I don’t like it because:

• I want to look at the oil and smell it, not just check the level.
• I don’t know the failure modes for the sensor, so I can’t trust that the absence of a complaint from it means the oil level is correct.

That seems likely to work.

# ls -l /dev/video0
crw-rw---- 1 system camera 81,   0 1974-07-26 10:09 /dev/video0

Android doesn’t handle users and groups like standard Linux, but the user account assigned to Termux is not a member of the camera group.

Epic was planning to distribute it in its own store in the EU.

flashlight man.

I’ll take it.

It appears phones as old as the Android 8 era can support this and phones that shipped with Android 13 or newer always do. I had the impression it had been universal a little longer.

No, Google is also trying to stop hobbyists running custom builds from accessing services built on their software (the aforementioned SafetyNet). Hackers keep finding ways around this, but Google keeps trying to lock them out.

That’s a side effect. If Google really wanted to interfere with hobbyists, they would mandate hardware-based attestation and all the current workarounds would be broken. It would be much harder to create workarounds for that.

The DMA should never have allowed Apple any oversight of apps distributed outside their store.

If manufacturers had their way, there wouldn’t be any phones for one side.

There’s nothing stopping manufacturers from permanently locking the bootloader. Some do and others don’t suggesting that the industry does not have a universal preference.

I do think Google wants it to be inconvenient enough to run a version of Android they haven’t blessed as one’s main phone that it has no chance to become mainstream, but that’s about the prospect of an OEM not bundling Google’s apps and store, not hobbyists running custom builds. If that sounds like an attempt to use market power to exclude competitors in violation of fair trading laws in a multitude of jurisdictions, you might be on to something.

Your point seems to be that the fine is about two days profit.

If you did something illegal and got fined two days pay for it, that would probably get your attention. You might think twice before doing the thing again. If not, the EU can fine them a larger amount next time.

The EU just fined Apple half a billion Euros and has imposed larger fines in the past.

“Butthurt” implies personal offense. This is about maximizing profit, nothing else.

It is, and it looks like the bad press got to Google and it will soon be fixed on Play Store.

I’d generally recommend getting things from F-Droid where possible anyway, but that could be a tech support headache for a larger institution using Nextcloud and requiring people to install the client.

They probably will once it’s not in early alpha as the readme says it is.

If you’re hosting it yourself, ActivityPub is a separate component. If someone else is hosting it for you, they will have to add support.

Google could theoretically build a Google Messages counterpart to iMessage and skip the Carrier as the middleman, but then it wouldn’t be interoperable with iPhones since it wouldn’t be an “open standard”

Google did that, in 2013. Hangouts was briefly the default SMS client on Android, and it would upgrade conversations from SMS to its protocol when available. It was available for iPhone, but couldn’t be an SMS client there.

Rumor has it, carriers whined about it, and Google caved out of fear they would promote Windows Phone devices instead. I think that was a foolish move on Google’s part, but I think I’m glad Google doesn’t own a dominant messaging platform.

They bullied Syncthing the same way. Fortunately, Syncthing-fork is still developed and available on F-droid.

I understand a well-curated app store (which Play Store is not) placing some limits on apps getting all files access. In a modern security model, that’s not a permission most apps should have, however synchronization and file management apps obviously should have it.

If you’re willing to endure a lot of inconvenience to maybe move the needle a tiny bit, I admire you. It also differs from place to place; if no restaurants exclusively put their menus on Instagram where you live, and most people do use SMS, then it wouldn’t be as painful for you as for the author.

every cafe that only distributes its menu solely via Instagram will not be visited by me

There’s a good chance I’d walk out over that too. I’ve never encountered it in the USA or Germany, but the author made it sound common in Australia.

you can write an SMS or call me

The author specifically mentioned people telling her “Oh I don’t text, do you have Insta or WhatsApp?” This is also true in Europe; WhatsApp is essentially universal, and some people have to pay per SMS sent. Some people also have another messaging app (Signal is reasonably common among my social group), but that won’t cover everyone, and group chats with more than three or four participants just aren’t going to happen.

If you are not willing to do that much, you do not really understand what meta is doing.

The average person does not really understand what Meta is doing. I do, and I think the author does, but neither of us is in a position to change the behavior of a majority of people in our regions.

The author goes into detail about the problems she experienced as a result of not having access to Meta products. She seems to recognize that it’s bad that there’s no way to read a cafe menu without an Instagram account or that the only messaging services some of her contacts use belong to Meta.

These are not problems the author can fix. She would be negatively impacted in the real world by not having access to Meta products.

This doesn’t seem to be the mainstream press, but a small tech blog. Mainstream American news outlets have been far more straightforward in their coverage of this case.

Furthermore, this case was a fight between two large corporations; there’s no little guy here. Smaller developers may benefit from the outcome though.