SD card slots on low-mid range devices, these devices often are essentially manufactured e-waste that barely gets a single Android update and gets barely three years of security updates. If we are supposedly trying to move to a more sustainable future, why the fuck do we keep making phones like this? When Oneplus got questioned by the tech press regarding the fact that the Nord N10 got a single Android update, they were like “oh yeah everyone does that (in this price range)!”, they could’ve probably broken the mold and give as many updates to that phone as it could handled. But Oneplus doesn’t give a shit. None of these companies do. If they made devices that actually lasted, then no one will buy next year’s shit phone. And as always, red line must go up, and therefore sales also must go up. The easiest way to make this happen? Artificially limit the amount of updates these phones can handle. LineageOS singlehandedly proves that this phone can run Android 14 so fucking well, but Oneplus decided not to update it.

I think the final nail in Android’s coffin will be the new developer verification that Google is trying to roll out. If it is as bad as many people been claiming, I think that will put a definite end to everything that Android used to stand for: user choice. And now we’ll end up with a worse iOS that is significantly worse. Because like, what stuff do I gain when I use a locked down version of Android? Most phone vendors barely offer 3 years of software updates, compared to the fucking 7 years that you can expect on the shittiest iPhone, not to mention the issues you can often get with Android. I put up with these issues because I value third party app installing and I love having the ability to flash ROMs whenever I god so fucking please. But remove all that, and what do we end up? A platform that spies on its users and sends gobs of data back to Google HQ? A platform that is inundated of awful phones that barely get 3 years with security updates, if that? A platform that will be forever locked to a app store inundated by AI slop, pay to win mobile games and apps for social media that fucking suck? Why the fuck would I deal with Android without third party app installing, if I could get a better experience with iOS at that point? The funny thing is that iOS is worse in regards with third party app installing, but at least you know that from the moment you purchase an iPhone. At least you’ll get a semi-decent experience on an iPhone, compared to the mess that we have over on Android.

I think the thing I am most worried about is the fact that this will make developers quit developing for Android (especially those who refuse to register themselves to Google or are opposed to the recent move), and in the coming years, I expect a large chunk of FOSS developers quitting, either moving to iOS or other open platforms like Linux. I am afraid of the day I can no longer find a good alternative for Google Photos, or the built-in file browser. I am worried for the day most of my FOSS apps simply stop existing because none of the devs decided to stay on the platform and jumped ship to another platform that treats them better.

I am so fucking tired man. I want to go back when Android modding was still a big deal. Where XDA isn’t the ghost town that it is now. Where a bigger chunk of phones had custom ROMs. When smartphones still had headphone jacks and people ripped Samsung a new one because they decided to remove the SD card slot on the Galaxy S6 for that one generation. But now we don’t have shit anymore, because of this greed and obsession of making line go up. And now things are getting worse. AI has been nothing but a massive burning money pit and to save face these big corporations are trying to shove AI in every single place possible. It is in your phone, social media apps have them, there is now a button where you can summon a lying robot and ask it anything to get a wrong answer. And it doesn’t stop there, AI is spying on you, watching everything you do on that phone or chat app or social media or [insert thing that shouldn't have AI here] with a hawk’s eye, slowly yet surely slorping up all that data to train and retrain that model until it fucking explodes. I am so fucking done with AI, and when the AI bubble pops, I will fucking celebrate. I fucking hope that AI in the future becomes such a taboo that no company, no matter who they are, would want to fucking touch it with a 20 meter pole. Fucking hell. 3

page updates:

  1. A font similar to Google’s typeface font, used on Pixel phones. It had another name but for the life of me, I couldn’t find it.↩︎

  2. even in this country where anything electronic costs twice the MSRP, these KZ IEMs are dirt cheap holy shit, and they sound better compared to most wireless earbuds!↩︎

  3. kinda sad because AI is useful for certain applications, like in the medical field or research, but like, the fact that we ended up here is fucking awful, oh well↩︎