One month in to android as a windows phone convert

[neo158]

Or no Facebook at all if you care about your privacy.

The funniest thing is that you think anyone has privacy these days, no one does and the only people who genuinely care about it are those who have something to hide anyway.

 

[mtf1380]

the only people who genuinely care about it are those who have something to hide anyway.

neo158, I will have to respectfully disagree with this assessment... even if those that are gathering the information have the best of intentions, there are those who will use that same information to try a scam the unexpected (mostly the elderly, but as scams get more sophisticated, everyone).

 

[fatclue_98]

The funniest thing is that you think anyone has privacy these days, no one does and the only people who genuinely care about it are those who have something to hide anyway.

I'm afraid it's not so cut and dried. Think about how many people, with nothing to hide, have lost their jobs because their views don't align with ownership's.

 

[RumoredNow]

The funniest thing is that you think anyone has privacy these days, no one does and the only people who genuinely care about it are those who have something to hide anyway.

I've nothing to hide, but like maximizing my privacy. The huge amounts of money being made off data mining means encroachment is getting more and more aggressive and frequent.

It feels like vultures are circling overhead, whilst packs of jackals pace nearby waiting for the scraps left by the lions and tigers and bears...

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

It's out of control. Why for the sake of all that is holy should companies salivate over the chance to know what you grandmother's email address is or how many texts she sent you last year? But they want this and more.


Best case scenario: they use it for advertising and micro-targeted advertising. Well guess what? I DON'T WANT TO BE AN ADVERTISING SPONGE. And yes, I am screaming about it. They rub my last nerve raw every day with this stuff. Enough has become too much quite rapidly and people are just accepting of it. Grates my cheese. I am absolutely peeved about the amount of adverts shoved at the populace every second of every day.

And when I research for a purchase, I want to make up my own mind on the merits not buy whatever product paid the most to get front and center.

Companies act as if they have a God Given Right to shove advertising in your face. I consider that a breach of my privacy and everything that encourages that is egregious to me.

Have a quick look:
https://www.statista.com/topics/979/advertising-in-the-us/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greats...g-ad-revenue-growth-to-continue/#4b32ccd16fe7


But wait, there's more...

Capitulate today and megacorp will use your metrics as part of their social engineering. That's right! The huge rivers of liquidity we've created from selling chances for the ad snipers to take pot shots at you will go to push our agenda and help us bully you into thinking the way we believe you should. We'll build out huge platforms and rig the systems so "right think" will rise to the top and "wrong think" will get squashed and punished. We are not governments, but we still believe we have the right and duty to control the populace and herd them toward a future we envision. Whether that future is good or ill. The marketplace of ideas needs to be under our control for your own good. What's "right think" and "wrong think" anyway? It is what we and those who think like us decide it is at any given moment, of course. And how dare you want to believe otherwise than we?


So, yeah, I do have have something to hide after all. My chance at sanity in a world gone mad where people seem to want advertisement overload and to allow some technocrats to decide the course of society based on how much money they throw at an issue and how wide of an audience they can capture.

 

[fatclue_98]

So, yeah, I do have have something to hide after all.

We all do. Some have skeletons in their closets, others have graveyards. But my crypts are NOT for sale to the highest bidder.

 

[nate0]

Now personal data is one thing. We all have personal data all over the internet. If you have an email account and use that to sign into a phone/mobile device...well you just gave consent for that proprietarily governed device to access your personal info. What burns me is how legally companies seem to have wormed their way into distributing not just your personal data but sensitive data. In IT we define data like this no matter how you look at it as NPI - non public information or PII. One cannot and will not allow data like this to become public. It is part of security policies in place. Some how, these companies (and we won't name specifically because in a way they all do) legally through opt-ins, consent pop ups, etc...have found ways to smoothly inject their own policy so that they could get access to and use PII. They should be ashamed in my opinion. Google for instance, at one point was the only company that defined their consent to using your data to include the phrase sensitive data. I am not sure how the terms are written nowadays, but that is just flat out scary. Yes we all agree to share most of our personal data just by singing into the dang device...but sensitive data too? Cmon! I get a flat out 5-10 spam callers a day because of this bull. Feel like moving my family to the Bermuda triangle for a decade until the dust clears..lol

 

[fatclue_98]

Feel like moving my family to the Bermuda triangle for a decade until the dust clears..lol

Or just stay on Windows Mobile, nobody will notice if you're here or not. Sorry, I couldn't resist. I love low-hanging fruit.

 

[jeffchapik]

I'm going to give Android another try. I needed an app that wasn't available on W10M, so I dug out my old Galaxy J3. I started playing around with it, and installed Launcher 10 again to see if it had changed. Here's the result:



My Lumia 650 start screen

Launcher 10

Launcher 10 seems to have more "live tiles" now than I remember. If I could just find a radar app with a widget that fits a 2x2 tile, I'd be golden.



The thing that gave me fits last time I tried this was getting all my contact photos synched up. I used something called sync.me, but you had to force a sync, manually link duplicates, and then disable synching or it would screw it all up again. This time, once I installed Outlook, my contacts all showed up automatically with their pics intact.



Previously I also couldn't find a music player that could access my music library on OneDrive and I didn't want to have to export it all over to something else. But Groove is now available on Android and just as soon as I signed into OneDrive, it started synching my library.



Cortana seems to be a little more functional now too, and she's supposedly able to read incoming SMS over Bluetooth now, with the ability to send texts coming in a few weeks.



It's almost as fluid as my 650, and this is only a $70 android go-phone. So I bought a Moto G5 Plus on Amazon that should be here Monday and we'll see how that runs. Plus it has a better camera than either my 650 or the Samsung, which completely sucks.

 

[sporosarcina]

Finally had to make the leap. My 950 had a fatal encounter with a tile floor and I couldn't justify the cost to replace. I picked up an Xperia XA2 on sale, and it is decent, but man I miss my 950. One thing I like is the cheaper SD630 devices that never materialized in Windows.

 

[sporosarcina]

I will give it that my Garmin is much more stable, and the integration with W10 desktop is very good, but damn I miss tiles and my phone reading messages in the car (I am in the Beta for Cortana on Android, not the Alpha that supposedly does this).

 

[jeffchapik]

I will give it that my Garmin is much more stable, and the integration with W10 desktop is very good, but damn I miss tiles and my phone reading messages in the car (I am in the Beta for Cortana on Android, not the Alpha that supposedly does this).

I found an app named HFT that reads incoming texts and allows you to reply to them hands free. It also breaks in over FM radio like Cortana and doesn't require your phone to be selected as the current audio source.

It doesn't allow you to initiate a text hands free, but most of mine are incoming anyway.

I've just installed Android Auto which will also allow me to respond to an incoming text over BT, but I don't know yet if it will break in over FM. I'm getting ready to try it shortly.

Update - Android Auto does not break in. You must be listening to the phone over BT to hear the announcement. This is such a basic thing, and HFT proves it can be done. I can't understand why Android doesn't do it. Maybe Microsoft has a patent on it.

 

[sporosarcina]

What gets me is that the hands-free text reading/response is such a no-brainer that I cannot imagine why Android and Apple haven't baked them in yet. MS had this feature down cold and I never realized how much I missed it till I didn't have it. In general I think MS was light-years ahead in voice assistant usage, when used with a headset I could do pretty much anything on my 950 handsfree, Android definitely does not have that feel.

Notifications are another area I think Android fails. The fine grain control is missing.

 

[fatclue_98]

What gets me is that the hands-free text reading/response is such a no-brainer that I cannot imagine why Android and Apple haven't baked them in yet. MS had this feature down cold and I never realized how much I missed it till I didn't have it. In general I think MS was light-years ahead in voice assistant usage, when used with a headset I could do pretty much anything on my 950 handsfree, Android definitely does not have that feel.

Notifications are another area I think Android fails. The fine grain control is missing.

Agreed, Cortana is much more efficient as a voice assistant. BlackBerry 10's virtual assistant was quite good for hands-free commands but it didn't read texts. But you could easily compose and send an email, text or make a phone call without once looking at your phone.

 

[Amirk365]

I'm very confused by the app crashes that people are talking about in here. I have used a Galaxy S5 and now an Honor 6X and have yet to face an app crashing on me. Only the S3 mini, my first phone, crashed on me.

 

[fatclue_98]

I'm very confused by the app crashes that people are talking about in here. I have used a Galaxy S5 and now an Honor 6X and have yet to face an app crashing on me. Only the S3 mini, my first phone, crashed on me.

You’ve lived a charmed life indeed. I have a Galaxy S8+ and I get app crashes. I’m not talking about 3rd party apps either, it happens with core Google apps like Messaging, Play Store and others. Sure, it’s not like in the days of FroYo or Gingerbread but it does happen.

 

[Amirk365]

Exceedingly strange. I use a mid-range phone and it doesn't crash.

 

[anon(50597)]

You’ve lived a charmed life indeed. I have a Galaxy S8+ and I get app crashes. I’m not talking about 3rd party apps either, it happens with core Google apps like Messaging, Play Store and others. Sure, it’s not like in the days of FroYo or Gingerbread but it does happen.

I haven’t used Android for a couple of years now but I don’t remember it being an issue.
Sure, every OS has occasional hiccups, but it wasn’t a frequent thing.

 

[fatclue_98]

I haven’t used Android for a couple of years now but I don’t remember it being an issue.
Sure, every OS has occasional hiccups, but it wasn’t a frequent thing.

I think the furor over updating every few months has affected all OSes. Call it boring or whatever you want but iOS was always rock solid. Now you’re seeing random freezes and battery issues sporadically. Android was always a victim of bogging down after a few months but you’re seeing the same random issues as iOS even on brand new phones. Windows of course is not immune to this except it’s magnified by a factor of 100.

 

[anon(50597)]

I think the furor over updating every few months has affected all OSes. Call it boring or whatever you want but iOS was always rock solid. Now you’re seeing random freezes and battery issues sporadically. Android was always a victim of bogging down after a few months but you’re seeing the same random issues as iOS even on brand new phones. Windows of course is not immune to this except it’s magnified by a factor of 100.

You could be right. I don’t see rebooting apps or anything with iOS but they’ve had other issues. Other than security updates you wonder if all the “pretty” updates are really worth it or do more harm than good.

 

[nate0]

I think the furor over updating every few months has affected all OSes. Call it boring or whatever you want but iOS was always rock solid. Now you’re seeing random freezes and battery issues sporadically. Android was always a victim of bogging down after a few months but you’re seeing the same random issues as iOS even on brand new phones. Windows of course is not immune to this except it’s magnified by a factor of 100.

I blame Solar flares and emp..