this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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This defeats the entire purpose of me having android
Like I'm just going to switch to an iPhone now. Not because Apple is any better, but because I have more family with them.
They took away our SD cards, they took away our removable batteries, they took away our headphone jacks. Now they're taking away side loading apps, and that's it. I'm done. The death of android.
Removable batteries are coming back, as they become mandatory in the EU in 2027.
Or you can already get one with a Fairphone (which also has SD card slot).
As for the headphone jack, I'm afraid it won't come back. Bluetooth alternatives are far better these days (I got both, so I know from experience), and good adapters (like Apple one) are barely more than $10.
Disputable.
I liked the whole not having to charge headphones thing more than anything.
I liked being able to accidentally brush up against my headphones or putting them down for a moment without them turning off my music.
Missed a few things.
i'm a musician, have a trained ear and even with mild tinnitus have yet to see any BT audio transmission that matches the fidelity of cables.
BT 6.1 introduced Randomized RPA (Resolvable Private Address) which should help with some of the security issues. That said I wouldn’t expect to see headphones implementing 6.1 for quite some time. It just came out in May.
I have two devices, one is my phone, and one only plays music. I only ever use my phone as my phone, and my music device as my music device in my car, and both run over Bluetooth.
It is a crapshoot as to which role my car will assign to which device. Sometimes I have to put my phone in airplane mode so that the car won't try to assign it the media player role in Bluetooth settings. I'm not impressed.
check the Bluetooth settings on your phone. on mine, I can disallow roles that a peripheral could get, like media audio, phone calls, etc
That has a lot more to do with the car itself.
If you ever want to talk about a shit OS...
Bluetooth alternatives aren't better, that's laughable.
You cant buy beyerdynamics DT-990s with Bluetooth, you cant get Sennheiser HD 490 Pros with Bluetooth, you cant buy Audeze LCD-5s with Bluetooth. I could go on and on but you get the point. Good headphones don't use Bluetooth.
The nice headphones a lot of us have had for years, well before the headphone jack was removed don't have Bluetooth.
So when you say they're better 1. You're wrong. And 2. You're missing the point.
If you prefer Bluetooth, fine, but phones with headphone jacks still have Bluetooth. You're only ok with it because it doesn't effect you and I think that's appalling.
Imagine phone manufacturers remove the ability to use Bluetooth headphones and I say "that's fine, wired headphones are better anyway". It's not about that, it's about removing your freedom to choose and it should NOT be tolerated
Phones that run Linux and have a headphone jack:
https://volla.online/en/volla-phone-x23/
https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1/
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/#tech-specs
https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone/
2026 will be the year of the Linux phone!
Hmmm. Then I would need to figure out how my authenticators would work. I have like 3 different ones for a total of like 18 accounts. It's annoying as all hell
I'd love for that to be the case, but without a lot more polish and the ability to run Android apps in some kind of sandbox I don't see it happening.
need more ppl to adopt it while its shitty for that point to ever come
or 2027. Or some Chinese variant of android on Chinese/Taiwan phone that allows sideloading, perhaps with alternate playstore and maps. I don't yet understand how draconian this actually gets implemented, but death of android/google (to me) is possible. If hardware is good enough, then android emulator will be fine for legacy apps.
No, bluetooth is not better. Bluetooth has latency which is bad for anything that needs realtime audio, like video games or any kind of live performance. It also runs on 2.4 like every other electronic Wireless devices making it prone to interference. And it's yet another device to keep charged all the time.
USB C is also inferior because you need dongles which increase complexity of your setup, it's more prone to failures. Like audio cutting off every x minutes because connection is just slightly loose or other electronic gremlins. I'm saying this having just had a gig and the MD's phone we relied on for the metronome started acting up during the performance not recognizing the dongle until a reboot.
Audio jacks were simple, analog, worked perfectly fine and delivered high quality audio. What we have now is overengineered slop that is less reliable and more expensive.
I never had one of my wired earbuds fall off the platform at the train station and disappear in the gravel, nor did I ever have isues with forgetting to charge them, let alone their case being brolen and not charging at all. And if I want to switch my favourite headphones over from my PC to my phone, I'm really glad my old phone still has a jack.
Bluetooth is better than...it used to be? Because I promise you there is no earbud on planet earth better than my open back cans.
saying "bluetooth alternatives are far better these days" ignores the uses cases for cable.
I still have a headphone jack. Rare but Androids with them exist if you go out of the mainstream bullshit.
I have a fp4 and it is VERY annoying to not have jack(I don't wanna use bluetooth because jack works, doesn't need a battery and is low tech), so now I only listen to music on my computer, but I'm planning on making an mp3 player with a raspberry pi pico.
Tbf, you can a very cheap android phone for around $100 USD, the cheapest iPhone starts at around ~~$400~~ (edit: Actually I got curious and looked it up, apparantly the iPhone SE is gone and the cheapest new iPhone right now seems to be the 16e which start at $600). Also, Apple developer account cost $99 per year, Google developer account cost $25 one time fee, so the cost is gonna trickle down to the user, sometimes you find free apps on google play and then you look at apple and it cost a few dollars, its most likely due to the recurring costs to maintain a developer account.
Also, Apple doesn't allow torrent clients, You can't use firefox with ublock origin on iOS.
(But then again, these advantages could also go away in a few years... 👀)
Wait no Firefox on iPhone? Fuck that I'm back in
There is a "firefox" but its just a re-skinned safari basicly, because Apple has some weird requirement of using their "webkit" or whatever, and no extensions allowed on the "firefox". I used an iPhone before (because I was a young adult and iPhones looked shiny) and I was so sad to find out I couldn't use uBlock Origin on it. And then finding out torrent apps are non-existent just made me cry.
Yes they do have "adblockers" like Brave or those Adguard thing on safari, but those are dogshit and they broke like half of the time, and many ads get through anyways, especially on youtube (where as uBlock Origin only break sites like 5% of the time).
Friend you can buy a much cheaper android phone, which is why I don't really care much about this, though it is still obviously bad. I hate my phone, I hate cellphones in general, they're shitty feature locked mini laptops with a subscription so I can, what, make and receive 12 phonecalls a month? Download half a gb when I'm out of wifi range? Use google maps, the literally only truly useful thing my cellphone does for me?
Anyway, because of my disdain I buy the absolute cheapest cellphone on the market that has no attached plan, once every three or four years. I got a new one last month.
It cost thirty bucks. My monthly unlimited talk and text and data plan comes to about 22$ a month.
It's a piece of shit, obviously. But if all you're doing is begrudgingly using it to make a couple calls, send some texts, scroll Lemmy while you're pooping and occasionally use a map the price is appropriate.
I just get a flipphone, and try to build some portable computing device from a Raspberry Pi CM, even if they made it 5V, for "industrial purposes" (read: likely some industry people wanted to stop people from building their own portable devices), which is less ideal for battery operation.