Android

You'd think this would be easier than it seems to be in reality. I am interested in getting a Sony Xperia 5V or Xperia 1V. Where I live, phones can't make calls unless they support VoLTE. The phones in question support basically all the bands I need them to support and I've found several encouraging Reddit posts from people saying they got the Xperia 1V to work here (haven't found any for the 5V). Some confirm VoLTE, others simply say they were able to make calls. The VoLTE requirement for phones is very recent with different carriers killing off their 3G networks at slightly different times the latest being about a month away so it's hard to judge how much I can trust those posts. I've also seen a video from what seems to be an Indian person showing you how to enable VoLTE on a 1V.

The thing is though, these are encouraging signs but Sony themselves have kept decidedly shtoom on the matter not mentioning the capability in their marketing or their web manuals for either phone, it is also not mentioned on GSM arena, however I noticed that this is not mentioned in the information about my current phone on GSM arena either, even though it definitely does support it because I've been using since even before it was a hard requirement. Is there any way to figure this out definitively? I've tried contacting Sony and maybe at some point they'll reply but frankly I'm not holding my breath and I suspect if they do reply they'll say something about the phones not being for sale in this country (which is true), or mentioning some of the other things the phone can do without answering whether it will do this one particular thing, which is what some websites selling the phone did as well. That type of evasive behaviour would normally lead me to conclude the answer was the feature isn't supported but those Reddit posts and that video, while not definitive enough in their own right seem to strongly indicate that it is supported.

I'm trying to make sure that if I import a phone to my country, it will likely work pretty much wherever I may go here. Most phones I'm looking at support every 4G band operated here, but I've noticed that on the GSM arena website, they will often give a list of supported bands for a given phone followed by a dash and a region name like 'Asia' or 'international' or 'USA'. One of the supported bands I'm looking at is operated in my country, but seems to be pretty rare, if I use that as a criterion the list of devices shrinks considerably as does the number of brands to choose from. One particular phone I looked at only lists support for the specific band I'm looking at in it's "-USA" list of supported bands. I'm confused by what this means for me, if that band is used in my country and I import a phone that only lists the band as supported in the US does that mean the phone wouldn't work here if I'm in an area where the only available tower operated on such a frequency? Why not? It sounds like it's physically capable.

The other question is, how do you assess the likelihood of this being a problem? The relative rarity of support for this band and the fact that it's only officially supported here, but seems only to have recently been licensed for people to build infrastructure operating on that band makes me think that there are likely very few towers actually using it here, but presumably more will eventually start to do so. My current phone has lasted me 6 years, almost 7 so I'll want to future-proof in this regard. In the time since I bought my last phone, carriers have abandoned any non VoLTE support so if the phone I bough then, hadn't had this compatibility it would have become a brick well ahead of its time so I'm weary of something like that happening.

EDIT: Something has occurred to me that didn't before and might answer my question, but then I guess it'd be good if anyone knew because this is only a guess on my part. Maybe the dash followed by region name is referring to model variants, as in, if you buy the US variant of the phone, then it supports these bands, and if you buy the international variant, it supports these bands etc etc. In that case, it would presumably mean that if I bought a variant model of a phone that lists support for a particular frequency band it should work anywhere in the world where those frequency bands are used not just the region mentioned after the list. I guess the trouble is that usually the sites I can find selling these phones to consumers in my market don't go in to anywhere near that level of detail so I'd have no way of knowing which model variant it was other than simply the manufacturer's marketing terms for their product lineup.

I want to set up a 'home phone' network for the kids in a couple of different households. The kids are too young to have their own phones, but are currently dependent on parents to contact each other in the way we did when we were kids

My idea at the moment is to set up an old Android phone on the wifi in each house with messenger or similar, then uninstall all other internet apps and lock down the play store

Does this sound like the best option? If there a better tool that is still cheap/free and will be relatively safe for the kids to use unattended?

https://github.com/LawnchairLauncher/lawnchair

I'd like to harden my device and put some of my apps (mail & chat mostly) behind an additional layer of security. I found this app, that comes pretty close to what I had in mind.

However, it hasn't been updated in 5 years and some options in the app are still flagged as in development. Anyone know of a maintained alternative?

This used to just be how it worked, I don't know what changed. I have for a long time used VLC to navigate to files on my computer in the other room so I can stream video to my phone that are stored on the computer.

Occasionally I'll also use VLC to browse local media on my phone. I can still do this through the browse tab but I have to navigate my phone's internal memory folder structure that way, which is cumbersome and irritating. Previously I would just go to the video tab because any video that showed up there would be local to the phone. Now, all the video on my computer's storage is displayed there and seemingly NONE of the phone's own local video material.

I tried going to settings and Media Library Folders and noticed that interestingly the network location for my computer was ticked and the internal storage was unticked. I have no idea how that happened but I thought I had the problem solved then. I unticked all potential Media Library Folders except internal storage which I ticked and then navigated to the video tab in hopes of seeing only local video and no network video. The situation was completely unchanged. There was a notification at the top of the screen from VLC indicating it was scanning so I thought perhaps it was going to have to complete this scan first before anything could change so I left the phone to it to it with the VLC app open. Some time later I returned and the notification was gone, but the video tab was the same. I navigated away from and then back to the video tab and still it was the same. While writing this post I checked the Media Library Folders setting again and the changes I had made were reversed, only the network location for my PC was checked and all other items including the internal storage were unchecked. WTF!?

Does anyone know of a free privacy friendly camera app with funny filters and/or vignettes I can give my children to play around with?

Preferably open source but I've already looked through F-Droid and couldn't find anything.

google never says it's foss and it makes sense why theyd not foss it, extend and extinguish. flathub says proprietary, wikipedia says both, im very confused

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11894091

Keep small scale open source alive. F-Droid ftw! And consider to donate to Daniel as developer of XMPP software. See also :

• https://gultsch.social/@daniel/111923502625498287

• https://gultsch.social/@daniel/111923542300799098

Here is some important context you need to understand Quicksy:

· It’s not successful at all. The user count has stagnated at just under 1,500 for years.

· It’s very expensive to run. While Quicksy doesn’t have that many users it has a good amount of registrations. Sending SMS is really expensive. There are months in which I’m paying ~100 Euro for server cost + SMS. I receive a few donations that reference Quicksy alongside Conversations but nothing close to 100 Euro / month.

They seem too small and consistent in size to just be bundles of system apps that got security fixes the past month. Are they like differential patches or something? How are they applied? And what happens while the 'finishing system update' notification is shown? (as far as I can tell the phone remains unlocked while updating, so why do they need it to be booted to finish the update? Is it just to turn on the phone faster?)

Web search returns 'what is an update' articles so I'm asking here.

I am using Insular and create a work profile.

In the Work profile, say I want to install a modded version of an app; alongwith it I also want to install the normal version in the Home profile.

When I install the second app, it doesn't installs and a message appears that sort of says, "Another user has already installed this app which is different from this and is of some other version".

Till now, i always thought work profile makes a complete another instance and no corelation with the Home Profile. I want to know was am I wrong somewhere, or had not doing the setup properly.

Methods requiring root are also ok. I am on android 13 lineageos

Hello, I just switched to Android 13, and I am wondering what is this toggle doing on top of the 3 options? A bit confused.

Edit: on Asus zenfone 10, in case it varies from vendor to vendor

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10113624

what's a reliable way to determine my device's battery health? something like Coconutbattery for macOS - charge cycles, health, factory/remaining mAh, etc...

tried CPU-Z, says health is "Good". gee, thanks... out of what, "Excellent" through "Shit" or what?

backstory, I got a Samsung Tab S6 used, wiped it and installed LineageOS 20 and I'm using for a couple of months. the battery kinda sucks. granted, I have like 3-4 hours SOT/day but a 7000 mAh battery should last a couple of days; pure guesstimation, I had an iPad some years ago and that thing lasted for eons.

if I leave it overnight with 10ish% battery remaining and battery saver on, it's dead by morning. that sort of drain can't be normal? on the other hand, I don't have google services so every app has its own running service - syncthing, KDE Connect, Allcast, Jellyfin Player, etc.

there's the stuff I can read from /sys/class/power_supply/battery/ but nothing useful in there; like charge_full and charge_full_design are the same (70400) and other promising sounding items are unset or nonsensical.

tried the same on my Redmi phone w/LOS, completely different files there and equally useless.

I don't wanna go through sourcing the battery, prying the thing open and replacing it, only to find out that's how it's supposed to work. any ideas?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9939705

Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 are end-of-life and shouldn't be used anymore due to lack of security patches for firmware and drivers. We provide extended support for harm reduction.

Tags:

• 2023123000-redfin (Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 5)
• 2023123000 (Pixel 5a, Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6a, Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7a, Pixel Tablet, Pixel Fold, emulator, generic, other targets

Changes since the 2023121200 release:

• Keyboard: add new implementation of multi-locale spell checking support to fix crashes and other issues
• Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: add Android Auto support with the compatibility layer eliminating the need for most of the permissions and a permission menu with 4 toggles for granting the minimal special access required for wired Android Auto, wireless Android Auto, audio routing and phone calls
• Settings: remove confusing mention of Android Auto from Connected devices screen
• exempt non-app system processes from Sensors permission enforcement (fixes some issues including gpsd crashes)
• fix Bluetooth auto-turn-off race condition to avoid crashes
• work around upstream race condition bug in biometric service
• disable support for pre-approving PackageInstaller sessions due to incompatibility with Network permission toggle
• fix several upstream bugs in handling crash reports mainly to improve our user-facing crash reporting system
• use GrapheneOS Widevine provisioning proxy by default
• add settings for changing Widevine provisioning server
• add configuration for setupdesign and setupcompat libraries to improve system UI theme
• kernel (Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6a, Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7a, Pixel Tablet, Pixel Fold, Generic 5.10): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision including update to 5.10.204
• kernel (Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, Generic 5.15): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision including update to 5.15.142
• kernel (Generic 6.1): initial port of GrapheneOS changes for use with emulator builds
• force disable network ADB in early boot to improve verified boot security (no user-facing change since it's currently disabled by default later in the boot process, but not robustly)
• Vanadium: update to version 120.0.6099.115.0
• Vanadium: update to version 120.0.6099.144.0
• AppCompatConfig: update to version 2
• GmsCompatConfig: update to version 88
• GmsCompatConfig: update to version 89
• GmsCompatConfig: update to version 90
• Auditor: update to version 78

cross-posted from: https://notdigg.com/post/523027

Did they remove app categories from the web version of the Play Store? I liked browsing icon packs and stuff in the "Personalization" category from my computer but can't find it anymore

Last commit on the repo was in 2020. I don't really know.

A few months ago I dropped my phone (Samsung Galaxy A70) and the screen broke. Got a new phone, problem solved. But there is some data on it that I forgot to include in my backups. Very small files but important for achive purposes.

Screen (touch input too) and the speaker are dead. I know the password (obviously) but how will I go around doing this? First thing that came to my mind is connecting the phone to a computer via USB. But there are some obstacles.

The phone is rooted and has LineageOS 20 (and Lineage Recovery) installed. The phone is on vibration or muted mode. Therefore an external speaker isn't of much use. The OS is most likely fully functional. I can tell when the screen is on and not by holding the power button. If it's on, it will vibrate which indicates the power menu has openned. If it's off, the flashlight will turn on.

Phone has a USB-C 2.0 port and the wireless cast doesn't work due to Google Services being absent (apparently) so no video output. First thing I tried doing is just straight up connecting it to a computer. Obviously it didn't work because I didn't unlock the phone and a security feature that only uses USB for power unless otherwise is told is active. That setting can be changed via a notification. So I tried connecting a mouse and keyboard. I couldn't if anything was happening or if the peripherals were connected at all.

So what do I do? I'm thinking of booting into Lineage Recovery and see if I can do anything with ADB or fastboot. But probably not since the data is encrypted.

Murena offer a degoogled /e/os version of the fairphone 5.

I’m wondering if there are any catches… eg

• have google privacy issues been replaced with murena ones?
• would we still expect the 8-10 years of updates?
• would there be any driver issues eg worse camera/face unlock/fingerprint experience?

Also if anyone has had one (murena or stock) since launch, how is it working out?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/8736133

Hello, I successfully rooted my Pixel 8 Pro but I am stuck at "Phone is starting" after enabling Zygisk and rebooting. It does boot fine into safe mode tho. What can cause this issue and how can I fix it? Thx a lot!

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/15388100

Nothing Chats has already been pulled from Google Play over privacy issues / Nothing pulled the Nothing Chats beta from the Google Play store “until further notice” after reports that Sunbird sends messages in plain text.

I'm running Calyx OS (which for my device is on Android 13 at the moment). I would like to have better control over which Bluetooth-connections my phones attempts to connect to when enabled and which it does not. Right now, it seems to try to connect to whatever it was connected to last, even though it is no where near me. I have to wait for the connection to fail before I can start another connection. This eats up about 10-15 seconds every time I want to connect to a Bluetooth-speaker if it wasn't that last device I connected to.

Is there any way of getting better control over this? Best case for me would be to define some devices it should always try to connect to and other devices that should require manual connection.