Android Help Sunday Rant/Rage (Aug 01 2021) - Your weekly complaint thread! |
- Sunday Rant/Rage (Aug 01 2021) - Your weekly complaint thread!
- Ankur Sharma on Twitter : Today morning around 6AM IST, my wife went out for cycling with her new OnePlus Nord 2 (5days old) in her sling. All of a sudden phone blasted and smoke started coming out of it. Due to this blast, she met with an accident. She is in trauma after this incident ��
- Google is trying to limit what apps can use an Accessibility Service (again)
- Asus Zenfone 8 Review
- Have app updates gone too far in terms of size and frequency?
- Announcing Policy Updates To Bolster Privacy and Security
| Sunday Rant/Rage (Aug 01 2021) - Your weekly complaint thread! Posted: 01 Aug 2021 05:00 AM PDT Note 1. Join our IRC and Telegram chat-rooms This weekly Sunday thread is for you to let off some steam and speak out about whatever complaint you might have about:
Rules 1) Please do not target any individuals or try to name/shame any individual. If you hate Google/Samsung/HTC etc. for one thing that is fine, but do not be rude to an individual app developer. 2) If you have a suggestion to solve another user's issue, please leave a comment but be sure it's constructive! We do not want any flame-wars. 3) Be respectful of other's opinions. Even if you feel that somebody is "wrong" you don't have to go out of your way to prove them wrong. Disagree politely, and move on. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 01 Aug 2021 04:05 AM PDT
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| Google is trying to limit what apps can use an Accessibility Service (again) Posted: 01 Aug 2021 09:41 PM PDT
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| Posted: 01 Aug 2021 04:47 AM PDT Here is my rambling, middle-aged duffer review of my Zenfone 8. Rambling After my amazing Galaxy Note 8 blew me away and lasted 2.5 years, I went for the Galaxy Note 10 Plus next. My mistake. It was too unwieldy to use one-handed, and too heavy to read for more than 30 minutes before making my hands ache. This was my fault for going bigger. The wife has the regular Note 10 and it is much closer to the Note 8. Sadly it also lagged heavily about once a week requiring a reboot to stop. This was even with an automatic reboot once a week set for 4am Sunday morning. Factory resets did nothing to prevent this. The Note 8 never did this with the same apps installed. Then it did something unforgivable. I do not know if it's a bug or simply a very weak vibration motor, but I have never missed so many messages or calls before when out of the house. Ever. For the last 15 months I have regularly not noticed my phone vibrating. Recently I missed several important calls from my wife, who has a chronic illness and MUST be able to get in touch with me quickly and reliably. I was wearing skinny jeans. The phone was literally strapped to my thigh! I still didn't notice the calls or the messages. I have the vibration intensity set to max. All testing it vibrates just fine. But when it matters, nothing. Again several factory resets have done nothing to fix this. Also adding to this is the number of times I have taken it out of my pocket and it is unlocked and has done all sorts of things to settings and sent gibberish messages whilst rubbing against my leg. How on earth does this fingerprint reader think my pocket lining is my fingerprint? So scores a zero for security too. Bye-bye Note 10+ So I have decided to ditch the gimmicks and massive screens and look for something reliable that will fit in the hand. This seems to be the only phone out there aside from the Pixel phones. Hey I'm in danger of getting to the actual review here. Actual Review I got the 8GB RAM and 128GB storage option in black. I've had it for 3 weeks now. I love this thing. Yes at first the phone seems tiny compared to what I am used to, but after a couple of days it just became normal. I love how it fits in my hand. I love how much more reliable the fingerprint reader is, and it has never come out of my pocket unlocked. Face unlocking is fast and doesn't care if you have glasses on or off. I don't use this mode full time though, I just wanted to try it out. I love how I'm not worried about dropping it whilst using it one-handed, although I will say you need the included case on for grip as it's a slippery phone without it. It is not uncomfortable to hold for prolonged periods. I did an hours' reading last night with no issues. Normally I would be swapping hands every 5 minutes with the Note 10+. Vitally I have stopped missing calls. Even in my loose-fitting jeans I feel this thing ringing. I wouldn't say the vibration motor is any stronger than the Note 10+. It feels about the same so I guess the Note 10+ was just buggy. Messages too are easily detected. The notification light on the bottom is also way better than AOD icons for missed messages if it's on my desk when I step out of the office for a minute. It just catches your eye more easily than a dim, static icon on a screen. The WiFI, Bluetooth and 4G/5G reception are also superior to the Note 10+. For example my Jabra 75T Active wireless earbuds (where only the right bud connects to the phone) used to cut out if I turned my head to the right with my phone in my left trouser pocket. Now they don't. I can wander to the opposite side of the house from my phone before they cut out now. My Note 10+ used to barely hang on to the 5GHz WiFi in my office. The Zenfone 8 shows only one notch off max strength. So its primary function as a communications device is a success. Battery Life Give this phone a week to settle down after first getting it. It takes a bit of time to get used to your usage patterns and limit the stuff you don't need. If it has one, this is the phone's Achilles Heel compared to a 'Phablet' so I'm going more in-depth for this bit. Some usage disclaimers and settings: I do not do any gaming. I have found that the battery is perfectly OK at getting me through the day. I get an average 6 hours SOT which is good but not amazing. I could get 9 hours from Note 10+, but 6 hours is still not letting me down. It's nice knowing I can chuck this thing on charge before going to bed and I'll not ditch the battery leaving it on 100% overnight. I spent a couple of days recently with the System Mode set to Advanced and I've decided to keep it here. Here you can customise all the battery saving settings to a greater degree. I have the CPU, GPU, RAM and thermal limit set to the lowest setting. Not only did I not notice any difference in performance, I still got push messages through promptly and on day 5 of having this phone all set up, with these settings I got from 100% at 7am (topped it up from 90% to test) through to 14% at 7pm, with 6 hours 51 minutes SOT after a busy day of Signal, Teams, Reddit, YouTube and some browsing. I just spent a day out with friends camping in the countryside. I arrived with the phone at 95% at 10:30am and immediately put the phone into Ultra Durable mode, with all background data off when screen off. It made it through the full 24 hours with lots of photos, a couple of 5 minute videos 1080p@60, some photo-messaging to the friends that couldn't make the trip, and 7 hours 50 minutes of streaming Amazon Music (837MB worth) to a bluetooth speaker. Very impressed, albeit our campsite had a strong 4G signal which would have helped. I would honestly leave it on Ultra Durable all the time were it not for the fact that even if you untick the option to restrict background data for push messages, they still don't seem to come through reliably. When I had a busy weekend and was not glued to my phone, and was only checking messages and had a little bit of YouTube, I got 1 day and 18 hours out of it with 5 hours 30 mins SOT. Very pleased with it. Screen I love the high refresh-rate display. Honestly the only time I notice it is whizzing about like I would not normally do, but it's still a nice feeling. The auto-brightness seems to set levels very high when indoors, but I am turning it down and it remains to be seen if it is going to learn or if I need to switch to manual. It doesn't go as bright as the Note 10+ but outdoors in strong sunlight it is still fully usable. 1080 is absolutely pin-sharp on this size screen. No need for more. Camera Camera is also perfectly adequate. It opens fast and focuses fast for those unplanned spontaneous photo moments. What I love is that it takes the photo when you press the shutter, whether auto-focus is ready or not. You are in charge. So many times on past phones I've tried to take a quick shot and I've missed the moment because auto-focus decided to have another flex before taking the actual photo. That's all I really ask. I do not print photos off. They are just memories sat on my NAS drive for occasional viewing. I have noticed that sometimes the auto-focus gets confused about what it should be focusing on. This is more for close-up stuff than your typical scenery picture. A long-press does lock the focus and exposure though once you have it right. Switching to wide-angle for close-up shots also gets better auto-focus performance. You have the option to set the camera to use the full 64MP sensor for a 4:3 shot. The detail is insane but the photo is about 40MB so I will likely not use this much. The weak spot is how it handles skin tones in less-than-ideal light. Faces seem quite noisy when you zoom into them compared to the rest of the picture. A quick 5% smooth in Photoshop app fixes it though. Video is excellent, way better than the Note 10+ which would completely de-saturate the shot if you pointed it at anything green. UI Loving the near-stock Android UI. I like that you can also tweak the notification bar icons. I never show NFC, Alarm, VoLTE, etc. The smaller display and hole-punch camera limit notification real-estate so I was very relieved I could turn off these icons. Note that if you want to turn off the battery icon yet keep the percentage, that is hidden away somewhere else. Settings > Battery > Visual Settings > Battery Display Styles. You can change the colour of the UI elements in quick settings, but only between 8 muted pastel colours. I guess this is to stop you choosing something with poor contrast, but I would still have preferred a colour wheel and be allowed to make my own mistakes. I could then match it to the app icon colour, which you can't change at all! They seem stuck on Royal Blue. Great as long as you like blue wallpapers, or simply don't care what colour coordination your phone has. But if you are not going to have themes for your UI, and then let you change certain elements, it seems odd that icon badge colour is overlooked. You can change the icon shape after all. Negatives Nothing major so far. When trying to move music back onto my phone via USB (my NAS drive is out of service), it was super slow. USB2.0 speeds slow. That said, it's done now and future transfers will be done over WiFi once my NAS drive is replaced. The Asus File Manager app has the facility to browse network storage so that's another third-party app I don't need any more. There are some minor bugs I think. For example you can set the battery care to charge the phone on a timed schedule. I set it to charge between 3am and 7am. Even with it set to slow charge to prevent battery heating, that is still plenty of time to get from 15% to 90%. Yet whenever I set this and plug the phone in before bed, it starts charging immediately. I might be missing something here though. Can anyone help shed light? If I watch a YouTube video, pause it, lock the phone and put it in my pocket, the video can resume playing somehow. I have tried pocket mode turned on. It still does it. I think the 'Pick up to wake' gesture that I like to have turned on is misinterpreting pocket-jiggle for a pick-up gesture and waking the screen up, and the lock-screen play button is then activated. Edit: Since writing the last bit I have caught it un-pausing when on a stand in my kitchen. So not pocket-related. I pause the video, walk away from the phone, and a few seconds later it un-pauses. Very weird. I do like the gesture controls in lieu of traditional navigation buttons with the exception of 'Recent Apps'. At first I couldn't even find how you do this on Zenfone 8 as the tutorial didn't seem to mention it. I found it accidentally. Swipe up from the bottom then dog-leg left or right before the up-gesture drops you back to Home Page. It's a bit clunky and tough to do quickly without an unwanted trip to a home screen. The recent apps tiles then only show one card per page, so scrolling is required to switch to another app. Samsung lets you adjust this view to fit more apps at a glance. Things I miss Can't mark Asus down for these as I knew full well this was not going to have all the bells-and-whistles of a Samsung flagship device at twice the cost. Secure Folder. I liked the idea of a separate, ring-fenced and encrypted section of my phone where I could keep my financial apps and password safe. Asus does have an 'App Locker' feature, but it's not the same level of security. I do miss the S Pen. It is no fault of Asus that Samsung has such a rock-solid patent on that. I am also not willing to risk not noticing calls to have it back. I guess it would also mandate a huge phone to fit it in! Bixby Routines. I will have to retrain myself on Tasker to get some of this back I guess. Things I don't miss Lag That's it really. Considering this cost half what the Note 10+ did, it gets within 90% of what I personally used the Note 10+ for. Plus I answer calls now! I'll do a follow-up in a fews months if people are interested. Any questions please ask and I'll do my best to answer. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Have app updates gone too far in terms of size and frequency? Posted: 01 Aug 2021 10:31 AM PDT I've been using Android phones from 2010. And since then app updates have obviously gone bigger in size, which is understandable since phones have more memory and apps are more complex. But the current state in my opinion is too much. I have about 60 apps installed and there's not a single day without my phone offering me some kind of update. The absolute worst are popular apps like FB, Messenger, Revolut. They have a 60-100mb update every other day, which is ridiculous. What are your thoughts? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Announcing Policy Updates To Bolster Privacy and Security Posted: 31 Jul 2021 11:53 PM PDT |
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