All About Android 605, Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Jason Howell (00:00:00):
Coming up on All About Android. It's me, Jason Howell, we've got Ron Richards, Huyen Tue Dao and Mishaal Rahman. And we got a lot to talk about. I actually go Hands-On with the OnePlus Nord N 300 5G, Google TV getting app bundles at the same time, Raspberry Pi, getting Google TV. We've got Black Friday discounts galore. The 64-bit only Pixel 7. Now with 32-bit, unofficially. Of course, a nearby share quartet, plus your feedback and a whole lot more. Next on all about Android!

(00:00:44):
This is All About Android episode 605, recorded Tuesday, November 22nd, 2022, 32-bit your Pixel 7. This episode of All About Android is brought to you by Secure Works. So you ready for inevitable cyber threats? Secure works detects evolving adversaries and defends against them with a combination of security, analytics and threat intelligence directly from their own counter threat unit. Visit secureworks.com/twit to get a free trial of Taegis extended detection and response, also referenced as XDR. And by BitWarden. Get the password manager that offers a robust and cost effective solution that can drastically increase your chances of staying safe online. Get started with a free trial of a teams or enterprise plan, or get started for free across all devices as an individual user at bitwarden.com/twit. And by Tanium. Tanium Unites operations and security teams with a single platform that identifies where all your IT data is. Patches every device you own in seconds and implements critical security controls all from a single pane of glass. Are you ready to protect your organization from cyber threats? Well learn more. At tanium.com/twit. Hello, welcome to All About Android. This is your weekly source for latest news, hardware and apps for the Android Faithful. I'm Jason Howell, and I am as ever. Ron Richards. You are, and I am as usual. Huyen Tue Dao. You are too. And in the fourth corner of the screen when we have the quad view up, anyways, it's Mishaal Rahman from esper.io. Welcome back Mishaal.

Mishaal Rahman (00:02:27):
Glad to be back Jason. And thanks for doing my intro.

Jason Howell (00:02:30):
Yeah, sorry I didn't <laugh>. That's right, that's right. We all got to introduce ourselves and then I like stole it from you. I apologize. Introduce you. If you, if you want to introduce yourself, we can pretend like that didn't happen. It's totally up to you.

Mishaal Rahman (00:02:44):
<Laugh>. I'm not gonna give our editors any work, but yeah. Hi. I'm the, so you know,

Jason Howell (00:02:48):
<Laugh> Oh, oh, don't, don't get me wrong. None of it's coming out. <Laugh>. There's no editing going the show. Yeah, it all sticks around. It's good to have you back, Mishaal. And good to see the the, all four of us ready to talk some Android today. We've got some pretty interesting news throughout this show. I've got a device, the the Nord, what is it? The nord 300, is it? Yeah, the Nord 300. So the one plus North 300. Talk about that a little bit later. A few interesting tidbits about that that came up during pre-show. Yeah. And I think some of us have a little bit of, of Thanksgiving on the brain. I'm like, I'm like realizing that this is a short week and kind of like waiting so I can get to the food. Cause I'm thinking about all, we were talking about the food that we're gonna make at Thanksgiving in pre-show. So little distracted. That must just mean that I'm hungry right now or something. So but it's good to see y'all and it's good to have you here. Let's jump right in. Let's get into some news. Let's do it.

(00:03:59):
 I can't even touch this top front. First time

Huyen Tue Dao (00:04:03):
<Laugh>.

Jason Howell (00:04:03):
He, you know, once again the, the mic wasn't even on at all. I could hear from the other side of the room was it was on <laugh> long grown.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:04:16):
Well, you know what goes with Thanksgiving, Turkey? I don't, this is, I just, I don't know. App bundles?

Jason Howell (00:04:22):
Sure. Oh yeah,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:04:23):
Sure. That's, I know. I think of just, just yeah, just bundle of bundles and apps with your Turkey. Well, so really, so our, our Google, Android Google and Android TVs are certainly smart televisions, but what they don't have a lot of is memory. So Google notes in that, in the year of our smartphone 2022, most smartphones have around six sixty four gigabytes of storage. But your TV might only have eight gigabytes of storage, which is kind of obviously an issue as we kind of expect our smart televisions to do more. You know, most, like a lot of people are starting to have them. And we have like a bajillion different streaming services and thus a bajillion different apps that we gotta have on our TVs. But the storage is becoming an issue. And so very recently Google has announced that in order to serve this, you know, widening ecosystem of TV apps, that they are now going to require developers and publishers wanting to create apps for the Google slash Android TV platforms that these developers slash publishers will have to use Android app bundles with archiving in order to publish apps.

(00:05:24):
So we've talked about Android app bundling in the past. It's basically a rather a relatively new publishing format that was announced around 2018, but really didn't really come into play until 2020. And so basically in the before times, not in, well, I guess actually in the before times too, but before, before ad bundles, you know, we as developers, we would just push up what is known as an Android package, which is your app. And it has every single thing that we might need for every single type of device, screen size, screen density, language, whatever, all rolled up into one binary. And you got that, which has a lot of extra stuff in it. So what app bundles have done is to kind of provide Google away to let developers load all that stuff into Google Play. And then what happens is the placer will actually generate an APK that is kind of geared towards whatever device is downloading it.

(00:06:14):
So rather than getting, you know, all kinds of extra stuff that you personally as a user on your particular device don't need, you get a kind of customized apk. So why this comes into play is that, you know, we talked about archiving before and Mishaal wrote a very nice breakdown about how, you know, the actually archiving works, which, you know, helps to nominally save up to 60% of storage when you are, you know, having an app that you don't want to use. Like right now you wanna kind of hibernate it. You can archive it and it, you know, drops down 60% storage. And just in general using app bundles with this kind of like I dunno, couture <laugh>, that wasn't the word I wanted, but this like couture, that's not the right, the right this bespoke. I mean,

Jason Howell (00:06:55):
I was gonna say, it makes it sound way cooler than it actually is. Way cooler than it's this

Huyen Tue Dao (00:06:59):
Like bespoke, I should tell that to my, I should write a talk about app bundles and just use couture. But you know, these kind of like more customized APKs can say up to 15%. So it's really interesting because app bundles are not exactly like mandatory. Like most new apps have to use app bundles. Most developers, like places I've worked, have adopted them voluntarily because making smaller APKs is great. But yeah, they are required for archiving cuz it needs all that kind of special kinda compression magic that again, you should read Mishaal article about and which also is now required for tv. So archiving isn't required for most phone apps, but they will be required for TV apps. So if you have those Google tv, Android TV and, you know, you were kind of wondering how much space you storage space you got in your tv. It's not much. It's really not much. No,

Jason Howell (00:07:50):
It's not,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:07:51):
But it's really not eight, I said memory, but I meant storage, eight gigabytes of storage. So yeah this makes a lot of sense. And, and it, and to be honest with you, the impact on developers should be not a lot. Like, I I it's never trivial, but I think we, when we switched app bundles, it took whoever was doing it, actually, it might have been friend of the show vision, who was a very good friend of mine, like a few days Google, like estimates that I should take the average developer like three days to do it. So the deadline for this is actually May, 2023. So it kind of fast relatively speaking for Google to demand developers do something. But you know, as they're, they're definitely shifting towards emphasizing, you know, Google or Google tv, the nano tv, the form factor is gonna be a thing. So weren't

Ron Richards (00:08:31):
We, weren't we just talking about the lack of storage based on Google TV recently?

Jason Howell (00:08:35):
Yeah, I feel like it's come up a number of times. It's really seems endemic to that particular thing. Like in phones never an issue, but on Google tv it always is. It

Ron Richards (00:08:46):
Seems like I've run into it with my Chromecast, Chromecast or Google tv, 4k, whatever you call it, where like, I literally have to delete apps because I run outta room room, which is like super annoying. Yeah. Cool. So I can't watch pbs. Oh, well, you know, like, and then you've gotta do this uninstall, reinstall kind of tango whenever you wanna watch something on, you know. Yes. it, it hit a wall with it. It's not

Jason Howell (00:09:07):
Cool. Yeah. What were you gonna say, Mishaal?

Mishaal Rahman (00:09:10):
Yeah, I was gonna have to bring up that the, you know, the Google didn't bring up the, one of the biggest offenders is their own device, the Chromecast with Google tv, 4k, which is an eight gigabyte internal storage. And I'm sure you've, we've talked about it before on the show, plenty of people have had storage related problems because they just don't have enough storage on their device just installing the applications,

Jason Howell (00:09:29):
You know, and when I think about it right now, I'm like, okay, so obviously they're doing that goo and I say they Google, other manufacturers do this too with their Google TV and our Android TV devices. I'm guessing they're doing that because it saves cost to have only eight gigs of, of storage in there. But storage isn't so expensive that the bump to 16 gigs, like like I can't imagine it's that much more. Like how much does that tack onto the product versus the pain that the consumer <laugh> goes through When you reach that, that limit. I mean, eight gigs just sounds like incredibly under you know, under the number that it needs to be. I, I don't know how you release a device like that and release it with eight gigs and be okay with it. This certainly helps, but I don't think this suddenly makes those, those very, you know, low storage devices suddenly, you know, magically be able to have twice as many apps on there. I mean, it'll improve it, it'll make things a little bit roomier, but not to the degree that as a consumer, we can just be like, okay, cool. We never have to worry about that. And the way that we never really have to worry about that with our phones is just not a thing we worry about much anymore.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:10:39):
Yeah. And even, even though, like, even if archiving like app archiving, which again allows you to kind of hibernate apps that's still on the user to do that, that's still up to you to kind of prune through and be like, well, okay, I'm not like football season's over, so I don't need like p and app or whatever. It's up to you to do it. It would be just simpler to stick another a few more. Again, I said, sorry, I said memory store, bit more storage in there. And I, I think it's a really good point. And again, maybe we're not seeing something on manufacturing side. Is there like, I don't know, like a latency between Yeah, what we all consider like average storage and maybe what like TV manufacturers are able to put in TVs, but I can't imagine like from eight to 16, like there, like there's, there's some jumps in there that would actually Yeah, improve quality of life, but that I, I don't personally see would be a cost or size increase. But again, not a TV manufacturer personally, but yeah,

Mishaal Rahman (00:11:29):
I'm guessing it's, I can understand why they're, why like the very budget low end TPS might not have, you know, more storage, but like, when you're buying a $3,000, $2,000 tv, I don't really understand why this have like, such minuscule storage capacities or like such low end CPUs. I I'm, I, I don't really know.

Jason Howell (00:11:49):
Yeah, yeah. Or even if you're buying Google's, you know, Google's solution Google, I, I maybe unfairly, but I, you know, I tend to kind of put Google a little bit more on a, on a level of expectation that's maybe above some of the other manufacturers out there, just because I think of Google as being the company that's like, this is how it could be. This is what you, this is what we want to be the best representation of all the hard work we're doing on the software, the behind the scenes, the ideal. And then to then kind of cheap out on these things. And then as a consumer run into those things and realize just kind of the pain and discomfort that comes with that. On a device like that, it's just kinda like, eh, I expected better, I hoped for better

Ron Richards (00:12:34):
Talk can, and can I deviate just away from the storage, but on the topic of Google TV and, and Jason kind of drifting off of you're expecting better. So I've had the Chromecast of Google TV since it came out, right? Like the little, the little white puck. Google knows so much about me, like we were talking about the Discover tab, right? And, and Google News and like how to tell it like what stories you're interested in and all the stuff like that. I am fascinated by how little, it seems like Google knows about me when interacting with Google tv mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, right? Like, like, you know, like Google should know I have no interest in football, don't serve up the Monday Night football banner thing. You know what I mean? Yeah. Google should know that I don't watch, you know, I don't watch reality television, don't gimme whatever nonsense love island things, whatever. Like show me sci-fi show. Like, you know what I like a, you know what I search for, you know, what I've rented from you, you know what I watch on the platform, right? Like, so, so why can't I get actual, like, valuable recommendations instead of the garbage that it puts up on a daily basis in terms of like, in that main rotator, and then even on like when it tries to bubble up recommended stuff. Yeah. It like never hits the mark.

Jason Howell (00:13:42):
Yeah.

Ron Richards (00:13:43):
I was thinking, I was just thinking about very generic and I was like,

Jason Howell (00:13:46):
Most people will like this. That's why we put it there. But

Ron Richards (00:13:51):
I understand that. I understand that a portion of them have like it's like ad based, you know, like some, and that's fine. That's like, I see it says sponsored. I know that's not the thing, but the ones that don't say that that's organic and that should be using what you know about me and it doesn't, I don't know. It just, it just, I find it very bizarre. It seems like, again, it's like a Google Pro product that we think this could, should be the ideal. This is how watching TV can be, this is how great it could be, and it's not even doing what the other apps in the Google sphere can do.

Jason Howell (00:14:20):
Yeah. Yeah.

Ron Richards (00:14:22):
So

Jason Howell (00:14:23):
Mishaal, you got, you got a little more to tack onto this before we move on.

Mishaal Rahman (00:14:27):
Yeah. There's an interesting line in Google's blog post announcing this feature or this deadline. They say that a quick archive slash univ user interface is built into the tv. And that kind of got me thinking about how the rollout of this feature is gonna differ than it's going to roll out on smartphone. So on Android tv slash Google tv, the launcher is actually provided by Google. All Android TV slash Google TV devices have the same launches by Google through the Play Store, right? So what that means is that likely we'll see Google roll out an update adding maybe like, you know, like a long press on the DPA on your TV remote, you'll be able to archive for un archive an app from the home screen. They can't do that on smartphones because smartphones are very fragmented. And so your pixel phone has the pixel launcher, but your Samsung phone has a one UI launcher.

(00:15:18):
So Google can't push an update to every Android, smartphone or tablet that adds a similar built in archiving slash on archiving feature. And instead what we're seeing them doing is likely they're just going to be adding this within Google Play Store itself. So it's kind of interesting seeing like the differences between Android TV slash versus Android for smartphones and like how, because Google has more of a tighter grip on Android tv, they're able to actually make this feature mandatory and available to all users versus whether that's, they can't do that on Android for smartphones.

Jason Howell (00:15:48):
Yeah. And maybe if in through that it ends up getting used more than <laugh> than it is in other, in other, you know, in other presentations or on phones and and whatnot,

Mishaal Rahman (00:16:00):
It'll certainly be way more useful for TVs just you said, you know.

Jason Howell (00:16:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Totally. How do they ma how do they make that make sense to, you know, the why majority of users, the people who aren't, you know, following this stuff closely. That'll be interesting to see. Cuz if it is up on a TV, then every kind of user is being exposed to this feature, which is kind of, it's kind of a cerebral thing, you know what I mean? Not everybody's going to automatically understand what it means to hibernate an app or, you know, you know what I mean? Also they aren't gonna understand that as much if they've never run into the you are out of storage space thing to begin with, you know? So that'll be interesting, interesting to see. Well, we're not getting off of the Android TV train. There is other news here that if you have a Raspberry PI four or if you have a Raspberry Pie 400, you can now turn it into an Android TV device.

(00:16:57):
Android TV 13 to be specific thanks to the unofficial lineage os 20 rom that you can flash onto your Raspberry Pie. The code base does include the November, 2022 security patch. So very very recent. As recent as it gets the developer of this and Xda developer by the user named Consta had created an Android 13 Android TV 13 version for the Raspberry Pie. It only operated in tablet mode. This particular version actually runs in TV mode. You can also run it in tablet mode, is my understanding. But you can put it into that official TV mode and you can boot into that from an external usb drive as well. So but you don't get everything in it. You don't get Chromecast support. Since this is unofficial it does work with apps, you know, you have access to the Play Store, so that's a great thing. I saw someone comment that this probably means that it doesn't support Y Vine L one, which I guess that's something that would need to be added more officially. Right? And if that's the case, does that, does that eliminate the support for high def video? This is something that I didn't have time to, to research, but if so, that seems like kind of a big deal.

Mishaal Rahman (00:18:21):
Yeah, this build only supports wide fine L three, which is software decoding. So that means it'll be limited to like four ADP video in like Netflix or many other applications that use wide find drm. But on top of that, this build also doesn't support hardware video decoding. So even if it could like support seven 20 P 10 80 P 4K video, it would run that very poorly.

Jason Howell (00:18:47):
Okay. So it's a couple steps forward, couple steps back. Yes, you can. It's like, are you gonna wanna,

Mishaal Rahman (00:18:53):
It's one of those can you do it? Yeah. But

Jason Howell (00:18:55):
Should you do it can. Right. <laugh> so neat. And you know what, and the, the tinkerers, you know, that have the raspberry pies and everything, I think a lot of times is just, you know, they're just excited when they can get it to do something that I couldn't do before. And this is

Ron Richards (00:19:10):
Just excited just to get it to do something period. Like just stop there. I

Jason Howell (00:19:14):
<Laugh>

Mishaal Rahman (00:19:15):
I've seen people turn these they use these Android tv or they don't use the Android TV bills per se, but like the regular Android bills for the Raspberry Pie and they turn them into like, semi decent emulation, like retro consoles.

Jason Howell (00:19:29):
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Mishaal Rahman (00:19:31):
Platforms mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and you guys should get a lot of decent mileage out of it cuz they have some somewhat decent CPUs and, you know, whatever storage you can hook up to it. And there's, there's some videos on YouTube showing that often. I think that's one decent use you can get out of this.

Jason Howell (00:19:43):
That's, that's a huge use. I, I have a raspberry pie at home in a in an arcade cabinet that was built on Twi years ago. And, you know, it's, I think it's a Raspberry Pi three in there. But yeah, for emulation of a certain kind of generation of games, it's, it's good up to a certain point. Things powerful enough to do that. You know, obviously putting Android tv 13 on there, different story. Like on one hand it seems like it would be more than sufficient, more than capable to do that. And as hardware it probably is, it's just, it runs into some of these software snags, which don't allow you to watch Netflix higher than four adp. So <laugh>, you know, keep that keep that in mind. It's not, not totally ideal, but interesting nonetheless. So there you go. All right, Ron, you got the last one.

Ron Richards (00:20:36):
I do got the last one, but actually Mishaal's got the last one for Mishaal. You, you were in the new, you, you, you had some breaking news here that you were able to uncover because you spotted a new feature coming soon to the Google Play Store. And it's a prompt that will ask users to update an app that's crashing if an update is available. And currently on Android, you get the, Hey, this app is crashing a lot, do you wanna restart it? But now it will prompt you to do an update. Mishaal, you know, don't you tell us what you found and specifically what, what this means and

Mishaal Rahman (00:21:08):
How you found it. So what I found, well, okay, how I found it is there's a page, a Google support page called What's New in Google System updates. And this is where Google outlines features coming in versions of the Google Play Store, Google Play Services, and Google Play System updates, which is the project mainline updates. And this is kinda like a very generic, like a lot of the, a lot of the items they add are very vague. They don't really tell you much about what's going on, but we can sometimes figure out new features that are coming to updates to these applications or services. So one of the lines that was added says help users to resolve app crashes with new update prompts. And then it had a it mentioned like a, in brackets number eight, and it said this is coming with Play store version 33.2.

(00:21:56):
And basically like, it was kind of, that told me enough, but I just like decided to decode the Play Store application to see if there's any relevant strings or anything related to this feature. And it looks like there's something in Google Play Store that will like prompt you to update the app to fix crashes. So like whenever an application crashes, the Google Play Store might throw up some dialogue saying, Hey, this app stopped working, but the latest update may fix this issue. Why don't you go ahead and install this update and see if it fixed the issue. And this might help solve any problems you might have, but obviously it only, it depends on there actually being an update available for the app that's crashing. And so if there isn't an update available, well then, you know, you're stuck with an app that's crashing.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:22:45):
This does come up a lot though, like not right now because the app I'm working on is not released, so we don't have to deal with this yet.

Mishaal Rahman (00:22:52):
I thought you were gonna say not, not right now because the app that I'm working on never crashes.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:22:56):
Never. Oh, it's perfect's whatsoever. No bugs whatsoever ever. But yeah, like it, I, for like every app I've worked on, especially at trla when we we're a little more hands on with like, by reports and support, you know, like usually the first thing they ask you is, are you updated to the most recent version? It's not like all the, it's not like, I'd say like a good percentage of the time. A lot of it is, hey, you know, we just, we we, there's a bug and we like, we push an update and a lot of times people aren't necessarily on the latest version. And I, I get why sometimes it's not apparent, it's not easy. And also the way that, you know, the Google place through updates, your app is a little bit opportunistic kind of based on your usage. So I actually was checking some of my apps and some of several of them are out of date. So this actually is really nice. And it, again, it, the user doesn't pay attention or doesn't actually fall through then it's kind of here nor there. But it is kind of nice to have that visibility. I think sometimes, like people don't necessarily think about up updating the app when they get a crash. They're like, oh geez, what happened? Especially if they're not like a tech enthusiast. So I, this is cool. Like, this is just like a simple like little thing that maybe like will speed along sport processes, so yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Ron Richards (00:24:02):
Yeah. This is, this is the nice kind of thing you like to see that comes out of it was like, Hey, here's something that happens. How can we you know, you know, evolve it to being more than just telling you this app is crashing a lot, but like, hey, you should, you should update

Mishaal Rahman (00:24:16):
It. Yeah.

Ron Richards (00:24:17):
So it was interesting. That's what I'm cool with it. So. Nice. Good job, Mishaal. Thumbs up.

Jason Howell (00:24:22):
Wait, way to read that update. <Laugh>

Mishaal Rahman (00:24:26):
Somewhat related to this when I think I'm sure you've seen like reports from developers who accidentally pushed an app to 100% production and like they discovered, oh, there's a, there's a catastrophic bug that causes the crash on boot and like it's too late. They've already pushed it to a hundred percent. There's no way to stop the rollout. And I've seen like, you know, some developers recommend, oh, instead of pushing it to a hundred percent, why don't you just do a stage rollout and do like 99.99% so that you're able to stop the rollout. Like even though it's technically almost a hundred percent, you're able to stop the rollout using Google plays built in feature to manage rollouts. And like, I'm wondering, like, I think maybe Google should just make that the default option. Make it so even if you push a hundred percent of users, you can still stop the rollout if you want. Mean like, go save a

Huyen Tue Dao (00:25:14):
Lot of headache period of time.

Mishaal Rahman (00:25:15):
Yeah, yeah. Give like a, you know, like a Gmail undo feature, right? <Laugh> do that because right now you push something that's bad, you gotta go through the review period again to push another update. And that could be like three days.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:25:27):
Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's like a hard balance. Like a lot of times, like that's okay. A couple times at TR we like, I think there was actually like a database like with all, with all good, like, I mean, this crap happens. Like, you, you overlook something a couple times we had like a database change database usually a little bit harder especially for us because like when the database version increments, that means the data's changed, so there's not really much rolling them back. So yeah, there were a couple times where, I don't know, it's just, it's, it's hard. Yeah. but we, I think I, we've always had like a very slow, like, spin up. Like I think we, we were very conservative at Trello. We were like, okay, do I think we did five 10? We like some fach sequence or something really nerdy about it, but yeah.

(00:26:09):
 Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, no those things have happened. We have pushed things and then we somehow get to 50% and then we hit like some kind of like critical mass where oh my gosh, all of a sudden thousands of her bug reports are coming in. Like, everything was fine, fine, fine. I was like, so yeah, I mean, like, I think I do think like some safety buffer would be nice cuz I think that, I don't know, sometimes you just think this is is no big, no big deal. And then something that was just something hiding like out of the corner, like a jump schedule's like ra, everyone's crashing in their dating basis career. I, no, sorry, I

Jason Howell (00:26:38):
You're not getting any sleep

Huyen Tue Dao (00:26:40):
Tonight. Way past Halloween. No, no. There there've have been, there have been times. There have been times I'm sure. So I'm sure not as, that would be nice to build, to build in a little safety net for people, because deaths are people too.

Jason Howell (00:26:52):
That's right. There's another shirt, another, another. All that animals. Oh my gosh,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:26:56):
I like it. Should make that mm-hmm.

Jason Howell (00:26:58):
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(00:29:05):
And with 24 7 by 365 coverage, whether you experience a Christmas Day security event, let's hope that doesn't happen <laugh>. But if you do, or let's say half your team is out sick, suddenly well, you can trust that Secure Works has your back there behind you. Many companies are facing a shortage of security talent. Certainly you've heard about that. Or he might be impacted by that. Secureworks acts as an extension of your security team on day one. They're alleviating cybersecurity talent gaps. That's gonna allow you to customize the approach on the coverage level that you need. And what happens if you've already found an intruder in your system. If you notice that there's no need to worry, want you to write this number down if you haven't already written it down, cause we've read it in a few different other episodes. But do it now.

(00:29:57):
1-800-BREACHED. It's also very easy to remember and that's a good thing. That number's gonna connect you with the SecureWorks Emergency Incident Response Team. They can provide you with immediate assistance 24 7 in responding to and remediating a possible cyber incident or data breach at SecureWorks. You can learn more about the ways today's threat environment is evolving and the risks that it can present to your organization, including case studies reports from their counter threat unit and more. Visit secureworks.com/twi, you'll get a free trial of Tais xdr, that's secureworks.com/twi. Secureworks defending every corner of cyberspace, and we thank them for their support of all about Android. It's good to get you back episode after episode. Thank you. Secure Works. All right. And with that, we've got some hardware to talk about. Let's dive right in into the hardware pool.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:30:58):
That sounds like a very uncomfortable pool.

Jason Howell (00:31:00):
Yeah, I mean, there's just phones everywhere. There's keyboards, there's mechanical keyboards.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:31:07):
Yeah.

Jason Howell (00:31:07):
You just, you dive in and all you hear is like, you know, it doesn't, doesn't sound very Power supplies. Power supplies, yeah. Ooh, yeah.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:31:16):
Pointy. Ooh. Yeah. and ly <laugh>,

(00:31:21):
Well, I mean, mean there is a pool of very nice discounts. If you wanna get your post, post Thanksgiving shopping on, there are plenty of early Black Friday sales if you are looking to get to a nice smartphone or get, get yourself well, you actually get other people. Get other people or maybe yourself a, you know, an Android device for the Christmas season or the holiday season rather. So there's some really good discounts out there, y'all. So if you are looking at a Pixel 7 or Pixel 7 Pro, and you are currently a Google Fly user, or if you want to be, you can get up to, hold on, I made a chart. You can get up to $200 off Pixel 7 and $300 off Pixel 7 Pro if you are an existing Gofi customer or if you're transferring you know, there's, there's usual like Provisos and like script and like, you know, fine print about, well, you have to like, make sure that you buy it on the same account that you're activating. If you're new new user, you need to transfer your number, yada yada, 30 days from shipping confirmation. But that's still a pretty dang good discount. I mean, even on the Google store. Yeah, on the Google store, if you buy directly from the Google store, the discount for the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro is like 100 and 150 respectively. So if you were a Google five person kaing, like, or

Jason Howell (00:32:37):
Google Five Curious.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:32:38):
Oh, Google Bike. Curious, yes.

Ron Richards (00:32:40):
If

Huyen Tue Dao (00:32:40):
You've been flirting with Google five from across the room and, and like kind of been like wondering if something, something could happen for real here. I don't know,

Jason Howell (00:32:48):
Google five, I think it might

Huyen Tue Dao (00:32:50):
Be the season. Might the season <laugh>.

Ron Richards (00:32:51):
I gotta, I gotta say that like even, I mean, you expect this for Black Friday with this, but since the Pixel 7 has come out, like the deals have been crazy.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:33:01):
Yeah,

Ron Richards (00:33:02):
Right. Like, like, like, like, you know, the PHI discount, the Verizon discount. A friend of mine said he basically traded in his, his phone got a Pixel 7 and paid like 30 bucks or something like that. It was like, so just, yeah, like, I forgot the math. I gotta, I gotta dig up to see what he said. What

Jason Howell (00:33:16):
Did he have a fuzzy fold four or something? <Laugh>? No, I

Ron Richards (00:33:19):
Don't. Yeah. But I think you had a, I think you might add a, not a Pixel six, but maybe pixel four or something like that, but yeah. Wow. Just insane. An insane discount. And I just feel like everywhere you're looking around, you're seeing, I'm seeing the Pixel 7 and like these almost like too good to be true deals that are just kind of doubling down, leading up to Black Friday. It just, I just, it's, I think it's an interesting strategy, at least in terms of getting the phone into people's hands. But

Jason Howell (00:33:45):
Are, are we seeing Pixel 7 s in the wild? Is anyone seeing unlike I gotta,

Ron Richards (00:33:50):
I gotta leave, I gotta leave my house to do that. Yeah,

Jason Howell (00:33:52):
<Laugh>, it's true. Yeah, that's, don't leave my house a whole lot these days. I'm either here or there. Yeah.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:33:59):
So in, in Pixel world, actually, if you want a Google Pixel watch and specifically if you want the wifi version, Amazon has a pretty decent deal for, you can get like the wifi version for 2 99. Wait, yeah. Not 52 99, not $50 off. Not bad, unfortunately. The LTE version has no, so if you go to Amazon, there's no discount on the LDE version. But, you know, if you were kind of just, you know, again, kind of just slightly like, you know, kind of thinking about lte, but you're really happy with wifi and you, you care more about an extra 50 bucks. Amazon has the wifi version of the Pixel watch for 2 99. But if you are not a Pixel fan, but a plus fan, instead you can get the one plus ten one hundred twenty eight gigabyte version for $250 off down to 550 on Amazon. Again. Like the, that's a good deal. It is a really freaking good deal. The if, if you really, really like storage the 2 56 gigabyte version is only $70 off. So, you know, that's kind of, it's not <laugh> the proportion

Jason Howell (00:35:02):
Who like storage, who wants,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:35:03):
Who likes storage, you know? Yeah. I mean, eight gigabytes on my TV is all I need. Why would my phone need more? But yeah, so, so if you are that kind of person who loves to upgrade the storage, not so much of a deal there. But if you're super happy with 120 gigabytes and you want yourself a one plus 10 get you to Amazon and get you two 50 off of your one plus 10. So there are your early Black Friday deals on some of like, you know, the hottest or like the, the flag shitiest to mid Rangest phones out there. So Oh, and a place of watch. So there you go. Happy shopping.

Jason Howell (00:35:35):
Yeah. Well, and, and also there's a bunch of Samsung price drops as well. If you want the Z fold four, that's normally $1,800, that's down to 1400. Oh shoot. I'm sorry. Put that weight outta my, no, no, no, it's okay. It's okay. The Z flip normally a thousand, that's 800. The point being, if you wanna buy a new phone and you've been waiting and you know, black Friday comes along, there's a lot of opportunity. <Laugh>, I always forget, like, and not as much with phones cause I'm always reviewing a phone, but with things like, and a little off topic, but things like audio production plugins, they always go on these ridiculous sales near the end of the year, you know, black Friday, cyber Monday leading up to Christmas and everything. And every year I'm like, well I really should have set aside money for that. And I never think to do that. I'm sure it's the same with people and, and smartphones and being able to save like five, $600 on a premium smartphone. You know, now's your time if you planned for it. <Laugh>.

(00:36:34):
There you go. Let's see here. Oh yes. So, okay, speaking of one plus, because you were just talking about the one plus 10 Pro not too long ago we talked a little bit on the show about a new device by one plus that is definitely not in the premium. It's kind of not even really in the mid tier. It's really kind of a low come more like a, a total budget smartphone offering from OnePlus called the Nord N 300 5g. I actually got one from OnePlus to to kind of give a review and a give it a spin. I haven't spent time with it yet. I've just really kind of unboxed it and started to set it up. I will say that like I set it up before the show and I synced it to my Google account, which is, you know, the, the system that we normally do nowadays because Google makes it easy to restore.

(00:37:32):
 And I did it from the cloud onto this device. And then soon after the device started rebooting very randomly on me in pre-show, like I was just on the screen, then suddenly boo it would reboot. And I'm pretty certain it's not the phone. I think it's something that's tied to my account in the cloud cuz this has happened with another phone recently. And then what I ended up doing was totally wiping it and starting fresh and installing everything manually, which ugh is, is a big pain in the butt to have to do that. But anyways, I say this just to say that I'm pretty certain, I mean, if it, if it crops up for me again as I'm using this device, I will certainly let everybody know. But I, I have a feeling that the problem's not with the phone as much as it is, there's something in my backups in my cloud backups that's, that's throwing off devices when I set it up.

(00:38:24):
So anyways, I don't know what the heck that could be, but nonetheless, the Nord and 300 5g, I did get it. And I'm gonna be kind of giving it a little bit of a, a spin here, $228. So when you're talking about price category, this is a very affordable device and you can kind of see like design wise, it really, it really takes some inspiration from the iPhone 14 and the, and the pro, I mean, it has a lot of, you know, it has that kind of like flattened edge, which I feel like we're not seeing a whole lot of in the Android space these days. I mean, there's just some qualities of this that, that feel very iPhone to it to me. But this, this back does a good job of pretending to not be plastic, but it is, but it feels pretty, you know, it feels pretty solid and sturdy sometimes with plastic backs.

(00:39:16):
I feel like there's like a hollow quality to it, and I'm not really getting that with this. But yeah, 6.5 sorry, 6.56 inch LCD display does have 90 hertz refresh, so that's not a bad thing to have a $228. It also has a 5,000 million amp hour battery, which is that's, that's a lot of battery for for this price especially. So, and like, oh man, I didn't write down the, the fast charge, but I wanna say it's something like 33 wat or something like that. So, you know, again, you can charge it up a little bit faster. It doesn't have things like wireless charging, that sort of stuff. But but anyways, I guess in the $228 category, I mean I, I'm, I'm thinking back to the story that you, you were just talking about when, and the pixel six A with that price drop of $150 brings that down to I think $300.

(00:40:11):
So this is, you know, at the price that this is selling without a sales price, this is, you know, 60 ish, 70 ish dollars less than what you get the six A for right now on sale. I'm just thinking like the six A is a solid solid choice in that price category, but if you wanna save a little bit more, you know, maybe you're looking at a device like this also keeping in mind that you gotta be on T-Mobile in order to use this. But being that I'm with Mint Mobile one of the sponsors on the network, I, I've been using Mint Mobile for years. They are using the T-Mobile network and vno. And so I'm going to put this through some paces for the next week or two and see how it goes. It's been a while since I've like spent solid like ongoing time with a, a lower budget device.

(00:41:01):
So I'm really curious to see kinda how that goes. The little fingerprints, I like the look of it. Yeah, yeah, I do too. I think, I think design wise, you know, again, it, it always for me goes back to the if one plus does one thing really well, pretty consistently, I feel like their designs are are pretty solid. They're pretty top edge. Yeah, it's really nice. Very clean. Yeah, very clean. Does not feel like when I pick this up, I do not, I do not immediately think, well this is a cheap device. You know what I mean? Like $225 is pretty darn inexpensive. It definitely feels more expensive than the price might lead you to believe. So,

Ron Richards (00:41:43):
So yeah, I, I gotta say it's been, it's been a while since I've had a one plus in my hand. Yeah. In my inventory in my arsenal.

Jason Howell (00:41:50):
What, what was the last one? If you can remember?

Ron Richards (00:41:55):
The one plus eight, maybe

Jason Howell (00:41:57):
One plus eight

Ron Richards (00:41:58):
Or seven might have been seven Pro with the little camera that

Jason Howell (00:42:02):
Popped up. Oh, wow, okay. So yeah, you're talking earlier era. Yeah,

Ron Richards (00:42:05):
Yeah, yeah. Earlier. Yeah, might have been that. But I, I will say like, I always like their build, like, but like, it, it, it always, it feels like they, they have an identity, right? And it always feels like, yes, this is a one plus phone and so I'd be down to check out a one plus phone again, but we'll see.

Jason Howell (00:42:22):
Yeah. Well I think that, you know, they've got another flagship on the horizon. I think I saw a news story, you know, we're starting to weeks and everything with whatever their next latest and greatest is. I just, I, I think it's been interesting for me to see the story around OnePlus kind of shift in the last two to three years where, you know, for the, for the longest time they were that enthusiast brand. There was excitement there that they were doing a lot with the, you know, in a, in a price category that that was really a lot lower than the quality you were getting. And like I was just saying, like, I think there's still truth to that, but some of the luster has really, the Shine has, has really kind of has has muted over the last few years and you know, it's, it's hard to know if that's just like their brand has matured or if they're, you know, if, have they actively done things that have soured people's taste on, on what they're doing in smartphones now? I mean, to a certain degree

Ron Richards (00:43:25):
Soured. Yeah.

Jason Howell (00:43:26):
They, they've made themselves way more accessible in a lot of different ways and maybe that just kind of removes a little bit of the unique quality of, of their,

Ron Richards (00:43:33):
Have they grown, have they grown into complacency?

Jason Howell (00:43:36):
Yeah, I don't know. What do you think, Mishaal, I'm curious to know kind of your thoughts on, on the evolution of OnePlus in the last few years and kind of how people are responding to them versus the way they used to. I mean, you were at Xda for years, so you were, you were drowning in, in one plus coverage at one point. <Laugh>, I don't know about you personally, but the, but Xda in general.

Mishaal Rahman (00:43:59):
Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of the, the enthusiast opinion on OnePlus has soured somewhat based on, you know, them switching over to Color os them becoming less, I guess, friendly with the developer community. Yeah. But I think overall it's been success for the brand to do this because it's allowed them to tap into greater resources, reduce costs across the board. Color OS is not, I I I never thought it was a bad operating system. It's different. It's not what people were used to with Oxygen os it has some different behaviors, different ui, it's more iOS like, which is I guess the, the main criticism people had of Color Os. But I never thought it was bad. And I think it is a solid direction for one supposed to be going in, but it does feel like they've kind of lost their identity. Yeah. It does feel like they're just, they're just now people always accuse them of being an oppo subbrand and now it really feels like that's what they are.

Jason Howell (00:44:55):
Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think you, you nailed it. That's ex exactly where I was, where I was trying to go. That that identity, that kind of unique quality about them has really kind of flattened or at least the perception is that that's, that's the case. At the same time they're doing something right because they're in carrier stores now, at least here in the us And that's really, if you are a smartphone brand and you want to be a air quote success, you gotta be in the carrier stores and you gotta do what you gotta do to get there. And being the old school OnePlus brand where they were only selling online they were really catering to the enthusiast, developer friendly, all that kind of stuff you know, you, you're just not as easily going to end up in the carriers where, which is where I think you move a lot of devices like it or not here in the us it's just the way it is. So, so yeah. So the Nord M 300, I'll give it some give it some time and let you know what I think in the coming weeks. You can look forward to that. Mishaal, you have this next story, it seems like every, every little segment is a, is a Mishaal, there is a Mishaal thread in there. Tell us a little bit about how, how 32 bit support was ejected from the Pixel 7 and then now apparently it's back.

Mishaal Rahman (00:46:18):
All right, Jason, so a couple weeks back Google published a blog post saying that the Pixel 7 is the first 64 bit only Android phone and something we talked about on a previous episode. So what Google announced, you know, they said it's a 64 bit only Android phone, which means that the Pixel 7 can only run 64 bit Android applications. But in reality, the tensor g2 SOC that's powering the Pixel 7 actually does support 32 bit arm applications. It's just that the way Google built the Android 13 system image for the Pixel 7 excluded the ability to launch those 32 bit applications. So the way they did it is, so the actual, the system image, it still has those 32 bit system libraries and those 64 bit system libraries both included. So what that means that is if you are able to undo what Google did to disable launching 32 bit applications, you're able to again launch 32 bit applications.

(00:47:20):
It's kind of a complicated explanation, but basically there's this os process called zygote. And if you remember, remember back to high school biology, you know, what is the zygote? It's like one of the, the forming, one of the, one of the, the very basic cellular you know, when when, when you're making a new organism, right? You have the zygote and then you spawn you know, it splits. So that's basically what's going on with Android. You have the zygote, which has these 32 bit libraries and the 64 bit libraries and every single application process forks out of this zygote process. So it's kind of like, think back to high school biology. What did the zygote do? What was that for? That's exactly what's happening with Android. And so what Google did is say we have 32 bit and a 64 bit zygote, we're just gonna turn off 32 bit one, and the Pixel 7 only has a 64 bit one.

(00:48:14):
And so what developers are figuring out is we can just turn that 32 bit zygote back on. And that's only possible because the, as I mentioned, the Android 13 image that's shipped on the Pixel 7 still has those 32 bit libraries included in it. So and this is still possible because the 10 32 itself still supports 32 bit applications. So it's kind of a, like a, it's a, it's a very hacky solution that some developers have discovered. It's not going to be guaranteed to work forever because all Google would need to do to disable this is they would just have to ship an update that doesn't have any of those 32 bit libraries included and then all of a sudden this don't work anymore.

Jason Howell (00:48:55):
Hmm. Was it I mean obviously it's not, it wasn't essential that Google make the decision that the seven B 64 bid only, obviously. So why did they do it? Was it really, I mean, was it really just to say, Hey, this is, this is the future. Why not get there now? Cuz we can

Mishaal Rahman (00:49:18):
Absolutely. Like there's, it's the future is, it's coming. 64 feature devices will only be capable of running 64 bit applications and like you can't do any sort of Android hacks to make that to undo that. Well, I mean, theoretically you could do emulation or some kind of translation layer, like, you know, with if you're familiar with M one max, they have the Rosetta two. Yeah, yeah. Something like that, you know, you could have 32 bit arm code being translated to it's 64 bit arm counterpart, or you could just emulate 32 bit applications. But excluding those two things, future devices with ARM V nine CPUs just won't support the 32 bit application binary interfaces or ABIs that current CPUs are capable of supporting. So Pixel 7 though has actually a kind of low, an older CPU configuration. It's all arm v8, whereas like the Qualcomm, StopRA and H Gen two and the, the new media text, they're all arm V nine. So Google's tensor is kind of a few generations behind, but Google wants to push developers to get ready for feature devices that are 64 bit only. So they're making their Pixel 7 shipped with this configuration where it only runs 64 bit applications.

Jason Howell (00:50:38):
Yeah, it's nice little nudge, a gentle nudge the way the way developers love to be pushed into a, a certain direction. I'm sure right when <laugh>

Huyen Tue Dao (00:50:49):
Oh yeah, sorry, I was reminiscing about zy goats. Not, not in a weird way. Just I was they're so great.

Jason Howell (00:50:57):
Zy goats

Huyen Tue Dao (00:50:57):
Are so great. No, I always thought it was funny when I first started doing Andrew development that occasionally when like, I don't know, like something would crash terribly or I was trying to dig buzz through statements. I saw Zy code in there. I'm like, what, what, what? Zy like, what's that? Why is it in my Android app or wine with my Android device? Anyway, sorry. I really distracted <laugh> memory. Elaine Rivering about how Zy codes work. Not the Android ones, not the other ones.

Jason Howell (00:51:22):
That's okay. Mishaal mentioned high school biology and I almost shut down right there cuz I, I really did not enjoy that class. So anyways, we have, we all have different reactions to Zy goats on all about Android. That's why you listen many different perspectives make different reactions to Zygotes <laugh> Ron, you've got, you've got the ad, we've got apps coming up. But first over to Ron.

Ron Richards (00:51:47):
Before we get to apps, we need to thank our second sponsor of the evening cuz this episode of all about Android is brought to you by Bit Warden. And Bit Warden is the only open source cross platform password manager that can be used at home, at work, or on the go and is trusted by millions. With Bit Warden, you can securely store credentials across personal and business worlds. Bit Warden recently rolled out password protected encrypted exports. You can export your vault in an encrypted format using the password of your choice. They also rolled out mobile username generator. It can, it includes support for three of the five aliases that Bit Warden supports Duck dot Go email. Aliases also have been rolled out with support for their service has been integrated bringing the number of supported Alias services up to five. And if you're on the duck go bandwagon duck go Mac OS browser integration.

(00:52:37):
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(00:53:32):
That's nothing you can afford that. So at twit we're huge fans of password managers here at all about Android. We've been fans of password managers for years and we're so excited cuz Bit Warden is the only open source cross platform password manager that can be used at home on the go or at work and is trusted by millions of individuals, teams, and organizations worldwide. So get started with a free trial of teams or enterprise plan or get started for free across all devices as an individual user@bitwarden.com slash twi. That's bit warden.com/twi. And we thank Bit Warden for keeping our password secure and making it easy to use it. And duck, duck Go and all the cool stuff. So thanks Bid Warden.

Jason Howell (00:54:11):
Thank you bit Warden. Appreciate you. All right. And now it's time. Speaking of awesome apps. It's time for apps

(00:54:28):
And this segments featured Mishaal Block <laugh>. Geez, it's about Mishaal. It's good. I like when we were prepping for this show too, he is like, oh, there's just not a whole lot of news. Hey, what about this stuff? It was like, well that's half the show. It is <laugh>. No, but this is cool cause I did see that there were some interconnected pieces of news about nearby share. So I'm curious to hear your take on it specifically the the share sheet stuff, because I think, oh my God, the Share sheet is both the best thing and the worst thing all at once. But anyways tell us a little bit about what's going on with nearby share, Mishaal.

Mishaal Rahman (00:55:06):
All right, so on this episode of all about nearby Share, I've

Jason Howell (00:55:09):
Got four pieces

Mishaal Rahman (00:55:10):
Of use related to nearby share to to talk to you about. So one of the first things is that back at Google io Google announced that you'll be able to share text and images between your Android phone and your tablets through the, the clipboard, the new clipboard editor overlay. It's an Android 13. So in Android 13, whenever you copy something to the clipboard on the bottom left of the screen, you'll see like a preview of whatever you copied, followed by an edit icon or a share icon. And then start, what's starting to roll out right now to some users is a new, you can see on the screen right now this little PC with the phone next to IT Icon. You tap that and that opens up nearby Share. And so if you don't know what nearby share is, that's basically Android's equivalent to Apple's airdrop feature. And if you don't know what airdrop is just go Google it.

Jason Howell (00:55:59):
<Laugh>. Yeah, it's, it's just device to device, you know interconnected sharing a final between devices, that's all it's right. But, but Apple has done, has done it really well with, with Airplay. It's, it's really seamless really accessible. You know, people who might not normally spend the time to understand some of the really kind of nerdy features hiding inside of an os they're using Airplay cuz it's just really easy to understand and easy to use.

Mishaal Rahman (00:56:30):
So the reason, you know, a lot of people compare it to airdrop is because everyone knows what Air Drop is, right? You pick a random, pick a random person off the street, you tell, ask them, Hey, do you know what Airdrop is? Yeah, they probably heard of it. Ask them what's the, what's the version of it on Android? They're probably like, their minds a go blank, right? How many people actually know and use nearby share? And that's kind of a problem that Google seems to be trying to solve with this new feature or this new change they're testing. So on that, what's new in Google system updates page that I talked about earlier, there's a new line that says that they're testing adding nearby share to the first row of the share sheet. And so that kind of had people a little confused because right now if you're running a device that's Android 11 or later and you share something like you open Chrome tap on the URL and you hit share and right below the preview of whatever you're about to share, there are usually these little chips.

(00:57:25):
 One of them will be edit in the case of like images. The other will say like, nearby or nearby share. And that's what most people on Android 11 or later that's how you immediately start sharing a link or an image or something through the share sheet. You just hit the share sheet and then hit nearby. But what Google is testing is they're going to start there. They might move that option and they might put it in the share sheet itself. So as like another item within the share sheet. And if you know anything about the share sheet, there's like a million different other items in that share sheet. So some people are worried like, what is this gonna mean? Is it gonna be harder to access it? Is it gonna be lost amongst like all the other stuff? And I think what Google is trying to do here is they're running an experiment to see, okay, maybe people aren't clicking the, the chip that's at the top of the share sheet.

(00:58:13):
Maybe we'd get more usage of nearby share if we put it in the share sheet itself. Hmm. Because before Android 11 devices and nearby Share is available on Android 6.0 and later on devices that are running Android 6.0 to Android 10, that's already where nearby share is. It's already in the share sheet. Row itself, it's not in the chip because that chip feature didn't exist until Android 11. So what Google seems to be doing is they're trying to make, maybe they're trying to make the experience of accessing nearby share the same across all Android versions. Or maybe they're gonna have both options available. Maybe they're gonna have leave that chip up top and they're going to have this button in the share sheet itself. And who knows, maybe it might increase US usage of share Nearby Share which I, we, we certainly, like I'm sure you all agree more people need to be no made aware of this feature. Cause a lot of people probably don't know it even

Jason Howell (00:59:07):
Exists. No, totally. Well, and I'm looking at these share sheets too, and mind you, the share sheet has come a long way. It's been a very, you know, like historically speaking, the Share Sheet has had a lot of hate directed at it for many reasons. I think think perfectly valid. It's never quite as, as as manicured or easy to understand as it probably should be. Or, or even co like you know, the experience is different between app to app. So they've made improvements. It's still not quite there. And when I look at some of these screenshots of what, where nearby is, yeah, I mean, I, I don't know how you improve it to make it more obvious, but it still gets kind of like, if I try and put my, my, you know, take my eyes out of my own brain and put them in someone who is just an everyday user that happens to tap that share button, are they really gonna even know what they're looking at when they see that little squiggly nearby thing?

(01:00:01):
I mean, maybe, but I don't know. It's, it's still confusing. <Laugh>, I guess is my point. It's a challenge. It's a, I I think it's a big challenge that that Google faces in a lot of this stuff. It's like, and, and not just about nearby share, but in a lot of features in Android in general, it's like, these phones can do some really cool things. How on earth do you, do you signal this in a way that people really understand so that they use it? And nearby share is totally one of those features where it's like, man, if people just understood this, it would get used a lot more. I mean, we know that it's that this type of feature is, is helpful and usable because Airdrop is a very popular feature on iOS devices and Apple devices and it's used all the time. Why can't Android have a similar you know, functionality? I, I don't know. It's for whatever reason, it still confuses people.

Mishaal Rahman (01:00:56):
All right. So while we're still on the subject of nearby share a third piece of news came out recently from nine to five Google showing that Google is experimenting with the design of the nearby share. The sheet that pops up when you initiate nearby share, and they're like adding a dash of material you design to it. And so if you pull up the, the image on nine to five Google, you'll see what it looks like. Basically you can see like there's like a pulsating like a, like a cross that's behind your user account. Just slow down the even embedded like a video showing it off. Like there's more. Yeah, there you go. Like the actual preview of your text has this like this highlight that's like a rectangular oval behind it. It's just more, it just looks nicer in my opinion. It looks more in line with the rest of material you Yeah. Elements.

Jason Howell (01:01:50):
Yeah. Nice. It really ties the room together. Yeah. <laugh> like a good rug. Yes. <laugh>, I really liked that rug. It tied the room together. <Laugh>. cool.

Mishaal Rahman (01:02:02):
Is this your opinion in the last bit of, yeah, sorry.

(01:02:07):
And the last bit of news related to nearby share is an update on what the heck is going on with nearby share for Windows. So back at CES 2022, all the way in January, you know, we're already already coming on CBS 2023. So it's been 11 months since Google announced that they're going to be bringing Fast Pair and nearby share. So you can share text images, et cetera, or pair Bluetooth accessories quickly on your Windows pc. And so people are wondering, like, I'm certainly wondering like, where is this, this was announced 11 months ago, why can't we use this yet? So I've been tracking some changes recently to Google's nearby library. So the, the underlying library that Powers nearby share is called Nearby. And that's open source and it's on GitHub. And you can actually see like the work that Google is doing in the back end to support this nearby share feature for all platforms.

(01:03:04):
And there's some hints that they're already starting. They're, they're right now working on implementing Fast pair support for Windows. So that's like one of the key features that they implemented that they promised they would implement actually. And that's that's now supported in the nearby library. And I'm guessing you could compile this nearby library for Windows and use it in your own Windows application. I doubt anyone was thinking of doing that because we're probably gonna wait for Google to announce this mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but it seems like progress is being made and hopefully we will have like a beta soon or something. We can actually try this out. Cause I really wanna be able to share files between my Windows PC and my Android phone. And I'm sure a lot of people have the same combination of Windows and Android

Jason Howell (01:03:47):
For sure. Cousin of John, our IRC chat, just before we start talking about this story, said, I'd love to be able to nearby share to more than other Android devices. And here you go. It's kinda,

Mishaal Rahman (01:03:58):
And what it's all about a somewhat related tangent to this is so Windows already has a feature called nearby sharing. And so when Google rolls out nearby share for Windows, I'm almost certain this is not going to cause any confusion whatsoever.

Jason Howell (01:04:16):
No, no, no. It'll

Mishaal Rahman (01:04:17):
Be Why don't I have window by share? No. What about when nearby sharing? I already have it. Your Android

Jason Howell (01:04:22):
Phone nearby sharing by Google

Mishaal Rahman (01:04:26):
<Laugh>. That'll be the, it's what's interesting is there are actually some applications on Google Play that support Microsoft's nearby sharing. So if you have the app installed on your Android phone, you can use Windows as built in nearby sharing to share files from your Android phone to your Windows pc. But I don't believe any applications that use Microsoft's protocol have implemented sharing from your Windows PC to your Android phone. So you have the one one way sharing, but once Google's rolled out, you'll have two way sharing. But Google's uses something differently than Microsoft's. Yeah. Right. So you can't use once, once Googles rolls out, you won't be able to use Microsoft's built in nearby sharing. You'll have to use some application that they'll be providing to some windows OEMs or maybe you can install separately is going, I I suspect there's going to be confusion about this. I guarantee you there's going to be some confusion about this once it rolls out.

Jason Howell (01:05:25):
Sounds like it. I think you're absolutely right. And that was all about nearby share, A A N s <laugh> A Ns, as we like to call it, week in and week out. Thank you, Mishaal, for all that. And I, so this is, this is a news story that tied into something else that I read that I thought would be kind of an interesting quick discussion we could have. So first of all, the news story, Google Assistant is rolling out a new feature for Podcast Discovery. So you already know that with your Google Home or your Google Assistant, you can say, play this podcast and it'll play it from the beginning, right? Well, they're adding in new functionality so that you can search by guest. So you could say, you know, as the example from this nine to five Google article was play the Pivot episode with Bob Iger. You could search by topics, you could say, play the stuff you should know episode about the Star Wars Holiday Spectacular. Like, this is actually really cool that you could just do this with a voice command search by episode, play the story Pirates episode about the holidays. So what, Ron, you've got thoughts.

Ron Richards (01:06:35):
I'm a little critical of, I'm a little critical of this because, is this how people use podcasts?

Jason Howell (01:06:41):
I don't know. Yeah, it's a good question.

Ron Richards (01:06:43):
I think about your, think about your usage of podcasts, right? So like, you have a podcast player, you subscribe to your podcasts. Yeah. Those are the ones you listen to. You might discover a new one, but you're, you're in the act of doing it. You go into Spotify or podcast or whatever app you use and you download that episode and you subscribe to it, that sort of thing. I don't think I've ever thought, wow, I wanna play that pod this podcast with this guest. Like, you don't, it just doesn't think that way, you know? Like, I don't know, it's like, it is cool, but I just don't see people using this practically.

Jason Howell (01:07:14):
I could see, I have definitely looked for podcasts that had a certain guest on them. Yeah. Like

Ron Richards (01:07:22):
A WTF episode or something like that

Jason Howell (01:07:24):
Where you, or just a person like Brene Brown, let's say so, you know, play a podcast interviewing Brene Brown. I might not know the name of the podcast, but I know that I want Brene Brown to be the guest that is interviewed. Yep. that would be really helpful because, you know, as we know, after however many years we've knew in podcasts, it's like certain people, like, that's part of their circuit. That's their circuit is they hop from show to show and they do their little thing and, and whatever. It's just kind of part of how podcasting goes. But, but I'm also kind of reminded, like I just shared a podcast called Tape Notes with a friend of mine who's a musician. I say, Hey, you know, I've been listening to this podcast. It's been really inspirational to me. You should definitely check out the episode with DJ Shadow. So he, so I could see him saying, Hey, g, play the Tape Nose podcast episode with DJ Shadow. And that would actually be really handy, right? He might not care about any of the other podcast episodes in that feed, but he could get right to the one that I recommended. But how often does that happen? Not very often, right?

Ron Richards (01:08:24):
Yeah. It's like, interesting. Anyway, let's hear the rest of this

Jason Howell (01:08:28):
<Laugh>. Well, so, so this news was, was I thought, just kind of interesting. Like, hey, yay, I love more exposure for podcasting in functionality like this. But this reminded me of another article of which I had only read the headline at this point about Amazon and the A L E X A being a colossal failure. And apparently after 10 years, 10 years now that the Amazon Echo has been around, if you can believe that, go, go and watch that, that premier the, the very first video. Remember that staged that like staged video of the family using their echo for the first time. It's hilarious. 10 years later. Apparently it's losing money, 3 billion in, in Q1 2022. It's on pace to lose 10 billion this year alone. Double the losses of any other division at the company. And as we know, Amazon's got a lot of layoffs happening.

(01:09:22):
All big tech companies right now are, are, you know, at least in the process of analyzing and reducing staff, Amazon sells, apparently a lot of these echo devices. I mean, they're always on sale, but they're always selling it for cost apparently. And they're, they aren't really generating revenue for the company after the fact. So this is all Amazon related, but it got me thinking about the Google Home and what we think, like, is this just indicative of this type of device or this type of voice service? Like I know Amazon, you know, early on especially, we're thinking, oh, people will buy products from Amazon using their voice. And I always thought that was kind of ridiculous. Like, I'm sorry, I wanna look at my thing on my screen to say, yes, that's exactly what I want this $50 to buy. You know, not not do it in the,

Ron Richards (01:10:12):
I will say, I will say my, my sister's family, I always use my sister as an example, but my sister, they got an Amazon, they got a device from Amazon that they could talk to and talks to them, and they embraced it. And like, I was just over there this weekend and like, like something came up that, and they, they said, Hey, add this to my shopping list. And it, and it, it added it. And like, so they're, they're, they are integrating it and using it, you know I don't know if they're shopping directly from Amazon, it's, it's going to like a shopping list, like in Google Keep like what, you know, like what we use Sure, sure. When go the supermarket, they, they, but still, but like, that's still an interaction that they're using via voice. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Which I find interesting, but like, it also doesn't get used as much as it did when it was a novelty. When you're like asking it questions and doing stuff like that and all that, that sort of deal.

Jason Howell (01:10:57):
It can tell me anything I want to know. Isn't that cool? And now it's just like, yeah, it's just shut up <laugh>. Shut up Google.

Ron Richards (01:11:04):
By the way, can I, speaking of that, by the way, like again, I feel like I, you know, I ranted about Google tv, but like a couple of days ago I got so annoyed because I, in my bedroom, we have a go, we have a Google Home Mini, and I was getting ready and I said, you know, hey G, what, you know, what's, what's the temperature? You know, temperature right now. And it's like, you know, the temperature in, in, in Long Island is, is, you know, 32 degrees. And it's like, did you know that you, and then basically explained to me, when you say good morning to Google, Google Home, what happens? It's like, did you know that you can hear your schedule and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, yes, I've been using you for years. I know that like, don't, like, and like it's, I don't like using voice to tell me more than what I'd asked for.

Jason Howell (01:11:47):
Yeah, yeah.

Ron Richards (01:11:48):
Getting that

Jason Howell (01:11:49):
Voice. Our,

Huyen Tue Dao (01:11:50):
Our, our mini does that a lot actually. And specifically r b likes to suggest, and I'm like, how long have you been in this house? I know, right?

Ron Richards (01:11:57):
Or do you look at the room, read the room, Google

Jason Howell (01:12:00):
I know you know who I am. I've got voice match on, you know who I

Huyen Tue Dao (01:12:04):
Am. Yeah. You, you know who I actually, I don't know. I, I feel like my UB Max or I think both of us feel like our UB max is having issues like the when you, you have a timer going and you are supposed to have been able to say stop to stop it, she won't do it for me no more. She lets me scream at her to the top of my lungs. Actually, I dunno if I've told this antidote yet, but we both, my husband and I have been study Japanese, so we actually have our net sub max set to like allow for Japanese input. Oh. And I once asked her to do something in Japanese and she refused and then responded to me in English, and then my husband said the exact same thing to her, and she did it and then responded back in Japanese. So she's judging me, y'all. She finds my Japanese un unworthy. The mediocre, apparently. So.

Jason Howell (01:12:47):
Wow. Well, I'm just realizing we've got a, we've got a vacation coming up to Costa Rica next year, and I'm thinking, I've been thinking like, Ash, how do I get our family really, you know, kind of in the mindset of speaking Spanish and you know, leading up to it. That's a really great, great way to do it. I

Huyen Tue Dao (01:13:03):
Like that. It is funny. It can do both. So, you know, even if you kind of give up, you can just default to English, but yeah, right now ours is set up in like Japanese, so it's, it's kind of good immersiveness, but you know, if you really need to do something Yeah,

Jason Howell (01:13:15):
Yeah, yeah.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:13:15):
You could do that. It's no big deal. Yeah. Do that,

Jason Howell (01:13:17):
Do it. Interesting. So anyways, I just thought it was an interesting kind of perspective, you know, and, and also just realizing like, whoa, it's been 10 years since we've had like devices like these in our, in our homes. You, you know, and, and we've, at least in our family, like they, we, we still use them on a very regular basis. Mind you, we don't use them for all the things, you know, that I think when you first get these devices, you know, when they were really selling 'em hard early on, it was like, oh my, just think of all the things, the ways this is gonna, you know, make my life easier. You know, we're using it for music, we might be using it for time or we're, we're using it for weather, you know, <laugh> pretty basic stuff. But I

Ron Richards (01:14:03):
Mean, yeah, I'm, I'm, I mean the, the Google Home nest Hub. Nest Hub is is a media device. It's, is YouTube music and Netflix, as we talked about last week. Yeah. Which by the way, it is now working again, I know I posted on Twitter about this, but like Google actually did resolve my issue that I talked about last week. And Netflix and Google Assistant are now connected and it works on a desktop again. So go, go complain. If something's not working the way you need it to be, they'll fix it. But yeah, and I use it for kitchen timers and what's the temperature? That's basically it. Every now and then a search, I ask, I asked that what the Disney stock price was yesterday, and it told

Jason Howell (01:14:35):
Me Yeah, yeah. Every, every once in a while or, or my girls my younger daughter's in the other room doing her math homework and then I'll hear her say, Hey, ge, what's blah, blah, blah by blah, blah, blah. I'm like, Nope, nope, you can't do that. You gotta figure it out on your own. Google's too good <laugh>, but she's figured it out.

Mishaal Rahman (01:14:53):
You know, I wonder if the, if, if the next year's Pixel tablet is actually kind of in response to this market trend. So like, I was actually kinda surprised to hear how much money like Amazon is losing on Alexa. Yeah, I was too. And I'm sure the figures probably aren't very great for Google either, you know, like, I would've agree. As you mentioned, you probably don't use your, your Nest mini smart speakers to do much other than like set timers or listen to music, like Right. Google probably doesn't extract much revenue from you after you buy the hardware, and they probably don't make money, much money off the hardware either. But the Pixel tablet though, you're going to be presumably using that as a tablet, like a regular device at home, probably making purchases through Google Play or, you know, through many of the other ways that Google can extract money from you while you're using the device. So maybe, you know, maybe this is like their, it's all the pixels tablet already feels like a kill three birds with one stone product, considering it's gonna, it's going to be like a, like a tablet and a smart speaker and a smart display. Plus maybe it's in response to hey, we can actually make a lot more money off users using this as a tablet. So who knows, maybe this, maybe that might have been one of the reasons why they're making this product.

Jason Howell (01:16:02):
Yeah, yeah. It's interesting as I'm hearing, hearing you talk about that, because I, I think what I'm struck by is just how different Amazon's mission is versus Google's mission. I mean, well, I mean, they're both, they're both major companies. They, they wanna make money obviously, but Google really has, has positioned its entire business around search and around, you know, search and ads and, and that sort of stuff. So from, from Google's perspective, these devices, I would guess are much less about actually making them money and much more about, you know, the, the, the knowledge graph, tapping into the knowledge graph keeping people familiar with you, with thinking of Google when they think of, you know, needing to do something that, that has something to do with, with, with knowledge or search or whatever the case is. Because the more people are, are bought into the Google ecosystem, the more they are exposed to the things that really do make Google a lot of money versus Amazon, which they're making this piece of hardware to tap into their sales service, you know, their store, basically. And when I think of these devices, I, I'm just not in the category of person that thinks, oh, this is gonna be a really great way for me to buy things. I just have never thought of that device in that way. And so it just kind of shows how different the companies are and maybe their, their goals with these devices are quite different.

(01:17:31):
So anyway, <laugh>. Anyway. alright, so well when over to you, cuz you got the JR tip.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:17:42):
Yeah, so I think one thing that's interesting about, you know, chats and like our kind of modern, like wells modern been like 20, 30 years of, you know, asynchronous, chatting over messaging, sms, like every, every kind of asynchronous thing we have. And like, a lot of times, you know, I don't know about y'all, but when I'm talking to my friends and family, I'm usually talking about three things at the same time. And that can get confusing. I always, it's very confusing. Yeah, it's very, that's kind of how it is. I'm like, you know, like talking about like the new season of bleach, but then also talking about how much yogurt I accidentally bought today, I'm opening a yogurt store apparently, and then asking my husband whether he can make me a coffee. And although three of those things are gone at the same time, so he gets confused. So if you're like me, maybe talk about one too many things at the same time, JRA Field intelligence has a tip for you and for me, honestly to, to kind of help clarify things. So Jr what you got for us,

Speaker 6 (01:18:32):
Hey gang, happy Thanksgiving to everyone here in the States. I'll tell you one thing I am always thankful for, and that's the discovery of a fun little feature. Hiding away somewhere on my phone seems to happen a lot here in the land of Android, doesn't it? Well, this week ahead of our holiday break, I've got a good one to share with you. So grab your phone. Let's do this. All right. So this tasty little gem is inside the Google Made Android Messages app. It's something we heard about in passing a while back. And the other day I accidentally stumbled onto it and realized that Google had rolled it out without actually telling anyone. So it's a new feature that lets you respond directly to any individual message and create a threaded reply, kinda like what you'd see on Slack or any other modern messaging service.

(01:19:20):
So in any conversation that's using rcs conversation with someone else who's also using the Google Messages app, generally speaking, you can now just swipe to the right on any individual message to reply to it. That'll cause a little arrow to appear alongside the message. And when you let go, you can then just type your reply. Your reply will show up with the original message quoted right above it for context. So it's not quite the same as what you see in Slack exactly. But it's a nice way to create a point of reference and make it clear what you're replying to, especially if a lot of other messages have come in since now this feature seems to be in the midst of rolling out to the Messages app as we speak. It's been on my phone for a handful of days now. I've checked with a bunch of other people and almost everyone seems to be seeing it.

(01:20:05):
So give it a look, check, make sure, sure. You're looking at a conversation that's part of rcs that's with somebody else using the Google Messages app. And if you still don't see it, give it a few days. You know how Google can be with this sort of stuff. You'll probably get it on your phone any day now. And hey, remember, if you wanna learn even more new and useful stuff with me every week, come check out my Android intelligence newsletter. It'll give you three new things to try in your inbox every Friday directly from me to you. Just head over to android intel.net/twi to get started. That's android intel.net/twi. Hey, hope you have an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving if you're celebrating it. I'll see you back here next week.

Ron Richards (01:20:47):
I gotta admit, yeah, Google message is pretty cool, pretty darn cool. Although it is the caveat, it's gotta be with someone on rcs using messages. Yeah. Which is just like that's, that's probably a smaller population that I want. So <laugh>

Jason Howell (01:21:02):
Yeah. But I mean, it is improving. I'm, I'm seeing a lot more of that in, in the conversations that I'm having. Yeah. with, with people, at least with Android devices, <laugh>. Agreed. Yeah. That's the, that's the crummy thing. If you're, if you're chatting, you know, if you're messaging with someone on iOS, you're not getting any of those features. And that's a lot of people here in the us.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:21:23):
Yeah, I, I tried this and I actually struck out, struck out, struck out, and then my husband and I actually don't use messages. We use signals. So I sent him a couple of, I sent him a couple of texts cause I just had to try it for the show. He's the only person. <Laugh>. Oh my. I like, like, other than like, I don't know, some random person from a conference I met who I know with an Android dev, they're like, Hey, oh, random, here's a message. Like, you know, it is, unfortunately, it's just rcs. So yeah, back to signal for me, <laugh>, which does have that feature, by the way. But yeah.

Jason Howell (01:21:54):
Yeah. All right. Well, thank you JR for always giving us wonderful tips each and every week. I love this that we have you know, jr's tips in the show. So thank for that. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving yourself. Appreciate it. All right, let's take a quick break. Thank the sponsor of this episode, and then we will get into some feedback, some emails that you all sent to us. But first, this episode of all that. An is brought to you by Tanium, the industry's approach to cybersecurity. It's fundamentally flawed. IT management and security point tools offer only a small piece of the solution that's needed to protect your environment. Many of them promise that they can stop all breaches when they simply cannot. Making decisions based on stale data and trying to defend your critical assets from cyber attacks with tools that don't actually talk to each other, is no way for IT teams to navigate today's attack surface.

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Kevin Bush happens to be the vice president of IT at Ring Power Corp says Tanya brings visibility to one screen for our whole team. If you don't have that kind of visibility, you're not gonna be able to sleep at night. Listen to Kevin with real time data comes real time impact. If you're ready to unite operations and security teams with a single source of truth and confidently protect your organization from cyber threats, it's time that you met Tanium, you can learn more. All you gotta do is visit tanium.com/twi. That's t A N I U m tanium.com/twi. Check 'em out for yourself. I think you're gonna like what you see there. And we really thank Tanium for their support of all about Android, for keeping everybody protected and safe and secure. All right. AAA TV 3, 4, 7, show aa. If you ever wanna leave us a voicemail or drop us some feedback, that's where you go, like like this person Ron.

Ron Richards (01:25:16):
Yeah. So Derek wrote in and

Jason Howell (01:25:19):
Derek, little salty at the top, I realized, but I salty

Ron Richards (01:25:22):
Little. Yeah, but Derek so, so salty. Derek has to say Ron's comments surrounding the use of Amazon photos is truly ridiculous. Ridiculous.

Jason Howell (01:25:32):
I say,

Ron Richards (01:25:33):
Oh my. Every tech enthusiast tells you to follow a 3 21 backup system. This is one of those for me. If you're a prime member, why wouldn't you use it? It's free for unlimited storage, a full resolution photos. The only real limitation is that you only get five gig for photo for video storage. I get that. Google Photos has a great compression algorithm, but it's still compressed, and you only get 15 gig for free. And that storage is shared with your Google Drive storage. Here's where it gets really interesting. For any photographer. Amazon Photos accepts most raw camera formats. Again, without compression, a large portion of your audience are prime members, including Ron, if I recall correctly. And this service is included with that membership. Why not take advantage of it? Not everyone, especially in this time of seriously high inflation, has the money to just pay for more storage or Google.

(01:26:14):
All right, Derek, a little salty. And let me give you the, let me give you direct answers and responses. Alright. Number one, yes, I am a Prime member. I pay for Prime. I utilize it for the shipping and video and stuff like that. I am not a photographer by any way, shape or form. I don't have any device. I don't know, can my Pixel 7 take raw? I don't even know. Cuz I don't care. Right? Yeah. So, yes, I agree with you. Yes, it can, that that is a great feature. If you, if that is important to you, it is not important to me. Totally gets you on a 3, 2, 1 backup system. Pretty sure my stuff is safe on Google, though. I don't know. Pretty sure. Like, I haven't seen, I haven't seen a major data loss there in several years. I feel like they know what they're doing in terms of cloud storage.

(01:26:58):
 I started on Google Photos and that's what my infrastructure is like, set up around. And guess what? Amazon does offer a lot of great value ads for being a Prime member. What they don't offer you is great UI or seamless integration with the, with your devices and apps on the phones and stuff like that. And I just don't have the time or the motivation to set that up because going again, I'm not a photographer, it's not a priority for me. If my situation was different, you're totally right. It would be a great perk. It would be a great way to u to utilize it, to have that great full resolution backup if those things were important to me. But they're not. So I'm happy with Google Photos. No, don't at me. I don't know

Jason Howell (01:27:38):
<Laugh>, right? I think, I think the perk is yes, but the, the point totally, totally valid too, right? Like if you do have Amazon Prime, why not? I, you know, I'm, I'm an Amazon Prime member, but I don't automatically back up my stuff to, to prime. And yeah, I mean, maybe I should, but I don't. Like, I, I go to Google photos, I go to my, you know, my mass at home, which does me, which is the second point, but it's still at my house. My house lights on fire. You know, it goes up in a, in a ball of flames which I hope never happens. I guess my backup is the cloud, but again, it's 3 21 backup, right? Like that, that doesn't follow that, that category. And having it in another place would, you know, I guess make sense. I don't know, you know? Yeah. Sometimes it's just like, ugh, I don't wanna set up anything <laugh> stuff, or I don't want my phone syncing to five different places with every photo that I take. Mm-Hmm.

Ron Richards (01:28:38):
<Affirmative>, you know, or like setting to your point, setting that up and having the need to set, I just don't have the need to set it up. So, yeah, it's cool that I have it. It's not a feature of Amazon Prime that I, I didn't get Amazon Prime for that,

Jason Howell (01:28:48):
So. Yeah. Yeah. What about you, Mishaal? What's your, what's your backup scenario with photos? Or do you have one? I embarrassingly don't have one. I've thought about it. It's out of you. I, sorry.

Mishaal Rahman (01:29:02):
It's a need. I'm not a photographer. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, as y all mentioned, it's like there's best practices and then there's what's convenient and I'm like, do I really care that much about some of these, most of the photos I take, maybe when I start caring more about the photos, like maybe, you know, if you have a kid, right? Yeah. Those photos are really, really, really important to you, then Yeah, I'd, I'd get a second. I'd get a second or third backup, but like my random photos that I take when I travel, like I really don't care about them that much. Maybe I should. Maybe there's some photos that maybe I might regret 15 years down the line if they're gone. But yeah, you know, it's something you gotta evaluate on your own if it's worth it for you. Yeah. It's definitely not worth it for everyone to have a, to have three tiers of backups for everything. 

Jason Howell (01:29:50):
Yeah, I,

Mishaal Rahman (01:29:51):
For some people, yeah.

Jason Howell (01:29:52):
Yeah. I also have to say, like, I, my own backup situation is, like I said, going to Google Photos in the cloud and then going to my na at home, my na storage. And even that, it, that's just two places. Even that gets complicated for me because sometimes the NA goes offline and I don't realize it until later. And then I'm like, oh, wait a minute. Okay, so all my photos are in Google's cloud, most of them are on the na now I gotta figure out which ones, you know, sometimes the app will, will keep track of that, but which ones are actually backed up there, which ones aren't. If I'm on my desktop, then I gotta remember if I move something into Google photos, I've gotta also remember to open up, you know, log into my NA and move it over there. It's just more things to think about, which is wow, wow. You know, I guess, what do you call it? First world problems, but but adding yet another thing into that tier, while that is incredibly, you know responsible to do, because then you're backed up again. Sometimes it's just not as practical. And I, and that's what I run into, even with just these two points of place. I, I still do it. It's just sometimes it's more convenient, more inconvenient than I wish it would be. I wish it would be more convenient than it is.

Mishaal Rahman (01:31:08):
So, you know, real talk, I've, I've actually considered setting up, you know, people, you have like a, some people have like a spreadsheet for their budget. I've considered doing like a spreadsheet of digital services just because of how complicated things I've gotten and how many different services Yeah. I've described to just keeping track of everything. Yeah. Is is so hard that

Huyen Tue Dao (01:31:25):
That is legit. That is legit. I mean, like, I, I kind of faint at that by like, every time I have like a sign up for a new service, I try to keep a Google note or even just like, tag it as like, services, literally services in my Gmail box. It's just, it's is is is hard. It's really hard. And then something pops up. Like, I was signed up for that. What was I thinking? What do I, what's on it? What is was that needed? I guess at the time I thought it was needed. Yeah. I, I don't know. I didn't, I don't know. We've wanted to set up a NAS for so long, but I mean, even as like techy people, the, like, the overhead on that is just so high and like, it's like a different skill set than I think a lot of us have.

(01:32:00):
So yeah, we're not, we're not 3, 2, 1 up in this house. Although we should be. I actually, I am for video stuff when I was doing a lot of video stuff. Cause that was really precious to me. I don't know why it's more precious than family photos, but I think because I just spent a lot on getting footage, I would do, I guess I had 3, 2, 1, maybe I just had two, one, but I don't know, even that felt like, wow, I'm running outta storage now. Especially with like larger file formats and like different things. So then I was like okay, Google Photos, that's it. Or some other kind Oh, oh, go wait, G go

Jason Howell (01:32:31):
Away. Oh. Oh. Do you need me? I was, I'm listening. I'm right here.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:32:35):
Anyways,

Jason Howell (01:32:36):
Read the room. Google <laugh> don't. Yeah. With all of your podcast functionality. Don't you know that we're recording a podcast right now? Like, read the room. Geez, Google. All right. Thank you Derek, for writing in, even if it was a little salty, but sometimes that's fine. Salty. That's fine too. Fine. It's okay to be salty sometimes. It's okay. All right. When you've got the next one.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:32:58):
Well, Scott also has some kind of maybe like opposite perspective or kind of devil's advocate for, I get some feedback. I gave, I think, was it last week when I was talking about I was talking about the pixel. We were talking about the, the alleged pixel food, alleged alleged prize of 1800. I know I personally blocked that, but Scott has some very good perspective to provide to us. And Scott writes is saying, while I agree that $1,800 is an eye watering, high amount to spend on a phone and that it'd be nice if they were more affordable so that more people could have them. It's worth taking a historical look here. Consider the first flip phone, the original Motorola star attack, which came out in 1996 for $1,000. $1,000 in 1980 $6 adjusted for inflation is equal to 1816 today.

Jason Howell (01:33:48):
Interesting.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:33:49):
So over time, that star attack came down in Apri in price to the point where even poor me had one. And they became extremely common and popular in and of themselves, let alone all the other Blands, <laugh>, other blend brands, other brands and models of flip phones that came out later for even less money. And I think that's a really fantastic point. And maybe that's that. It is, it is. Maybe like I, I, you know, Scott, I think you're totally right. I think it's worth looking at foldables and flippable even like in their own category, cuz they are, I mean they're phones. So maybe that's why I'm getting hung, hung up a little bit cuz I'm already like balking at paying like almost a grand for my flagship phones or more. Cuz I have this thing before trade in. But I, I think that's a really, really great point because I mean, remember we all, I mean, well some of us who are alive, then remember those, you know, those big phones that cost like a, you know, $20 a second or $20 a minute to, you know, back in the day when before even like the Star Tech came out and that seemed like, you know, a

Jason Howell (01:34:44):
With a cord? With a cord cord. Yeah.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:34:47):
Oh man. Oh yeah, those came with cords. Did they have a little like little purse that went with them or something with the kid to carry all the It

Jason Howell (01:34:54):
Did.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:34:55):
So I, I mean, yeah, that, that seemed like a ridiculous luxury item at the time, right? But now, like, we all have one even in like, you know, developing parts of the world. So I, it's a really good perspective and I I I, I really appreciate you looking up some kinda historical price data cuz that that's, that's like a really good point. And maybe looking at this as something a little bit different than your average phone makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So Yeah. Yeah.

Ron Richards (01:35:17):
I I I will say anybody, anytime anybody drops the adjusted for inflation calculation, I'm, I'm Count Me In. I love it. That's the best conversation ever.

Jason Howell (01:35:24):
<Laugh>. I

Huyen Tue Dao (01:35:25):
Was so surprised. Yeah. Like, okay. Okay, so, well, I I will just take it as Scott, like, I'm, I don't feel, I feel less bad. I feel less bad about this now. I did trade in though. I did trade in though. So but thanks Scott for, for giving us a little perspective.

Jason Howell (01:35:40):
Thank you Scott. And now it's time for the email of the week. John May is the lucky individual this week says Ron, I am still using Kit Kat on an old, I like how he, he singled you outrun. I,

Ron Richards (01:36:00):
I asked every, I said if we were still using Kit Kat, let us know. So I appreciate John, you letting us know. Thank

Jason Howell (01:36:05):
You. I hope it's okay, John, that I'm reading this email says I'm still using Kit Kat on an old Samsung Galaxy s3. It is running IP webcam and I have it mounted over our barn cat's water and food bowls. It is aptly named the cat cam though when hindsight cat cam with, with Ks would've been better. And is integrated with both my home assistant and my motion eye systems. I also have a Samsung S seven running Oreo and a Huawei May nine also Oreo running IP webcam security cameras in my outbuilding workshop. I went on a binge of repurposing old smartphones shortly after retiring a few years ago. I checked them every few months for battery bulge to avoid burning the place down. That's smart. And then did include a couple of photos that I linked to. This is one camera looking down on the one cat cam looking down on the cats.

(01:37:04):
And then I think the other photo is the actual device itself, or one of the cameras you know, one of the phones set up as a camera. It's okay. There's another link there. We'll show it in a second. But I love it. I, I love we've, we've asked about this in episodes past, you know, like what do you all do with, with your old devices? How do you repurpose them? There we go. It's all mounted up there and plugged in eternally outside. It weathers, you know, it stands up to the, the cold weather out there, although it's not exposed to like rain and everything, but you never know if it's outside. It's, it's exposed to who knows what kind of weather, potential, what's that cover? Everything. It's gotta, yeah. I mean it's, it's protected. That thing looks pretty yeah, well designed. Good job. That's how you do it, right? I love it. I do wonder, are there ever any times where the phone, you know, like if, if an app locks up or the phone reboots, like the OnePlus that I showed up earlier, <laugh>, and then you've gotta get up there, you know, and tweak it every couple of days it sounds like. No, it sounds like this system works really well for you. And I just think that's pretty, pretty awesome.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:38:18):
So it's nice that it's camouflaged too because I, I did have a friend who's Kim was stolen.

Jason Howell (01:38:23):
Oh

Huyen Tue Dao (01:38:23):
Because, you know, wow. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know whether the Kirks, the people that took it just didn't care that they were on camera. But yeah, like a friend of mine had a couple of his very nice. I assume they were like, you know, unify or some, some kinda similar brand nest cameras stolen. So, but I, I, but I like that actually the case for the cat cam is camouflaged to look like the roof. So if even anyone saw there, they might not know what it is. You know, just Oh,

Jason Howell (01:38:47):
Totally. Yeah.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:38:48):
That's wonderful. I love that. That's, you

Jason Howell (01:38:50):
Don't at that and think, oh, that's a smartphone.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:38:52):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, good luck <laugh>,

Jason Howell (01:38:55):
And even and even if you did, that's a smartphone from like 10 years ago. So, you know, it's great.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:39:01):
That's what you get for taking people's

Jason Howell (01:39:03):
Stuff. Steal my $20 smartphone. You know, that's ancient pretty awesome stuff. Thank you for sending that in John. And congratulations cuz you're the email of the week. There you go. You can feed your cats some extra special food to reward them for being famous <laugh>. We have reached the end of this episode of all about Android and it's always a lot of fun. And Mishaal, thanks so much for hopping on with us once again. It was kind of a last minute thing. You're like, Hey, I'm available. I'm like, heck yeah. We always love getting you on. So thank you. What do you wanna leave people with? What do you want 'em to know?

Mishaal Rahman (01:39:43):
Thanks, Jason. So if you wanna know what's happening in the world of Android follow me on Twitter at Mishaal Roman. Actually, you know, Twitter, who knows how long that'll be a thing. <Laugh>. I'm also available on like, pretty much every other platform. Just search at Mishaal. Same username everywhere else. But if you wanna follow my blog posts, that's at esper.io where we also have a, you know, you know, business managing deploying fleets of Android devices. So if you're in that MDM space, MDM adjacent space, come check us out.io.

Jason Howell (01:40:18):
Yes, indeed. Check it out. Esper.Io. Cool. Stuff they're doing over there. Thank you, Mishaal. When, what do you wanna leave people with?

Huyen Tue Dao (01:40:27):
You can find me on the social medias at Queen Code Monkey. You can kind of currently find me on Instagram, that bird site and at Queen Code monkey@masada.social. I still gotta work out how to like, make that a little

Jason Howell (01:40:39):
Bit smoother. Yeah, it's hard.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:40:40):
It's hard. It's, it's hard. But you can find me there. And you can find any Android related technical content that I do. Talks, code and video on my website randomly typing.com.

Jason Howell (01:40:51):
Right on. Thank you. And mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And what about you, Ron?

Ron Richards (01:40:56):
Yes, and I will avoid any snark about social networks, but my handle's Ron XO and you could pretty much find me everywhere on that handle <laugh>. That's worth being at, although I'm not posting that often that much. But but yeah, just go do that and I'm gonna go to bed soon, so.

Jason Howell (01:41:12):
All right. Well, almost good night, Ron.

Ron Richards (01:41:15):
Almost. Good night. Good night, Ron. Good night, moon. Good night, Ron. Good night, Google. Aw, good night, Android. Good night. Google. Good night. Mountain View. <Laugh>.

Jason Howell (01:41:24):
<Laugh>. Good night. Trash cans.

Ron Richards (01:41:26):
Yep. <laugh>.

Jason Howell (01:41:27):
Yeah. big thanks to Jerry Phil, Android intelligence. Make sure and check out his work there and yep. Keep, keep him coming Jr. I love your tips. So appreciate it. Thank you Burke here in the studio for pushing buttons, talking occasionally and deep size when he's disapproving of something we're talking about from the other side of the room. Also big thanks to Victor who is wild size. Yes, very loud, but audible to me. Might maybe not audible to anybody on the show cuz the mic is usually muted, but I hear it. Thanks to Victor even more behind the scenes publishing this show, editing it if it's needed making sure that you can actually download it on a daily basis. Couldn't do it without you. Victor. you can find me at Jason Howell on Twitter. You can find me at on Mastodon as well. Twitter, social Twitter. What, what do I even say? At this point? I still don't

Ron Richards (01:42:20):
Even know it's the problem. Macon, you don't know what to say. I will say that I keep getting followers on Macon thanks to mentioning it here. So cool.

Jason Howell (01:42:26):
Yeah, I mean, actually, yeah, it's, wow, I hadn't, I hadn't looked at at the follower account. There's a lot of people going to, to the TWI do social, so check that out. Twi.Social/ Jason Howell. I think that's how you

Ron Richards (01:42:40):
Can find, I will say I don't, I don't know if, I don't know if the, if the viral moment has hit the tech side of things, but in my other world and the comics and geek kind of side, everyone is flocking to hive social. That's a, so it's called Hive Social. It's basically looks like a Twitter clone, that sort of thing. But there's a whole lot of real estate. Like I, I, you know, I claimed my, I claimed my spot here on this, on this social network.

Jason Howell (01:43:06):
Yeah, I got my name. I,

Huyen Tue Dao (01:43:07):
I'm gonna try to grab it just in case, but the hind Android app is like in beta and it's rated like 3.0 out of five, which

Ron Richards (01:43:12):
Yeah, I have it. It's, it's not, it looks, it looks nice, but yeah, it's not great. Maybe we do a deep dive on it next week. I don't know that, that could be interesting, but maybe we should do like a little Macon hive. Like Twitter alternatives. Twitter

Jason Howell (01:43:25):
Alternatives. Yeah. There was a story almost put in today. I can't remember the name of it, but the X CEO of Waze, I think has a, has a Twitter. Yes, of course. There's a lot of that going on. Yeah, maybe we can do that next week.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:43:39):
I will say it's kind of, oh, sorry, I,

Jason Howell (01:43:40):
Nevermind. No, no,

Huyen Tue Dao (01:43:41):
No, no. Go. I will say, it's funny because a lot of the Android devs have hopped onto Macon, and then what happens is when you get a bunch of Android dev looking at an open source client from Macon so, so to, to their, I mean, like, not to like denigrate any of the efforts of the Macon folks for their open source, but a lot of the Android code was a little bit older. It was written all in Java, some of kinda the older, older, like patterns in libraries. So you, like, you got a whole, like, you got dozens, dozens of Android deaths coming in, seeing this like open source project that isn't using modern Android techniques. And it's like, oh, I feel bad. It, I had an image of like stranger things when like the bat things come in that it was like that a little bit. I was like, oh man, these poor maintainers of this lovely open source software. Here come the Android devs, like with their, the poor

Jason Howell (01:44:24):
Protected software, <laugh> <laugh>.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:44:27):
Anyway we so appreciate open source. You know, we, we like to do, you know, Andrew does like to android dev, so apologies ahead of time for, you know, ah, ah, anyway, sorry. We,

Jason Howell (01:44:38):
We, we, we wait. Hey there we go. All right. Don't forget, another way that you can interact with everybody in a different sort of way is Club Twit. That's our ad-free subscription tier. Yes. All of our shows, no ads. Yes, you get extra content, you get hands on Windows, hands on Mac, an Untitled Linux show. You get Stacy's book club, all this stuff. All, all this content that happens within the club. And then you also get access to our members Only Discord, all that for $7 per month. Check it out. It's really really a cool space to communicate with, you know, other fans of the shows and, and the hosts. A lot of the guests are on there co-host contributors, you know, there's a lot of us hanging out there. So check it out. Twit.Tv/Club twit. As for this show, all you gotta do is remember twit.tv/aa. If you get lost on the internet, just go there and we will recalibrate you and make sure that you're subscribed to all about Android. That's really the most important thing. Subscribe. You get our episodes. You never have to think about it anymore. It just appears like magic. But we can't thank you enough for watching and listening this week, and we will see you next time on all About Android. Have a good night. Bye everybody.

Speaker 7 (01:46:04):
Hey, what's going on everybody? I am at Pruitt and I am the host of Hands On Photography here on twit tv. I know you got yourself a fancy smartphone. You got yourself a fancy camera, but your pictures are still lacking. Can't quite figure out what the heck shutter speed means. Watch my show. I got you covered. I want to know more about just the I, ISO and Exposure Triangle in general. Yeah, I got you covered. Or if you got all of that down, you want to get into lighting, you know, making things look like a change in the lights around you. I got you covered on that too. So check us out each and every Thursday here in the network. Go to twit tv slash hop and subscribe today.

Speaker 8 (01:46:49):
Android.