Google Android catch-all

Google is ending free unlimited photo storage on June 1, 2021. All photos taken before then will not count toward your storage limit.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Google is ending free unlimited photo storage on June 1, 2021. All photos taken before then will not count toward your storage limit.

It was a trap all along.

DSGamer wrote:

It was a trap all along.

Who could have guessed Google would kill a useful service?

Wonder if that still includes phones like the first Pixel that were promised free forever?

Kept mine around just in case.

Next up: paid Gmail accounts

Stele wrote:

Wonder if that still includes phones like the first Pixel that were promised free forever?

Kept mine around just in case.

All pixel are still unlimited. However, I'm not sure if the phone has to be active.

Hot take time. Online providers should charge us for online services and stop surveilling us.

DSGamer wrote:

Hot take time. Online providers should charge us for online services and stop surveilling us.

Yeah.

DSGamer wrote:

Hot take time. Online providers should charge us for online services and stop surveilling us.

Yeah I've been slowly moving off of the Google ecosystem by paying for Microsoft services instead. No ads in email is pretty nice, and for now at least they seem to be taking privacy more seriously than other big tech companies except maybe Apple. I will hit the 1TB OneDrive cap in a few more years I think, so hopefully they offer higher storage limits before then.

If nothing else, Microsoft understands how to support end users. With Google, only in rare cases are end-users the actual customers; in most cases, they are the product. And the product, since it's getting free services, can just shut the hell up and align itself with Google's priorities. They have no understanding of the pain they cause for people with the constant disruptions in their offered services. (Or, maybe they understand, and just don't care.)

Microsoft has always sold things to actual people, so they understand the value of backward compatibility and not messing up customer workflows. On a 32-bit Windows system, you can still run most DOS software back to the dawn of time. (That went away with 64-bit, but that's not Microsoft's fault, really, that was AMD making 16-bit support very hard in 64-bit mode.) They rarely discontinue services, and generally make sure that they offer something new that fully replaces the old thing before they do.

Historically, I have not been a fan of Microsoft, but with Google being as abusive as it has become, they're looking like a damn fine cloud option these days.

I've been slowly trying to get off of Google services. They make it hard, though, when they make the operating system you run.

I've mostly moved away from Google as well. I still have Gmail as my primary email address that I am loathe to change everywhere.

The only other service of theirs I regularly use is YouTube which I don't care that they track as long as they don't have my browser, calendar, location, health, etc data.

Since Google announced the death of Google Music, I moved to Protonmail from Gmail (a huge pain), and to Spotify for my music. I used to love integrating every service under as few vendors as possible, but I've completely turned around into finding a vendor who's dedicated to the service I'm looking for.

The worst part about this is that Google will now ask our money AND keep mining our data.

So yeah I'm now looking into alternatives to Google Photo's, but OneDrive lacks a lot of features for easy photo editing. Frankly, I'm not finding anything as easy-to-use as Google Photo's. Except maybe Amazon Prime Photo, but that's just trading the pest for cholera.

I’m interested in following this. I would prefer Apple over Google but Apple’s cloud services just aren’t mature enough. Currently I find Google Photos very convenient for keeping my and my wife’s photo collections in sync across iOS, Android and the cloud. And the free storage was nice.

I moved to proton mail, too. For photos I use Slidebox to organize and Piktures as a gallery. Slidebox uses Tinder like gestures to sort and delete photos. Makes that tedium a little more bearable.

And just got another email from Google: High-quality uploads from your Pixel phone will be exempt.

So that's good news.

Stele wrote:

And just got another email from Google: High-quality uploads from your Pixel phone will be exempt.

So that's good news.

Caveat that this only holds for Pixel phones already in market, up through the 5.

For now. I'd still be shopping for a replacement, myself.

Malor wrote:

Historically, I have not been a fan of Microsoft, but with Google being as abusive as it has become, they're looking like a damn fine cloud option these days.

My pre-MS 1999 Hotmail account is going to be cool again. Like Star Wars Phantom Menace (also from 1999).

IMAGE(https://media.giphy.com/media/l3fZDR7wIwY0VND9K/giphy.gif)

I moved to proton mail too as part of my own getting out of google's stuff. For cloud storage I went with sync.com. Proton mail is fine, though searching through old emails could be a lot better. I even got a paid account and they threw in Proton VPN Plus with it, so I've got that too. I still have my old gmail account, but I set up a 100% forward from there so everything ends up in proton mail. Over the months I've been able to slowly switch everything over as it comes along.

I use duckduckgo for searches. Any time I can't find what I'm looking for with duckduckgo I end up opening a private window to do a google search. I just don't trust them much these days. Getting a non-google android phone is one of the few things I have yet to figure out. Not sure if it's even possible or easy.

I now use my gmail what it's best for... marketing emails. Keep the outlook email for connecting with verifiably good actor humanoids of personal acquaintance (i.e. family and friends) and transactional emails from financial institutions.

My Pixel XL froze up last night and is now caught in a boot loop. Selecting Recovery Mode to try to either apply a rescue ota or factory reset just starts the loop again. Any point in pressing on to try to fix this? If so, any ideas on what I can do? I'm going to get a new phone either way, but ideally I'd like to wipe the old phone.

My son's Samsung A51 just went through that and it was solved by a factory reset. If you can get it done before the next reboot, try that.

Hey friends, question for y'all. My lease with Sprint/T-Mobile is up in a couple of months. While I do like this Galaxy Note 10 Ultra thing, I realize it's a tad too big for me, and I've honestly been itching to get a physical keyboard of late, so I've got my sights set on a BlackBerry Key2. Might any of y'all have any experience with one who can share their impressions, please and thank you?

McChuck wrote:

My Pixel XL froze up last night and is now caught in a boot loop. Selecting Recovery Mode to try to either apply a rescue ota or factory reset just starts the loop again. Any point in pressing on to try to fix this? If so, any ideas on what I can do? I'm going to get a new phone either way, but ideally I'd like to wipe the old phone.

Go office space printer on it?

I just got a Pixel 4a and I find the pinhole camera really distracting. I mean I'm sure I'll get used to it, it's just...

I was really annoyed when they moved the clock to the top left corner in Android to accomadate phones with stupid unibrow notches, even on phones that didn't have notches, because years of experience had conditioned me to think "if there's something in the top left corner of the screen, you have a notification." But then there was always something there whether you had a notification or not because the clock was there. Now the unibrow phone era seems to mostly be behind us, thank God, but the clock is still on the top left, except it's bumped over like a half inch to make room for the camera which looks stupid.

Honestly, phones just having moderately sized top bezels to put things like front cameras in was FINE, and until they perfect putting the front camera inside the screen itself everything else is a downgrade IMO.

Middcore wrote:

IHonestly, phones just having moderately sized top bezels to put things like front cameras in was FINE, and until they perfect putting the front camera inside the screen itself everything else is a downgrade IMO.

I whole-heartedly agree with this. I loved the bezels on the Galaxy s8/s9, and then they started doing the pinhole camera thing and it turned me off on getting an upgrade.

I went from a Pixel 2 with bezels to a Pixel 5 with pinhole and I prefer the Pixel 5.

/shrug

Qualcomm's next flagship SoC finally integrates the 5G modem, so next year's top tier phones might actually be worth getting.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Qualcomm's next flagship SoC finally integrates the 5G modem, so next year's top tier phones might actually be worth getting.

What does this actually mean for the consumer? Major performance improvements?