Google Android catch-all

NSMike wrote:

Keep an eye on that 3XL battery - mine just expanded.

Sheesh

NSMike wrote:

Keep an eye on that 3XL battery - mine just expanded.

That's good, right? It means it has additional room for more charge? /s

Fedaykin98 wrote:

I think, for the first time in history, my cell phone is three years old and I feel no need whatsoever to "upgrade". It's a Samsung Galaxy s8+, which came out in April of 2017.

Not sure what feature or whatever would make me want to upgrade it right now, either. Y'all are discussing 5g, and if that were important, then yeah, I'd have upgraded already.

I just had to jump from an S8+ to an S20+. My charge port was dead. I priced the parts, and I could have replaced it for about $35 including a new battery, but instead of risking being out a phone for a day or so if I screwed it up, I went ahead and bought a new one. Will likely fix the S8+ anyway as a family spare. Pissed to not have a headphone jack on the S20+, but I bought an adapter.

I will say that I've started seeing 5G here locally. Obviously not mmwave based on what T-Mobile is rolling out, but I've seen 60Mbps+ down and almost that same amount up. I've only run a couple of tests. Not amazing speeds, but I'm in the middle of the merger of Sprint's network, so this is good for me based on passed experience.

Battery is much better on my S20+, even with the 5G. And the 120hz screen is smooth.

Nevin73 wrote:
NSMike wrote:

Keep an eye on that 3XL battery - mine just expanded.

That's good, right? It means it has additional room for more charge? /s

Oh, wait, HTC used to make the Pixel phones. Is that still true? If so, HTC was notorious for putting crap batteries in their phones. They'd all die the day after the warranty ran out.

Gotta cut costs somewhere, eh?

I still have a 2XL because nothing about the 3 or 4 enticed me to upgrade other than the camera. And since I have a good DSLR even that hasn't been enough to make me shell out a grand.

Battery is still fine, camera works. I don't play games on phones at all so I guess I'm sticking with this for a while longer.

NSMike wrote:

Keep an eye on that 3XL battery - mine just expanded.

Since you haven't clarified, did you mean 'exploded'?

Google music is going away soon. Be sure to download your music if you need to do so.

Malor wrote:
NSMike wrote:

Keep an eye on that 3XL battery - mine just expanded.

Since you haven't clarified, did you mean 'exploded'?

Expanded makes more sense to me. Older batteries eventually will make enough hydrogen gas to expand, which is safe as long as the battery isn't damaged or defective.

My Galaxy S4 and my current S7 both had this happen. I replaced the battery in the S7 since it popped off the back of the phone. With the S4 it broke the screen, since I had it in a pretty serious phone case that kept the back cover on.

I've also seen this in Macbooks and several other devices with Lithium ion packs in them. It's a common failure mode for those batteries.

garion333 wrote:

Oh, wait, HTC used to make the Pixel phones. Is that still true? If so, HTC was notorious for putting crap batteries in their phones. They'd all die the day after the warranty ran out.

They were only ever involved with the first Pixel and a few of the Nexus devices.

LouZiffer wrote:
Malor wrote:
NSMike wrote:

Keep an eye on that 3XL battery - mine just expanded.

Since you haven't clarified, did you mean 'exploded'?

Expanded makes more sense to me. Older batteries eventually will make enough hydrogen gas to expand, which is safe as long as the battery isn't damaged or defective.

My Galaxy S4 and my current S7 both had this happen. I replaced the battery in the S7 since it popped off the back of the phone. With the S4 it broke the screen, since I had it in a pretty serious phone case that kept the back cover on.

I've also seen this in Macbooks and several other devices with Lithium ion packs in them. It's a common failure mode for those batteries.

Yeah, this is what happened. It separated part of the back of my phone. I bought a replacement off iFixit.

The Pixel 3 and 3XL were made by Foxconn.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/BIiE3vJ.png)

Baron Of Hell wrote:

Google music is going away soon. Be sure to download your music if you need to do so.

Yeah, I have to go to YouTube music now? That sucks. The Google Play app is a perfectly solid app, but why the hell do I need a video-focused music app on my phone? I don't want to watch video on my phone anymore than I want to watch forced video on website rather than reading an article. The YouTube Music app sucks.

It's Google. This is what they do. Why did they get rid of Inbox, which was massively superior to gmail in every single way.

It's why Stadia is a goddamned joke and destined for failure.

Yeah, never rely on any small Google service for anything. Either they grow explosively or Google cuts their throats.

Never rely on anything you don't pay for.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Never rely on anything you don't pay for.

Even then. I paid $20 a year of something for the Amazon free picture storage service. They stopped that some years ago.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Never rely on anything you don't pay for.

I would amend that to say never rely on network services you don't pay for.

There's lots of free software out that's excellent, and you can often use it to make your own network services that you can depend on. They'll only get discontinued when you choose to turn them off.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Never rely on anything you don't pay for.

I pay for Google Play Music.

I gave YouTube Music a try a while back and it was kind of atrocious, mixing together a lot of video content with my music. I will give it another go before I decide to leave, but I don't have high hopes.

Note I wasn't saying always rely on things you do pay for. But I would add to my statement "or on cloud based services whether you pay for them or not."

I too am annoyed that Google is shutting down music. I hope they add most of its features to YouTube music.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Note I wasn't saying always rely on things you do pay for. But I would add to my statement "or on cloud based services whether you pay for them or not."

So, when do you move to your new home with the Amish community?

Initiated the swap to YouTube yesterday.
I download my preferred playlist so that I don't use data. Everything was set on Google Music.

In the car this morning there was no music. No big, the kids were talkative and usually I'll have forgotten to switch from the bedtime playlist anyway. Well YouTube Music suddenly started playing when I got to my destination and presumably connected to WiFi.

Dropped the kids off, got back in the car, switched to Google Music.... But now YouTube Music started playing automatically at the same time that Google Music was playing.
Facepalm.

Google... Stop. Just... Stop.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

Note I wasn't saying always rely on things you do pay for. But I would add to my statement "or on cloud based services whether you pay for them or not."

So, when do you move to your new home with the Amish community?

It's a myth that Amish don't use technology, they just question its need before coming to a communal decision about whether to allow it.

But more seriously, I use all these SaaS things, I just try not to rely on them should sh*t meet the fan. E.g. I keep local backup of any data stored in the cloud.

Chairman_Mao wrote:
MilkmanDanimal wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

Note I wasn't saying always rely on things you do pay for. But I would add to my statement "or on cloud based services whether you pay for them or not."

So, when do you move to your new home with the Amish community?

It's a myth that Amish don't use technology, they just question its need before coming to a communal decision about whether to allow it.

But more seriously, I use all these SaaS things, I just try not to rely on them should sh*t meet the fan. E.g. I keep local backup of any data stored in the cloud.

My wife is from a town with a big Amish community, and I've been amused for years and years as to how they justify the use of technology to keep up their beliefs; you can't have a phone in your house, but, for your business, you can have one in an outbuilding behind your house. You can't have a car, but you can ride in someone else.s That being said . . .

Things are progressively becoming more serviced-based, and, well, I don't know how to live in the modern world without relying on them. My music, games, books, and loads of other things are entirely cloud-based these days and I rarely have copies, and, yes, that's with the risk of losing access if a service goes down or goes away, but that's the price of convenience; I'm balancing that risk with having so many things at my fingertips. It's a trade-off I choose to make, because life would be so much less convenient if I had to rely on any local anymore.

Oh, we're crapping on YouTube Music now? Finally, I hear the song of my people.

YouTube Music is an awful dogsh*t mess of a service, that completely fails to re-implement Google Play Music's killer features in any meaningful way. More importantly, it fails to implement basic music collection functions. On top of that, it conflates with YouTube such that having any YouTube activity on the same account is likely to degrade your YTM experience in unpredictable ways (watched some dumb video? Now YTM thinks that's a meaningful data point for your music recommendations).

Google Play Music was far and away the best music streaming service, falling a little short of Spotify in some areas but having big strengths in areas Spotify has complete voids.

My worry with GPM was always the "G" part. To see that fear so completely realized has pretty much eliminated the likelihood I will use any new Google service ever again.

Like many GPM refugees who still require music locker functions, I am now on Apple Music. I fled months ago, and while I find AM less satisfying than GPM, I check back on YTM every month or so and marvel at the mess. YTM is the Hue Jackson of streaming.

I was using Google Music as a cloud repository for my extensive MP3 collection. Will YouTube Music allow me to do that? Amazon Music has discontinued the feature that allows you to upload your collection.

Nevin73 wrote:

I was using Google Music as a cloud repository for my extensive MP3 collection. Will YouTube Music allow me to do that? Amazon Music has discontinued the feature that allows you to upload your collection.

yes you can transfer your songs to ytm, so it's got that at least.

Nevin73 wrote:

I was using Google Music as a cloud repository for my extensive MP3 collection. Will YouTube Music allow me to do that? Amazon Music has discontinued the feature that allows you to upload your collection.

What made GPM special is that your uploaded music was treated as a first-class citizen. Uploads were essentially indistinguishable from catalog tracks. They appeared in your collection, on artist pages, and in searches as if they were part of the streaming catalog.

This is not true on YTM, at all. Uploads are segmented into their own little "Uploads" ghetto, separate from your collection of catalog titles, separate in search results, etc.

The reason many of us fled to Apple Music is because it gets this feature somewhat right. Uploads sit in your library side-by-side with catalog tracks that you've added to your collection. There's still some parts where uploads don't coexist with the streaming catalog (like searches), but it gets the important part right enough.

Do you have to move from GPM to YTM? I have GPM and it's asked me about trying YTM but I've not done it. I really don't care which service I use but GPM gives me add-free Youtube which is kind of big for us (3 kids whose tv comes from YT).

edit - Yes. It looks like GPM is going away in December.

*Legion* wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

I was using Google Music as a cloud repository for my extensive MP3 collection. Will YouTube Music allow me to do that? Amazon Music has discontinued the feature that allows you to upload your collection.

What made GPM special is that your uploaded music was treated as a first-class citizen. Uploads were essentially indistinguishable from catalog tracks. They appeared in your collection, on artist pages, and in searches as if they were part of the streaming catalog.

THIS. I was a paid customer of GPM for years, and while the streaming catalogue had played catch-up to most of my ancient uploads, it was nice to have those obscure trance or eurodance tracks I snagged from discogs or whatever just mixed into my regular playlists. The last few years it was especially useful for kids' music & audio stories from more alternative Flemish artists that aren't on streaming services to be there, mixed in between the more commercial kid hit music factory songs.

But when Google announced last year that they would stop GPM 'as soon as feature parity with YTM is achieved' (a promise not kept) I switched to Spotify and didn't look back. This is the one feature I miss dearly, even if Spotify is much better at guessing which songs I might like.

And in general, I've switched to SaaS solutions where the solution is their core business. So Spotify for music, Protonmail for e-mail, etc. I used to try to consolidate in as few apps/services as possible, but no more thanks to Google.

Why does it keep turning autoplay on, I never want autoplay on

The main solution I use is just to load high-bitrate MP3s on my phone and use those when I'm out and about. When I was more into the streaming thing, I used to use the Slimdevices Squeezebox software, and run the Java client, which behaves just like the old hardware Squeezeboxen.

But I also needed to run a VPN to make that work, and many workplaces would be horrified at the thought. Now that phones have gotten so big, just loading a huge library works really well.

Radio Paradise, one of my favorite channels, also has a really neat feature in their Android client; you can preload blocks of music when you're on WiFi, and then play them back locally. It sounds exactly like you're live, and Bill (the main DJ) is an awesome music curator. It's not personalized for you, but I really enjoy his taste in music.

I remember one time when someone listening with me remarked that he'd gone from Peter Gabriel to Johnny Cash to Jesus and Mary Chain within an hour, without ever jarring the ear. I really love how eclectic it can be.