Downloading and installing apps sure is easier now, but actually finding apps you may want to install? I’m not so sure.
Back then with the limit amount of apps available, it felt like almost everything was worth trying out. Now you have a million useless apps for any interesting on.
Even if you go to the “most popular” lists on the app store, there’s nothing worth downloading there. Discovery is still dependant on third party websites or word of mouth.
Google actively blocked a ton of their stuff from being accessed from windows phones. They even deprecated some communication protocols in gmail to ensure some features of Microsoft’s mail app would not work with Gmail (and then Microsoft found a way to make it work with an alternative protocol and Google went ahead and dropped that too).
YouTube could only be used in internet Explorer. Google refused to let Microsoft make a client for it or do one themselves. Some folks created third party clients for it but Google was quick to block them too.
Then Pokémon Go came out for iOS and Android and it was the nail on the coffin.
Edit: I forgot to mention Instagram, it was a big part of it too. I think this was before Facebook acquired them, because Facebook (and Twitter) were VERY well integrated into Microsoft apps on top of having their own apps available.
In general windows phone was the easiest platform to make apps for (I made a few), but there was a lot of sabotage from those big names. I was very conflicted because in one hand, Microsoft was tasting a bit of their own venom - as they had done the same sort of stuff so many times before, but in the other hand windows phone really felt like the best mobile OS and I wanted it to stay relevant.
Had Microsoft succeeded, things could have ended up the same as the pc market, with windows being used by big brands and Android being used by companies like 2011 Xiami, making highly customized experiences and that sort.
They say Microsoft lost Samsung to Android by being one month too late. Had they finished that first windows phone one month earlier, everything would probably be different today.
Too be fair, it was a big bet and at that point it was Nokia’s only chance of remaining at the top. It they had used android at that point in time, they would have started from the bottom in the race for the android domination that was already seeing some large companies fail. Going with Android that late would at best turn them into another Sony Ericsson unless they executed everything perfectly (which wouldn’t happen with the large amount of in-fighting the company had). Going with Windows Phone would be all or nothing. Only time showed it ended up being nothing.
Supposedly they eventually got android apps to run on windows phone directly, the app devs would only need to publish their Android app to wp. But if they actually got that far they never released such an option.
I’ve heard that the tech they got from developing this Android app support eventually turned into the WSL system on windows (the windows feature that let’s you run a Linux kernel/terminal and subsequently, Linux programs)
That’s really not a big barrier. Just add a couple folks with experience in the desired tech and any good dev team will continue to be a good dev team, even if everything changed under them.
The first iPhone didn’t have anything. In terms of features it was laughable and it could barely be considered a smartphone. It succeeded because it was a phone on a touch screen that worked better than any previous attempt at touch screens.
Everything that made iPhone relevant against Android only came out later. Apple had a large quick start on hardware and UX, Android had a large quick start on the feature set. They both worked to close the gap and now we have two very similar products.
Microsoft didn’t have that gap with Android on the OS level in any way. It could do everything. But they didn’t have apps, because the devs didn’t want a third OS to exist. Devs who just wanted to expand their customer base were making apps for wp just fine. Companies who wanted to manipulate the market into what was more convenient for them did not. Regular folks were making apps to get YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and that sort of stuff working on wp just fine - someone even made a Pokémon Go client that actually worked on windows phone, but the companies behind those platforms actively wanted those apps to not exist in any way.
It missed custom apps but all the default phone apps were really great. The “people” app already had everything the android’s “contacts” app implemented in subsequent years (everything it has today) and also integrated with social networks so if you accessed a contact you could see all their posts from every social media in a custom timeline.
The “me” app also integrated all your social media notifications into one app, allowing you to post to all of them from the same place, see replies and that sort of stuff.
I don’t remember what it was, but the “mail” app had a feature that was my favorite thing in the whole WP7, but by the time WP8 came out Google had already managed to make it not wok with Gmail.
Calendar, Camera, even the keyboard. All those default apps were filled with amazing little things. Many of which we STILL don’t have in android today.
In third world countries the difference was even bigger. The keyboard suggested local words and names of local places (no system does that these days), the Nokia maps were far more reliable than Google’s (my town had been split in half by a new train line and Google maps messed up their data with that, as some streets that used to cross the whole town now had multiple unconnected segments - if you tried to follow Google directions to a McDonald’s in one of those segments, it would send you into a slum in another segment).
Plus, the whole UI was cool and the flipping tiles were quite useful.
Now is a good time to flood Wikipedia with donations. For the first time in my life, i have just donated to them and will do so again. You can do it too for a minimum of €2, no requirement for recurring donations or any nonsense.
He doesn’t need to pay. Twitter is already worth less than the debt, if he continues to break that company apart there’ll he no reason to even consider paying the debt off.
The way I understood it is that he didn’t get a loan to buy the company, but had a bank itself buy Twitter as a loan, so Twitter itself is the collateral. That’s what I did when I bought my apartment: a bank bought it from the constructor and let me live in it while slowly buying it from them over hundreds of installments. If I stopped paying the bank would kick me out and sell the apartment to someone else.
Say a simple (hours enjoyed playing)/(price of game) equation. How many hours (you enjoyed) per $ do you think is reasonable/expected? Or is there other criteria for you?...
There was a time I worked as a third party for one of the 10 most accessed websites in my country. I got assigned to a project that has been maintained by another third party for 10+ years with no oversight. I have many stories from there but today’s is that this company had very strict access control to the production database.
Third parties couldn’t access the database directly. All fine and good, except for the fact that we were expected to setup some stuff in the database pretty much every week. The dude who kept this project running for the previous decade, unable to get proper credentials to do his job, instead created an input box in some system that allowed him to run any sql code.
You can already guess the rest of the story, right? For security reasons we had to do things in the least secure way imaginable. Eventually, wheres were forgotten.
I was very happy with almost all windows update in the last 23 yrars. WinXp was bad for a little while but soon got good. Win Vista was terrible for a shorter period and soon got fantastic. Everything else had more good than bad from the start. Win11 had zero positive changes until the paint layers got announced, with a ton of negative changes.
I personally haven’t seen windows do that in many many years (last time I saw it happen was with windows XP, though I haven’t ran dual-boot system with every windows since then, just some).
In my dual-Linux setup though, one keeps trying to get over the other in every minor update.
While I agree with you, the issues described are definitely not made up. Linux tends to remove proprietary drivers on every update and the open source drivers for Nvidia still fail with a lot of hardware.
I never installed any driver in any way other than the software center and it happened to me in every single update for several years until I finally bothered to search how to configure the update process to stop doing it (last month).
Multiple machines, distros, DEs, you name it. None of them ever not had this problem.
Not only white countries. I live in Brazil and here is also a good country if you’re a man, white, educated, not disabled, mentally stable and of german descent.
And FPTP will never go away while it benefits the only folks who go to the street to fight for things.
If you want change you’ll need to organize a movement to fight for it. Plenty of people out there wanting this system to change who would happily join movements to fight for this change but nobody is organizing such movements.
I’ve been using sublime since forever as well; Atom never really felt like a valid alternative because it was so so slow. VSCode still feels kinda slow but not to a degree that gets to be annoying. Still I could never get used to it. It breaks some system keyboard shortcuts that I use heavily (alt + arrow keys for example) and takes forever to parse files (to make a list of all functions in the project for example).
I wish sublime would update more often and have all the cool new things that come to VSCode every other week, but at the end of the day it still works better and doesn’t really lack anything that’s actually useful (except maybe for a few months before st4 came out).
Where I live, there’s a law that says all vehicles have to yield for pedestrians at crosswalks. Of course this would be a thing, otherwise crosswalks would only be as good as any part of the road. Despite this, it’s a largely unfollowed rule, to severe degrees. To the extent that me and some friends have a “running gag”...
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. With the repairability of the steam deck and the power available to it, it seems like a no brainer to use it for a bit of school work or casual browsing, Discord etc. Like you would a normal desktop....
I use it for work in the rare occasions I go to the office, but there are monitors available there so I don’t have to rely on the device’s screen.
It works pretty well but I had to install a ton of development dependencies that tend to be standard in every Linux distro but are not there in the steam OS.
Plus some coworkers have heard that I work on a PSP, coding with the joystick buttons and that is a nice rumor I like to keep alive.
Speaking as someone who tried to get into homestuck after seeing how beloved it was, but couldn’t really adapt to it… Wait I don’t really have anything to say.
Valve is also a privately owned company, meaning that every decision they make will always affect Gabe, and not someone different every week like most other companies. Valve needs to think long term while their competitors need immediate effects.
No no no, minimum age should increase by 360 days every year, that way people can still have hope that some day they’ll be able to smoke. Staying true to how capitalism works.
It’s a full chain of events that one thing lead to another. People invest money into companies in order to make more money, but they don’t make more money just because the company had profit - it that was the case nobody would have sold it to them. For the investors to profit from owning part of a company, it needs to increase the amount of money it makes compared to when the investor jumped in. With the companies being negotiated at all times, it needs to increase its revenue at all times as well. So companies’ objectives are no longer to make money, but to increase the amount of money they make. There’s no stopping point, no “we’re at a real good spot here”. If some company managed to amass all the money in the world, it would be screwed because that would mean it can’t make more money. Some companies may make some nice products and become profitable and have happy users, but even if a company makes enough money to give all of its employees a very comfortable life, it can’t, because it needs to continue increasing its profits.
The greed is so apparent these days because too many companies have reached a point where there’s no more room for them to grow, but they still need to.
And it’ll only get worse.
There was a scene in the show Parks and Recreation that happens in some near future and that scene had an ad saying “Proud to be one of America’s eight companies”. That absolutely is the future we’re walking towards.
I think the main difference is that one option is easier for the end user to occasionally take a look at what’s happening and debug without needing much context or previous knowledge, while the other is much easier for the actual maintainer to actually keep the thing working properly and predictably, as well as supporting every sort of edge case for their users in advance.
An exaggerated stupid analogy: “back in the day we had horse carts and if it wasn’t moving we could just look at the tires to check if they were stuck in a hole or blocked by some rock, but now with cars there are so many things going on that the tires depend on some internal parts that are connected to an engine that depend on some fuel and there are so many elements that can go wrong in-between that often if the car is not moving it requires someone with very specific expertise to diagnose”
(analogy is extra stupid because the horse cart is by nature inferior to the car and this is not the case with the init files and systemd, analogy would work better if the cart still had engines and fuel but that operated with the same simplify as the carts tires).
Out of sight, out of mind [ADHDinos] (startrek.website)
ADHDinos Source Links:...
Anon plays Zelda (feels warning) (sh.itjust.works)
15 years of the Android Market: The app that changed the game (www.androidauthority.com)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake (www.theverge.com)
Nadella, Gates, and Ballmer have all admitted to Microsoft’s mobile mistakes.
Elon offers Wikipedia $ 1 billion to change their name to Dickipedia (www.theguardian.com)
Now is a good time to flood Wikipedia with donations. For the first time in my life, i have just donated to them and will do so again. You can do it too for a minimum of €2, no requirement for recurring donations or any nonsense.
When was a game's price worth it to you?
Say a simple (hours enjoyed playing)/(price of game) equation. How many hours (you enjoyed) per $ do you think is reasonable/expected? Or is there other criteria for you?...
I accidentally removed the WHERE clause from my SQL query in a personal tool. Every row is now the same. I overwrote 206,000+ rows. I have no backup, I am stupid.
“UPDATE table_name SET w = $1, x = $2, z = $4 WHERE y = $3 RETURNING *”,...
why does the color of pee change when you're dehydrated?
Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11 (www.theregister.com)
Microsoft published a guide on how to install Linux. (programming.dev)
those poor little fellas... (feddit.de)
Buying medicine late at night in a car dependent city
Tonight my sister had an asthma attack and her inhaler ran out. It was late and the nearest open pharmacy was 3km away. Our options were:...
Most of us hate Microsoft, and yet many of us use VSCode
I get that it’s open source provided you use codium not code but I still find that interesting
After Axing Headlines, Elon Musk To Hide Retweet, Like Buttons On Twitter (www.pcmag.com)
What's the longest time you've had to wait for vehicles to stop so you can cross the street?
Where I live, there’s a law that says all vehicles have to yield for pedestrians at crosswalks. Of course this would be a thing, otherwise crosswalks would only be as good as any part of the road. Despite this, it’s a largely unfollowed rule, to severe degrees. To the extent that me and some friends have a “running gag”...
Life is great because… (lemmy.ml)
Steam Deck as a laptop replacement?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. With the repairability of the steam deck and the power available to it, it seems like a no brainer to use it for a bit of school work or casual browsing, Discord etc. Like you would a normal desktop....
the sad truth (i.imgur.com)
Twitter sleuths suggest a new Steam Deck is on its way, but any updates are likely to be for Valve's benefit not ours (www.pcgamer.com)
i hate that it's very often like this (sh.itjust.works)
Microsoft expected to finally buy Activision Blizzard next week (www.eurogamer.net)
Smoking age should rise from 18, by one year every year - Rishi Sunak (www.bbc.com)
A visual learning method (kerala.party)
Another reason to sail the high seas (sh.itjust.works)
$25 to rent the movie, one watch within max 24 hours after you start watching it… Or $5 more to own it. Scammers.
Microsoft Edge could use a win (i.postimg.cc)
i find it's a great tool. (lemmy.world)