this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
1072 points (98.3% liked)

Technology

60052 readers
3344 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Google says it can’t fix Pixel Watches, please just buy a new one | With no official repair program and no parts, broken Pixel Watches are just e-waste.::With no official repair program and no parts, broken Pixel Watches are just e-waste.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Google support for literally anything is non existent. Same could be said about Meta.

I am slowly shifting away from Google. Gmail and Google Photos is going to be the hardest. :/

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For those thinking of moving away from Gmail... I strongly recommend buying your own domain name so you actually own your address and can switch e-mail services whenever you want without needing a new e-mail address. Hell, I'd recommend this even if you're planning on staying with Gmail for a while.

Honestly, aside from having to point people at your new e-mail address... Gmail is not particularly hard to move away from, especially if you already use an external mail client. I don't really miss it, anyway. The only pain point I experience is that if somebody sends you a Google Doc / Sheet you need a Google account to edit it, but that's not a huge concern for me personally.

I'm self hosting my personal e-mail right now, and it's pretty great if you know how to do that stuff. Super cheap to host, and I can have as many aliases and send as many e-mails as I want. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's very doable if you already host your own stuff. Otherwise there's a bunch of e-mail services like Proton (kind of expensive, and a little annoying in that it's not just IMAP), Tutanota (dunno much about it), Fastmail, etc... But it's also worth mentioning that if you have a domain / VPS already your VPS provider and your registrar may both provide e-mail services that you can use... And if you just want to get out of Google and you have an iCloud+ account already (which is very possible if you have an iPhone and wanted more iCloud storage, but otherwise it's $0.99/mo) you can also use iCloud+ for e-mail with a custom domain.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do you deal with your custom domain emails being flagged as spam? I did all the requirements (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and there still are some (e.g. old-fart gov or finantial institutions) that need a gmail address to communicate with.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Often times when people complain about this there is some misconfiguration somewhere, which is admittedly hard to notice a lot of the time. One big gotcha with DKIM, for instance, is that TXT records have a limited size in DNS, so if you have a large key you likely cannot fit it within a single TXT record (an RSA 2048 key is too big, unfortunately). In theory you can split the key in DNS, but I'm not sure if every mail server will handle this correctly. Anyway, people will make an RSA 2048 key (or larger) and try to stuff it into a single TXT record and they might not notice that it doesn't fit (e.g., their DNS provider's interface may truncate the record silently). So, it's good to confirm after the fact that the records are good and working (there's a number of free services that will do that, e.g., https://www.learndmarc.com/).

The other thing that's a bigger deal than I think it should be is rDNS. The rDNS on the mail server really needs to be the same as the MX record or certain spam detectors flip out. If your MX record is mail.example.com, it seems like the spam detectors really want the rDNS to be mail.example.com and not example.com, for instance. You'll see some advice online that suggests that the rDNS record just has to exist and doesn't have to match exactly, but this has not been my experience.

Beyond that I have also registered for Outlook's SNDS and Google's Postmaster services, and I've also added myself to the whitelist here: dnswl.org/. I'm not sure how much of difference that makes, but it's something else you can try.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

You could look at trying immich. I haven't set it up yet, but it seems to be the solution to me moving away from Google photos. https://github.com/immich-app/immich

You can find more info on these

https://matrix.to/#/#selfhosted:selfhosted.chat

https://forum.r-selfhosted.com/

https://discord.gg/UrZKzYZfcS

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I did set it up. Survive multiple upgrade in place just fine.

I can say it beats all my apps until now. The best part to me is delete from app request to delete from my Android as well. So unlike most, it works ironically like iPhone. And I prefer that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yup, I am aware about it. It's just dislaimers that look a bit scary (not production ready), even tho multiple users reported using it without any issues.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Proton if you want email, privacy and cloud storage.

Edit I use murena and it comes with cloid storage and online only office suite

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Already thinking about proton:)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I recommend tutanota, cheap clean and few frills.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I pay(my inner pirate is screaming) for proton's subscription and so far it's absolutely worth the cost. The only issue being, I have yet to make it work on my Orange pi. Other than that it's all smiles.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've had acceptable support for the pixel phone. I forget what went wrong, but I had a problem with one of my pixels, needed repair and they replaced it when it was just shy of two years old.

It sucked, because I had to send it to Hong Kong from Australia, and they then promptly sent me a replacement. But I was 5 days without a phone.

With Apple support, they have local presence and I've had same-day repair.

I have no intention of shifting away from Google. Their cloud service is great. I pay for it and my only complaint is there are stricter privacy policies on gsuite accounts that mean some Google services are incompatible. Which is a very clear endorsement of the old adage 'if you aren't paying for the service, you're the product'.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've heard this story: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked

Imagine your primary email is no longer accessible. Your memories (images/video) is no longer accessible that dates back to 2014.

I am scared it might happen to me, so I am strongly considering moving away from Google products.

Yes, writing this from my pixel. Luckily, I can flash alternative OS to my Pixel, so I don't really mind having Pixel, but Google services? Nooo....

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I am in the Apple ecosystem, but this strategy is universal. Every month I am reminded by my calendar to make a backup. That means:

A Photos export to flat file format for photo and video

An iCal backup (easily imported elsewhere)

A vCard backup of contacts

A bookmark backup

A to do list export by pasting to a .md

Same for notes

I like the easy way an ecosystem lets all my things play nice together, but I don’t want to be beholden to it. This is an acceptable workaround to me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

At the very least, periodic visits to Google Takeout.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I moved from Gmail. I'll link to my previous comment to save trying it out again...

https://lemm.ee/comment/3347046

If I ever move away from Protonmail it will take about 5 mins for all my 300 websites to start sending emails to the new mailbox.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For Gmail, I switched to fastmail. For google photos, I switched for immich.

The services that I still use from them are google maps, YouTube and SSO. They are all services that I wouldn't mind them shutting down. It's just that I find them much better than any alternatives.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How is immitch for you? I've been considering this for quite awhile.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I installed this week, so I'm not a long time user. But it's by far the best self hosted photo app that I've used. Before that I used nextcloud, but the user experience isn't as good Imo.

The only things that I miss are automatic albums based on face recognition and pet recognition. I still use google photo to share with family though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For SSO, are you talking about Google Authenticator? I was able to switch to Aegis, which is just an open source alternative, but does the same thing, except you are not forced to back up to Google.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is TOTP. I use my password manager for that. I used to use Bitwarden, but I recently switched to 1password.

SSO means single sign on. If I sign on to Google, it automatically sign me on other apps. I use a forward auth on my self hosted services. I used to use authentik but I switched to google since it just works much better. If Google makes a shitty move in that department, I can always fall back to authentik.

I don't mind using proprietary softwares if they're good, I just prefer to think about an alternative in case I need to switch.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I was considering this on and off, but never really attempted to do this.

Biggest dealbreaker was lack of USB-C cable, but here are few other issues:

  1. No easy & free way to sideload apps.
  2. No ability to install 3rd party OS.
  3. No proper files management.
  4. Clipboard and files sharing is still a joke. It works, but is uncomfortable as fuck.
  5. Lack of cusotmization almost for every aspect of a phone.
  6. Inability to self-repair. Apple made it harder on purpose.
  7. Overpriced smartphones & gadgets.
  8. Can't simply upload & download files from my PC (both Windows & Linux).
  9. Shitty media format support.
  10. Apple wallet does not support discount cards.
  11. Buying an Apple device means I would literally support anti-consumer company with shitty behavior towards its users.
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mostly done by ad-blocking DNS server at home (or via VPN when I am away), but yeah - no ability on Apple. Also impossible to root.

I don't do root anymore, but I would love to have this available as an option. Opens much more possibilities.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This just, isn’t true? You can just download the Ad Block Plus Safari extension, just like you can on a desktop/laptop machine. You could even add a user script manager to block ads yourself if you’re so inclined. This has been in iOS for years, at least 4.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That only blocks Safari, no? Whah about the rest of the apps?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can also use the system-wide ad blockers that function via iOS’s built in VPN functionality. That’s how Android does it too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I always found the VPN solution felt really heavy. I remember on Android you could at least also have hostfile and DNS blocking too... But maybe that was only because I was on a rooted device?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You’ve been able to use DNS-based solutions on iOS basically forever. I don’t really like them because they can be more technical than the average user is likely to jive with (they tend to cause a lot of issues browsing the web normally in my experience), but it’s pretty much always been around.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Apple doesn't allow "questionable" apps like emulators, bit torrent clients on its store and of course you can't sideload them either.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yes, that's what I am saying. Apple decides for you. You are not the one who decides how to use your phone.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I have an iPhone, but I will say for me the biggest deal breaker with it is absolutely not the lack of USB-C support (though that sucks and THANK GOD they're switching)... The lack of sideloading for apps is a much bigger problem IMO, because it's really hard for free and open source apps to even exist on iOS (which makes paid apps, subscriptions, and advertising much more common). Honestly, I'd care a lot less about the lack of sideloading if it wasn't for the other inconvenient facts, like the a $100/year developer license to publish anything on the App Store, or the fact that you pretty much need to have a Mac to develop for the iPhone... The $100/year developer license is just a death sentence for any open source apps and hobby / passion project apps. It's not thaaaat much money, but it's a lot to pay on top of putting in a bunch of free work to build an app in the first place.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Inability to self-repair. Apple made it harder on purpose.

Can you repair android phone nowadays? Afaik, they are just as hard as apple

Clipboard and files sharing is still a joke. It works, but is uncomfortable as fuck.

Never had a problem

No easy & free way to sideload apps.

this should come before March 2024

Overpriced smartphones & gadgets.

True for the gadgets, smartphones are just in line with other android phones but at least the phone is supported for 5-6 years and it doesn't go to shit after a few years of use

Shitty media format support.

Preach.

Buying an Apple device means I would literally support anti-consumer company with shitty behavior towards its users

Then buy no phone and remove google, etc. For a computer, buy a System76 et similia -but do not use Nvidia/AMD/intel GPU/CPU; no Samsung for SSD, no Intel network card etc.

Apple wallet does not support discount cards.

But you can?Maybe it's new, idk

Can't simply upload & download files from my PC (both Windows & Linux).

True. I use iCloud webApp on Linux or transfer the files on Mega

No proper files management.

It works for the most basic use cases

No ability to install 3rd party OS.

True, but on the other hand iOS is the reason you would buy an iPhone. I'm a power user on desktop but I can't be bothered on mobile: back when I had an android, I used the stock apps too and never did anything """weird""". I'm a desktop user throughout, so if I have to do anything I will just use my PC instead of relying on my phone

-- That said, if you don't mind paying:

  • try protonMail, there is the auto import and forward for gmail;
  • MEGA has a sync feature for the photos. I use it but on iOS it's not that great, for example the photos never get deleted but just uploaded;
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So you basically confirmed my points 😅

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Never said you were wrong lol

If you value freedom over comfort, then obviously an iPhone doesn't cut it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

freedom over comfort

With freedom comes the confort. It's me who should decide what I need, not Apple. Apple should adjust to my needs, not me to Apple.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

With freedom comes comfort

lol, tell me that when you use a banking app outside the Google play services

Freedom [to install your own OS on a mobile device] for sure won’t bring me any comfort, and in fact it’s something I don’t care about.

Beside, it’s a naive take: Apple doesn’t force you to buy its phones so you can just go wherever. And I doubt most people who buy an android do so for the freedom to install their own OS