social.noyu.me

we would be in such a better world if iOS had been an open platform, jesus christ

there is no world where a GNU/Linux phone could have won in 2010 because it's taken a decade and a half for the open-source desktop to get its act together, but man, it's nice to dream about that. think of all the tears that could have been saved

actually i should clarify this. Google's Java fantasyland is also awful :) it just gets even worse when you try to escape :) why did Google have to force this particular thing on us, couldn't they have chosen Chrome OS or something :)

screaming why does the fucking built-in OS file manager not fucking work properly when launched via an intent, but the same fucking package, the exact same fucking com dot android dot documentsui activity, does work if launched independently. fucking nightmare OS i hate you

android might have finally broken my resolve. why even bother supporting an os so fundamentally fucking broken and hostile. i jump through every last fucking hoop to try to allow basic fucking file management, but the fucking system file manager won't work if you look at it funny

oh to be an ios developer!!! a world where files still exist!!! noooo but we have to replace the entire bloody POSIX filesystem with a fucking Java-only nightmare world where everything goes through incomprehensible, undocumented URI schemes and a horrendously slow FUSE layer

allow a user to directly manage files? no!!! the cloud is the future!!!! everything is the cloud now! even your own fucking device is the cloud! you thought files and folders were real? surely you mean a hierarchy of application/octet-stream documents!!!!! fuck you!

oh you think that because this device has a terabyte of high-speed flash storage, that should mean you should be able to simply access it? no! fuck you! no direct file access for you! you're going to live with our performance-destroying, sanity-endangering networking abstraction!

sandboxing??? on a UNIX system??? surely you must be joking! there have never been any kind of access control systems added to Linux, certainly not any dating to the 1970s, let alone a modern ACL-based system that could be used for sandboxing. no, we must abolish POSIX!!!

oh, you want the user to be able to manage the FILES in DIRECTORIES on the built-in FLASH STORAGE of their DEVICE? what's a file? what's a directory? the user doesn't know that! pay no attention to the fact we use these terms everywhere in the user-facing UI! no, you must suffer!

oh, but you think that now that APPLE have finally caved and added real file management to their OS, in an intuitive and developer-friendly manner, that we would give up in our quest to destroy the filesystem? haha, who do you think we are? we are Google! we are the CLOUD! die!

oh, you thought that because we are a company whose success came from the web, we would know what a URI scheme is? oh, you think that constructing a meaningful URI to a file ought to be possible? what are you, thirty years old? the filesystem is dead, didn't you hear? fuck you!

oh, so you think that just because you figured out our undocumented URI scheme and generated a URI that should open a not-directory where you can manage not-files with the not-file-manager, using the cloud-storage-provider interface, that you had finally won? FOOL! SO FOOLISH!

THERE WAS NEVER AN EVENTUALITY WHERE YOU COULD WIN! OUR SYSTEM IS THE ONLY WAY AND INABILITY TO ACCEPT IT IS A PERSONAL FAILING. IF ONLY YOU WOULD EXPLAIN THE BEAUTY OF OUR UTOPIA, YOUR USERS WOULD UNDERSTAND AND NO LONGER FEEL THE GROWING PAINS! ACCEPT, AND THEY WILL LOVE YOU!

for a limited time only you can hear me read out this thread lol https://hikari.noyu.me/etc/tmp/2023-12-04-reading-my-android-rant-twitter-thread.mp3

@hikari I like how the two platforms have inverted in this respect; Android used to be the "fuck it write to /sdcard" platform and iOS didn't let you share shit between apps at all

@hikari at plex we just went "yeah no way in hell is that happening" and nvidia flagged us for access to the regular filesystem

@hikari does it have it's shit together today? I still wouldn't inflict a Linux desktop on someone who doesn't know what config files are (and even then....)

@canteen it at least has the technical foundations necessary for making a serious mobile device OS. i am not saying that the stuff built on those foundations is good, but at least they exist

@hikari Maemo fans in the back collectively screaming "if only Nokia had their shit together" </3

@hikari it sucks that we we don't live in the future where Nokia threw everything it had at moving to Maemo/MeeGo, instead of the future where they asked Microsoft to shove their handset business into a wood chipper

@hikari every year I make an attempt to get SailfishOS + AOSP HAL running on a new phone, and every year I give up after a week. The Android HAL/mystery Qualcomm blobs are cooked and impossible to debug, and the Sailfish build process is fragile bash scripts + painfully slow aarch64 tools running in QEMU.

Maybe once my current phone breaks I'll be desperate enough to spend three weeks.

@moralrecordings well, if Microsoft's attempt to use Nokia to make Windows Phone win had worked, we'd still be in a better world. we lost so many times: Nokia's OS was surely better, Microsoft's OS was surely better, basically everything but Android was surely better