Definitely to this extent.

Google started making the Tensor mobile SoC because Qualcomm (and everyone else) weren’t investing enough in hardware for ML/AI. We just happen to be seeing a lot of years of investment finally culminating now.

Huh? Google was an AI company 10 years ago…

This is straight up tinfoil hat. You really think they architected a whole new chip and had it fabricated just to data mine what songs you are listening to? You don’t think it would be easier to just send that data from Android? Apple, Sony and everybody else has custom chips for ANC and audio processing, it is in no way a generally solved problem.

It’s actually sad that shit comments that don’t even make logical sense get upvotes on here “because Google bad”.

Yes. I was very excited for notification snoozing, but having only a couple options and the longest being 2 hours makes it sorta worthless.

'Tis the season

None of that matters. End of support dates are published.

What matters is when that date is set for (traditionally based on the day it goes on sale) and when the new OS comes out (7 years from now). This is also only the guaranteed support date. They can (and have) delivered updates after the guaranteed date.

The aspect ratio is an enormous downgrade from last year. Complete deal breaker for me.

Huh? This is a hardware successor to the 2020 “Chromecast with Google TV”. This device will support casting. Casting isn’t going anywhere…

That’s not entirely true. They may have the same processor but they don’t have the same amount of RAM, which is actually super critical for on device AI tasks. They recently brought all the features to the Pixel 8, but it took additional time to optimize for 8 GB vs the 12 GB of the Pro.

What does any of this have to do with Google removing apps from the Play Store?

As you sort of alluded to timing makes a big difference because it’s a cat and mouse game. The last I had heard iPhones were pretty easy targets but some of the top end Android phones weren’t. iOS 17.4 is relatively new.

Who cares. Play Services backwards compatibility for new Android APIs and security updates being separated from the OS make this irrelevant.

You must be new here. People constantly state they love the ability to lay Pixels flat.

Also it doesn’t look like that’s changing with the 9 series…

Does F-Droid often sign apps they distribute? That seems odd.

I didn’t realize at first that the 24 in the version number stood for the year 2024. That made the initial version being 7.6, then the next version 24.2 very confusing lol

It makes sense when you factor in the development and maintenance cost. How many people have a desk with monitors, keyboard and mouse but don’t already have a more powerful machine they use there?It’s a high price to pay for the 1% of users that will ever try it.

This is going to sound very ‘my uncle works for Nintendo’ so feel free to not believe me, but the last I heard it was a “talent retention project”. Google would rather let some extremely good engineers work on Fuschia, even though it that has very little value, than leave the company and build something higher value for a competitor.

The real important reminder here is that you should never use SMS as your 2FA delivery method. Phone numbers aren’t private and once associated with an account it’s far too easy to spoof/sim swap and intercept the code.

That is exactly like saying having a separate deadbolt on your door is adding another attack vector…

It’s not clear why Google wants to do this, but one theory is that it’ll run some workloads more optimally and securely than microdroid.

Microdroid is a “Parallel Virtual Machine”. The idea is to offload part of the responsibility of an app to this VM so that it can execute in an environment that is more secure than what Android can guarantee.

So nobody knows why but (in typical Fuchsia fashion) it probably isn’t something a consumer would even know or care about.