House of Legends

Tag: Google

  • Googlification of FixBit app completed

    This post is sort of an outsider commentary to news I seen at Mastodon. The news story described how Google decision to replace original FixBit app with pile of AI garbage and UX catastrophe caused storm of 1-star reviews. I will think about the side effects of this story, some of which span beyond the gadgets and tech.

    Google awful testing flow exposed

    Or possible total lack of proper testing. This sounds like at least one these happening inside Google:

    1. The focus groups for new app testing has been stuffed with AI loyalists, like it happens with the candidates allowed to run in Russian elections.
    2. The real results of testing on the focus groups has been thrown into the recycle bin and different results have been shown to shareholders when managers were seeking approval of these terrible changes in the app. It can be called total break of feedback channels between the top bosses & shareholders, living now in own parallel reality never intersecting everyday life of proposed audience of Google Health app.

    Another myth about rich people exposed

    This is an observation my beautiful wife made when I told about all these news. Simply speaking, all these tales about rich people eating only healthy food and spending days in various healthy activities between few calls and meeting or a two – all these myths are busted now. Rich people do not use all these smartwatches, do not follow all these healthly lifestyle guides, and so on. Instead, rich people, like Soviet nomenklatura, enjoy all sorts of tasty (and unhealthy, haha) food, don’t spend hours in gym, don’t run daily, and so on. And of course, they don’t use these fitness activity tracking devices. Otherwise they would say at last minute something like “Hey, Sundar, your plan to remake this app is a total fuck and its outcome would be an unusable piece of fucked shit!”. Or at least they would found other words to express doubt that such plan will bring some profit growth.

    People hate AI

    People do not want AI features. People do not ask for more AI into their apps and devices. All possible use cases like image generation and disinformation factoring automation already are here. It would require a lot of creativity to find a new way to use AI that would not cause hate from people and a strong marketing research to find such people who really need this way to use AI.

    But billonaires and corporations behave like they have a common secret investor who never comes to their meetings with employees and shareholders but who have the most effective leverage on them. These corporations are likely sustained by a shadow investor’s infinite funding, contingent on the aggressive promotion of AI. This continues despite the fact that these technologies are currently in the red and unlikely to reach profitability in the short term.

    I have a theory that this hidden investor is the same investor who stuffed money into Epstein pockets, bloating his importance, and this investor likely is either Kremlin or CCP.

    And what could be done with all that?

    If we ever need gadgets, they should be created not by some corporations whose leadership lives in their own reality detached from everyday lives of common people. Such gadgets should be created using the most open electronics available, let it be PineCone. It should use not the most fastest chips but those which are closest to “I can print it in garage” model.

    Yes, some research on making 3D-printable microelectronics such as CPU, memory, and Systems-on-chip seems to necessary to make all this feasible. And the whole idea is to make a dedicated cooperative for a gadget or its series, where people who will use this gadget not only source of demand for mere existence of gadget but the single source of requirements for related features both for hardware and software.

    All this will be viable only when it would be enough to gather 3-5 friends together for a device project and establish into a garage full production cycle from CPU lithography or FPGA-like programming to 3D-printing of the case and buttons or touchscreens.

    I don’t know how exactly it is possible to avoid need for “clear-room” in micro-electronics creation process, or how to create some special metamaterials which would reprogram itself into combination of logical gates, like some materials pie, where each programmable cell exposes own programmability inputs on top side, and the contacts for CPU socket still would be at bottom, or some other arragement like that. But key point here is that both production of such “programmable pie” and its programming should be doable without need to use clear-room, “in garage setting”. This, again, surely will require a lot of not so easy research.

    As soon as a dedicated cooperative of people who will use the gadget will be the device creators, there is a hope for really usable devices and for avoiding enshitification, or as I call this in the headline, Googlification.

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  • How far this from mass appeal…

    How far this from mass appeal…

    Not everyone would scroll down to the end of the https://keepandroidopen.org page. Not everyone would even open it. Not everyone would even heard the news of what Google plans to do.

    You bought an Android phone because Google told you it was open. You could install what you wanted, and that was the deal.

    This is first words most people read opening the website.

    This sounds quite detached of why people buy Android phones in the first place. Most of the time mostivations are like:

    • “my old phone broke and does not turn on, so I bought some random phone cheap enough for my pocket”
    • “I was looking for some affordable phone with a good camera, bluetooth, wifi, internet hostspot, and not too big in size”
    • “I was looking for a new phone because I was bored of slowness of my current 6-years old phone, seen a fancy ad about youth having fun with nature around, and it clicked”.
    • “My 5 year son dropped my phone from the kitchen table at the floor and it cracked failing apart. I was need an urgent replacement”

    These are just random guesses on how and why people are buying android phones. Most common motivation for buying android phone is its affordable price.

    People en masse even does not know that formally Android OS is somehow “open”, or that AOSP exists, or that it is technically possible to install an OS to an android phone that supports bootloader unlocking.

    How I chose my current android phone?

    First, I was already aware of Sigma Mobile, Ukrainian mobile devices (feature phones, smartphones, tablets, powerbanks and accessories) brand.

    Second, my last phone battery got old and charged out quite quickly. So I was looking for phone with very good/high capacity/ battery, and found their X-treme PQ57 phone.

    None of these was about whether the OS of phone (Android 13) is “open” or not.

    I suspect that most people actually feel overwhelmed with available formal choice of the apps at Google App Store and does not scroll beyond 2nd page of app when looking for an app.

    Most people even never installed Windows on their PCs.

    Some may even not read down to the further explanation:

    Google is now rewriting that deal, retroactively, on hardware you already own. After the update lands, you can only run software that Google has pre-approved. On your phone: your property, that you paid for.

    For most people this already true, because most people using android already install only apps from the Google App Store.

    The mobile phones inherently lack many features of PCs, such as:

    1. option to open the case, extract a part and replace with another one (upgradeability).
    2. option to install different OS (many new phones lack option to unlock the bootloader, did not checked this on my phone yet).
    3. There is no enough screen space to show a terminal for command line, even if you would install such app.
    4. Many phones lack support of connecting external keyboard and mouse (but not mine at least).

    The last 2 parts is about the day to day usability, as mobile devices sacrifices a lot usability in favor of compactness.

    I am not telling about all these not to say that call to action against Google to prevent total locking of Google a-la Apple ecosystem is useless.

    All I wanting to say that alternative IT, let it be new phones, new or alternative OSes for them, or new software, should be helping people in their day to day life, not become some obstacle. Because the transition outside of the Google/Apple duopoly is difficult, and often means fighting or dodging various gotchas from banks, and now – government with their obsession with “age verification”.

    Current IT is doomed from the start, so may be it will require to go into abyss down to the smelly pit of digital gulag, before really free open alternative will be created, or finally it would be discovered that humanity does not need IT to survive and prosper?

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