This isn’t new. Just search for Glance. US/EU users may not have heard of this but entry level smartphones in India have long come bundled with this piece of spam, irrespective of OEM. From Chinese manufacturers to even Samsung/Motorola was guilty of bundling this.

Last I heard of Glance, they had embraced AI (because why not?). Either case, it was nothing more than an ad infested bloatware and whilst possible to toggle on/off (default state was on), removing it was usually tougher (if at all possible via adb, I am not sure of this part).

Glance walked so Nothing could run :p

Feel free to DM.

I wasn’t expecting tommydan from YouTube to be mentioned here :p. Best of all he does, what companies themselves couldn’t do, maintain the original aspect ratio. I remember that Shemaroo restored certain old Hindi films but the original aspect ratio for them was 4:3 whilst the restored ran into 16:9.

In fact, I have been seeing the odd old Hindi film from an unexpected source. The Russian site Ok. I am still not sure if it is a social media site or not since the English UI is not there for me but for all Intents and purposes, it is used to upload videos only. Some guy ended up uploading whole filmography of Rajesh Khanna on the site (much of it mirrored later to Archive.org). Whilst the irony remains that there is probably not a single legal hub to see the lesser known films.

Heck, I was hunting an out of print (like literally unavailable to stream or purchase anywhere short of anyone having the original CD/DVD) 1996 film and the only way was to pirate it (from a single source).

In some cases, piracy becomes an act of media preservation ( cues back to when BBC wiped some Doctor Who episodes in the late sixties and only way few were gotten back was because some folks had gotten audio transcribed or something at home).

From Kinks to Camel to obscure Krautrock stuff like Dissidenten, Out of Focus, Embryo. Ironically I have < 50 Hindi songs in my collection because the era I like the most [50s - 60s], good quality stuff is hard to come by. Like the files even on Soulseek or torrents are so incredibly compressed that it is a pity. The vocals sound so tinny that one wonders that how did the original masters sounded like.

I didn’t knew foobar2000 was available for mobile as well. I only knew it because it was so popular as a lightweight modular player for Windows. I used to be on Strawberry, a Clementine fork on Linux before moving to Deadbeef, which is like Foobar2000 but misses few features.

It is law of diminishing marginal utility. There would be more sonic distinguishness between a 64 kbps and a 128 kbps file, than say when making the same upgrade to 256 kbps. It becomes less and less obvious as one approaches 44.1 kHz/16 bit flac (beyond which it is useless to hoard unless one is mastering the albums themselves).

I have a DAC paired with Sennheiser IE 600 which is not audiophile level, but ought to be decent enough.

Either case, my point was not about audio quality and whether or not a person can distinguish a flac from say, 320 kbps mp3. Countless threads are made on that and viewpoints presented. My argument was that YouTube Music does not present first, to stream music in high quality and second, even if the quality was indistinguishable, there is no way to manage a library since most of the desktop third party clients remain without login.

Once can stream audio from YouTube via terminal on Linux but problem is all of that is limited to 128 kbps AAC. There is no way to stream proper 256 kbps AAC that YouTube Music Premium provides. One can download such streams via yt-dlp (it needs to be given authorization cookies) but there is currently no way to stream high quality audio from YouTube without using the webpage.

Could you tell me an alternative that allows for third party clients? On Spotify, I can configure a terminal client even on Linux and stream music with very low overhead [contrast with YTMusic with required a permanent browser tab opened]. Yes, local media streaming can do that but there is only so much space at one time on my HDD.

I heard of it. It is shipping in two variants, right? I just hope it makes general availability worldwide and not just a handful of countries (looks at Fairphone).

Pocketcasts really is trying folks towards it’s subscription driven model though I have no qualms with the UI. AntennePod relies on gPodder service to sync but that is slow and clunky sometimes.

There is Podcast Republic as well I think, which is still a one time purchase.

I didn’t even try using YTM as a podcast client. Streaming music players doubling as podcast players always have a hindrance (but at Atleast Amazon Music has some ad free content from Wondery in some regions in case one is a Prime subscriber).

AntennePod is a good FOSS alternative whilst Pocketcasts is a decent cross platform one (but the latter basically is subscription based if one wants desktop and watch playback which is a downer).

Podcasts was good. Lightweight, cross platform and basic. YTM is a sink hole as a podcast alternative.

Apple Podcasts lives on as a far superior alternative whilst Google has left it’s users in the lurch. In an alternate world, Google would still be developing Podcasts not only on mobile but also on Wear OS

I moved to weechat. It is terminal only. I had setup some keybindings either ways on hexchat to navigate faster via keyboard between channels / servers and weechat can replicate them (albeit it takes a little time to read documentation in this case). Many folks also are hard on users of irssi but weechat met my simplistic needs.

Not to mention almost any distro will have a packaged version of weechat in its repos.

I don’t understand why Mozilla is so smitten with this extension. They already removed it from AMO, why are policing it now. A tiny minority of folks use Firefox(as a percentage of market share) worldwide and only some part of it use this extension. Why go after it so hard?

They are policing it today, tomorrow they may say uBlock Origin violates our policies as well. Sure, technically one might be able to install via changing about:config toggle but that’s a bridge too far for most users.

It might seem I am making a huge mental jump for equating a paywall bypass extension to an adblocker extension, but in the eyes of corporations, both kind of users are equally loathed by them.

I have been using Nova for nearly a decade now. I think it was the first app I paid for. I tried ahem, different launchers but each had something or the other missing. Nova seems so feature complete to me. I will go looking out for something new when it breaks.

Currently on Android 15 on my phone, it works for the time being…

If you have a YTM subscription, it does not make sense to play in Outer tune. Any YTM Streaming client streams in 128 kbps whilst YTM Premium streams at 256 kbps when set at High.

One can download songs at 256 kbps though if they have YTM Premium via yt-dlp using setcookiesoption. This is useful if someone has large custom playlists where searching via Soulseek is a chore.

Sony has even lost the plot in their ~ country even. (Japan right?) Many folks don’t even know Sony still makes phones. It is not helped by the low number of Xperia models released and the exorbitant price tag. Sony is good at the camera and wireless earbuds segment but not in the phone arena.

Honestly it has been quite some time since I have seen anyone sporting a Xperia. They used to be somewhat common in my country but have almost disappeared now.

Edit: I just checked and Sony has officially stopped selling Xperia models in India (Atleast can’t be purchased directly from site). It is like they have stopped trying in many markets.

Yes, Sony is one of the last holdouts to make a flagship that still has both. They used to be really bad at software updates but have somewhat upped their ante on that. The price is still somewhat expensive and charging significantly slow (peak of 27 W is ironically slower than my budget Android phone).

3.5mm jack and SD card slot make a significant difference. I have a cheap phone but have a 256 gigs latter slotted in inside to give some storage. And former is even more important because there are lots of times when I am just listening to say, music or podcast in a still situation where true wireless buds don’t make sense. Why waste battery of expensive wireless buds when one can put decent IEMs in?

They don’t care a hoot about security. One look at Play Store which is filled with at best, low quality ad infested knockoffs to outright malware.

In fact, I would argue that Play Store is worse because they actively try to influence user’s intent by showing sponsored apps first.

In my country, Google has actively promoted apps of companies that were basically educational pyramid schemes and later fell. Even now, sponsored listings in Play Store for stuff like Learn Ethical Hacking filled with same fake reviews is promoted at top and Google has no problem with that.

Fairphone does make wireless earbuds with replaceable batteries. That being said, does the Fairphone 6 not come with a 3.5mm jack? Sony still ships it’s Xperia series with both the jack and microsD slot, so that is certainly possible.