Android phones, apps and tablets

My phone keeps losing contact with the SIM card and switching to "emergency calls only".

I feel like it's a software rather than hardware issue as it's always fine for a time after a restart and it was fine for a longer time after I found and followed advice online about wiping the cache partition.

Any ideas for a longer fix?

YT Music is shit for playing mp3 off the device.

Is there a free, ad-free, basic-as-fuck player available now that Simple Apps stuff is full of ads?

for playing mp3 off the device...a free, ad-free, basic-as-fuck player

VLC

I use AIMP which I found works with Android auto too

Ah, cool. I use that on PC. Didn't even think to look for it on Android.

Bought a Pixel 8, and then immediately blew away the operating systems so that I could install Graphene OS.

I think I've reached peak security mindedness now.

Was that difficult? I haven't rooted a phone or installed a custom ROM for frickin' ages now.

Main reasons for bothering? I'm still balls deep in Gmail and co so it doesn't seem like a custom OS will save me much that I'm not already feeding the beast and I'm hardly a prime target for cyberattack.

Why did you buy a Pixel, specifically?

https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices
https://grapheneos.org/faq#recommended-devices

Wasn't difficult, obviously it totally wiped the phone, but installation was entirely via WebUSB, meaning there is a web page to do the installation and you just follow instructions... Instructions are limited to "press these buttons on this order".

You can still install gmail and play store, but now they'll be sandboxed.

Under Graphene I do have the Pixel camera and Google Photos installed, but the sandboxing means I can disable their internet connection per app, they think I'm offline but still work fine... I use SyncThing to autobackup photos directly to my laptop (wherever it is) and NAS (back at home). I have gmail installed too, also for work, but that's also sandboxed, everything is.

Now everything is set up, it's basically a more secure Pixel, a more secure Android, and feels virtually no different. There's a few proprietary features missing, like having the alarm wake by turning the screen on, or the adaptive charging, but the latter of those is addressed in the Graphene FAQ.

I'm essence, less AI, more battery life, more control.

Has anyone been through Google's warranty process before? My Pixel 8, which I got at the beginning of January, completely died the other day. The person who took a look at it for me suggested it was either the motherboard or the battery.

I am at the moment with a pixel 7.

Went through the steps here https://store.google.com/repair?hl=en-GB

Depending on the problem I think it's either request a repair, they send you packaging and label and you ship it off or there is a walk in repair option at EE stores.

Idk if this is a question for here or the Spotify thread....

... someone has shared their radio playlist of an artist with me. When I try to cast to my Google home minis (individually or a group) then in classic Spotify fashion it tells me to fuck off/will only show BT devices.

I can cast the device, but not the Spotify app when it's playing this playlist.

Any ideas?

What's it like for apps that don't like rooted phones? I remember in the past, stuff like banking apps and some streaming ones refused to work on rooted stuff.

Yup, a few times. The last time they made me pay a deposit for the replacement phone which they refunded once they received my borked handset. Which I thought was a bit of a dick move but there you go.

The motherboard always goes one Pixels, bootloops-a-go-go! I should probably buy a different phone but I love the Vanilla Android experience, can't handle bloatware.

Haven't yet found an app that doesn't work, except for a single one that was documented in advance.

Not working:

• Google Pay, as Google will not approve in their allowlist a pure OSS Android for Pay, and whilst Graphene could trivially lie and masquerade as another device for Google Pay they will not do so out of principle.
  
  

Working:

• Wallet, but only for passes, vouchers, coupons, flights, etc... and not Pay
  
• Barclaycard
  
• Amex
  
• Monzo
  
• Carta
  
• Starling
  
• PayPal
  
• Wise
  
  

those are just the ones I've installed... I set up the new device whilst having the old device (a Pixel 6) next to me... if I'd found anything that didn't work and that was important to me, I would've stopped and rolled back, re-installed the Google flavour of Android, and started afresh.

but I've not found a single thing that didn't work, that I didn't already know wouldn't work.

what I knew would not work: Pay, Assistant (and most of the small AI things as a result)... and then contextually, Camera AI that involves networking (which is things like Magic Eraser, and I never used this)

so really my only loss is Google Pay... but I'm 100% happy with this as Google have positioned themselves as a Level 3 transaction provider ( https://www.tidalcommerce.com/learn/what-is-level-3-data ) which means that using Google Pay is providing them with an incredible amount of data on your spending habits, which they can use for marketing as Level 3 provides enough information to fully de-anonymise and associate to marketing profiles. I am, very intentionally, going back to using cards directly and not using a phone as a payment device.

On Google apps, I have installed Gmail (for work), Camera (for the on-device improvements), Photos (without network access for a nice on-device gallery), Maps (as it's still very nice), Calendar (for the nice widget)... so it's not like I have totally de-Googled, but I've put everything in nice sandboxes.

it's only been a few days, but predicted battery life is around 2.5 days, I only have 2 background apps running: Gms Compatibility (provides an abstraction to allow Google apps to think they're on a Google device), and Syncthing.

Interesting cheers. Looks a lot different than when I last rooted a phone and loads of stuff refused to work. I'd be keen to see if it improved the battery life for my Pixel 6 but the inability (so far as I'm aware) to just make a full backup and restore everyything to what it currently is if things don't work make me suspect I may not get round to it.

With Google One, you can make a full backup and restore.

But... it's not absolutely total, it doesn't include some local data files some older apps may have created.

You do kinda need a 2nd device to do these things confidently.

I still effed up and lost all my WhatsApp history though... so even with my careful planning things went to shit.

Signal was wonderful though, full wireless transfer of chat history from one device to another.

Thanks and thanks @RonAsheton.
I ended up taking it in to O2 to see if they could help out. They just plugged it in and turned it on. Simultaneously the best possible outcome and extremely frustrating! No idea what changed between the phone dying and today. Fingers crossed it's a one off.

Having just had my PC shit itself and the annoyance of moving stuff around, I think I'll configure syncthing. Can it work through Mullvad?

Oh, problem is, if I want to sync photos and GPX and random work stuff, my laptop HDD isn't going to cope at all. How much storage have you got squished into your laptop?

SyncThing works through VPNs and so forth, so long as there's a working internet connection it will resolve the distributed hash table and find the other nodes.

Photos and stuff... I use lots of different folders, you are not restricted to a single folder like you are with Dropbox, so I have roughly this:

• "Pixel 8" (contains photos taken on my phone) goes to my phone, work laptop, desktop, NAS, Backup
  
• "Files" (contains all files relating to home, i.e. bank statements and bills, etc) goes to my desktop, NAS, Backup
  
• "Work" (contains a scratch pad of work files) goes to my laptop and desktop
  
• "Music" (a lot of FLAC files) goes to my NAS, Backup
  
• "Films" (a lot of files) goes to my NAS, Backup
  
  

All those folders live in my user directory on each system, the systems include Android, Linux, Windows, though it also works on Mac, but not sure that it works on iOS.

In essence, different folders for different purposes, and send them to different places. I only have files sync'd depending on whether I need them on those devices, i.e. the Work stuff doesn't even go to my NAS or Backup, just the machines I may do work on.

I think my laptop is only 1TB, my desktop is 4TB, the NAS is ~90TB usable, the phone is the weakest of them at only 256GB, but that's OK as I don't sync much to it.

BTW, syncthing can be configured read-only, i.e. all devices get the things from the phone, but if you put things in the folder and the phone was read-only it wouldn't receive files back.

And Syncthing also can be configured with or without file versioning, i.e. a trash can of it's own, or some method to capture all versions of a file as they change.

Or you can just ignore those things and treat it as a dumb folder that synchronises

Ok, that sounds more useful. A one-way sync from phone to PC/laptop I could tolerate I guess. The problem is my photo library is bigger than the storage on my laptop so I'd need to replace the drive on that before I bothered otherwise I'll end up with a mess of half synced stuff.

Could it sync to an S3 bucket or something? That would be useful for automated live backup. I do regular backups to Glacier but they're like "end of days" backups and I would hate to restore from it.

Basically, I want a NAS, but in the cloud, so it doesn't sit in my lounge, waiting to die.

I also need to clean up. The old code repos I had sitting on the data drive took all night to copy to an external drive as a backup while I decide what to do with this desktop PC. A million files thanks to svn shite all over the place.

Could it sync to an S3 bucket or something?

Syncthing itself only syncs to a local file system.

What is local is up for discussion though, if you are willing to run a small compute process in Google Cloud and then use gcsfuse, this will present Google Cloud Storage as if it were a local file system to your syncthing process, and then, yes... it would be storing into object storage. However Syncthing relies on inotify from the file system to perform resyncs, and something like a fuse system will not support this, so you'd need to configure a rescan interval.

A NAS is going to prove long-term cheaper, but if all you want is a constantly in-sync backup you control, I'd not try and use object storage for this, but instead would look at Hetzner and their servers... +6TB is from €40 per month. I would just put Debian on that, install Syncthing, and let it store things locally... it will be long-term cheaper than running compute + object storage elsewhere.

If I tried to build my NAS in Hetzner it would cost around €200 per month, and frankly that means in 18 months it will have cost the same as building it at home, except the home system will be good for +5 years.

Syncthing is incredible, but Cloud pricing of compute + storage is not cheap.

FYI Ecto in the PC Tech thread suggested Backblaze so I'll have a look at both and then probably forget and end up in the same place in a few years time :)
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal/windows-online-backup