> Until you read the device compatibility page and see you're still at the mercy of Google.
Alternate take: good. I'd rather the GrapheneOS team pick standardized (if limited) hardware configurations to support and then spend their (many multiples less than Google) resources on the platform rather than device compatibility.
The Android OEM diversity mean the time/economics of supporting every phone with a non-Google OS were never going to work, and I'd rather have it working well on a limited number of platforms than poorly on more.
Firmware engineering and patching sucks and delivers little value to the user, because best case (you solved the issue or patched the hardware errata) something basic that a user expects is now working.
Nobody is going to switch to a platform because a phone can now make calls. Even if there are 1000+ human hours in patching some cheap clone LTE chip it uses.
As an Arab friend summed it up, 'All Arab governments like to trumpet the Palestinian cause when it serves them, but none of them are willing to lift a finger to help the Palestinians.'
Are you sure? Jordanians tried and it burned them spectacularly. And if my memory served, Egypt also tried to some extent and eventually was eagerly and happily offloading Gaza into Israel's hands. Then, they built a huge border defensive line to keep Gazan out that would make Trump's Mexican border a joke in comparison.
Could you imagine me making the same argument with other historically 'unwanted' groups, like for example Black people or Jews? If these populations keeep getting kicked out and marginalised through millennia, surely you have to start wondering why.
We need actual coherent answers to that question, because whenever the myriad number of kids in school ask such questions and get non answers, they start to actually buy the “global conspiracy” framing of everything.
It’s probably more anti-Semitic to lie and say “jews don’t control Hollywood” rather than try to explain correctly why they do. Yet, most people don’t even want to try to explain historical factors.
Egypt is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Total crackdown on islamists at home - whether Hamas or any other incarnation of the Muslim Brotherhood - but also making sure they remain a thorn in the side of Egypt's rivals. See for example the massive smuggling tunnels discovered by the IDF in Rafah in 2024, which had been keeping Hamas covertly resupplied through Egypt. Hard to imagine that Egypt was unaware.
At some point on William Gibson's now defunct micro blog*, he's about to embark on the book tour for Pattern Recognition (so circa 2003).
I'll butcher his insightful phrasing, but he remarks to the effect of
> I think I'm going to stop blogging. The act of sitting at a laptop and writing these posts seems incompatible with my life as it exists on a book tour. The only free moments available for it to occupy would be ones where I'm sitting, momentarily caught between two scheduled activities and staring off into space. I have a suspicion these moments are crucial for my soul. So, until we meet again.
The comingled ambiguousness and specificity of the observation stuck with me.
I have to admit, I had hoped that Bluesky would have countered that 300-character limitation and been a true microblog. I'm not sure why they chose to ape Twitter's limit.
OTOH, under what sequence of events would you?
Something gets big / popular enough for you to hear about it, despite having an inefficient app?
It seems exceedingly likely that a large number of companies with terrible apps just never grow... because they have terrible apps.
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