💾 Archived View for tilde.cafe › ~stack › gemlog › 2022-08-25.android.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 13:05:32. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Coding has been a true source of joy in my life for 40+ years. I cut my teeth toggling 1802 machine code without an assembler, then wrote assembly code on Atari and Apple 6502 machines. Using cassette tape to keep data and code was extremely painful, and I am happy the world has moved on. But it was nothing compared to the nightmare of using Android, today.
What's wrong with Android, you ask? Google, obviously. You'd think that, with hundreds of billions of dollars to play with, they would soar above, say, an amateur effort like Linux. But no, instead they took linux and made it largely unusable, except in some, very specific use cases.
Don't be fooled -- you are not Google's customer. Google is paid by hardware manufacturers and advertisers, and those who buy consumer data. You, the consumer, are the ticket to the game. Google (and other companies) will do the minimum necessary to keep the illusion of serving you while maximizing profits from their real customers. A busy app store provides such an illusion.
An 'app', consequently, is a piece of spyware, combined with an advertising display, with a small amount of useful functionality, locked down to be incompatible and unusable by other 'apps', of course (lock-in). Apps are there to extract money from you, while providing Google with valuable telemetry. The functionality is usually shamefully executed. Gordon Ramsay would say "Disgusting. Have you lost your passion?"
These are cranked out by uninspired billionaire wannabees, who care more about ad integration and in-app purchases than actually performing a useful task. Collecting personal information is likely more lucrative than selling the app, and selling apps at the Google store for a buck with Google taking most of it is probably not a viable business model in the first place.
Let's say you want to listen to an audiobook. If you have Audible, it's easy - click, pay, bam. But let's say you want to listen to a free book from LibriVox. For those who don't know about LibriVox, it is an open and free audiobook catalog where anyone can record themselves reading their favorite out-of-copyright book or short story. No money changes hands -- it is a labor of love.
First you spend an inordinate amount of time looking for an audiobook player that is not full of spyware. The Google app store is an awfulness you simply have to avoid, so you manage to install F-Droid, a free store for open-source apps, which has hundreds of apps. Some are questionable but much less likely to spy on you than apps from the evil store.
You manage to find an app called 'Voice'. It is really minimal, but plays audio files and has a sleep timer (with a fade-out, as abruptly stopping audio will wake you up, you find), a feature that for some reason many such would-be audiobook players seem to not have.
Seems like you are almost there, right? The player is not connected to any bookstore, so you have to download it yourself. How hard can it be?
Now for the book. You go to LibriVox.com website with your Firefox Nightly, the closest think you can find to a browser that does not spy on you too much (well, it does, but at least it's not made by Google). You find the book and hit the convenient 'download' button. Ok, a 150MB zip file is downloading, done.
Now what? Where did it go? And can the player play a zip file?
So the file wound up in the download directory. Shit, how do you move it to your 'audiobooks' directory? A while ago you had to deal with moving a file, and all you remember is that you were so enraged that you swore you'd never do it again.
On the desktop Firefox, you can just right-click and download to a different directory. Maybe holding down the download link will give you a menu? Yes it does. But it has no download-to option. Crap.
On the desktop Firefox, you can go into settings and tell the browser to ask which directory to download into, or set the default. Surely the Android version has a similar feature, right?
No.
Reluctantly, you load Chrome, the flagship spybrowser of evilco. And it has a setting to 'always ask' for the download directory. Great! At least moneyed up evil does something right. But it does not ask, and you wind up with another 150MB zip file in your 'downloads' directory.
OK, back to file management. You are a seasoned professional, you can move one lousy file, right?
First task: find a file manager. The built-in 'Device storage' one is complete bullshit, so you go back to F-Droid. You try one that seems to not work at all, because your phone is like 3 years old. You try another one, which seems to work, called File Explorer.
You navigate to the Download directory. You only have one pane filled with large icons, for some reason. You have to checkmark the file(s) you want to operate on, and select 'move'. OK, not too hard. You choose the destination folder. And the app crashes.
OK, let's try again. Crash. I guess this will not work.
So, reluctantly you go to the Google app store. You just choose the google app, called Files, because the last thing you want is for some Chinese hacker to be in your phone -- google is evil, but they already have a way of getting everything about you. So Files it is. You move the file over to AudioBooks folder without too much (although, some) frustration.
You start up the 'Voice' app, and spend more minutes than you should trying to get it to reload the directory to recognize the book you just put there. No luck.
Oh, wait, it does not recognize the book because it's a 'zip' file. Shit.
Ok, can your non-google File Explorer unzip a file? Nope. Back to google Files, and yes, unzipped.
Voice now sees the files. Later on you discover that you could just download a single m4b file, whatever that is, and Voice will play it. Avoids unzipping, anyway. But now instead of the name of the short story in a collection you just get 'Chapter 12'. Screw it, you can live with it.
Your partner is looking at you funny, because you said you were just going to get an audiobook, and three hours have gone by, and you are very agitated, muttering obsenities, and it's really unpleasant to be anywhere near you when you get like that.
She says "Why don't you just get HyperDrive connected to your library app and borrow the book from the public library? Or just buy it from Audible -- it's not like we are broke?"
You say, not quite convincingly, "but HyperDrive and that other app are not open-source!"
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P.S. IOS, apparently, is even worse about not allowing you to see and manipulate files. Well, that prick Jobs (may he rot in Hell) was known for saying that "it's not the customer's job to know what they want", so no great surprise there. Also why I would never own Apple hardware.