kirk781

I originally used Spotify a long time ago before switching to Premium again from YT Music. I mainly liked the fact that it supported third party clients ( I got a low overhead terminal based client on Linux setup that supports proper keybindings and Spotify connect as well). I also liked the fact that it had a good Wear OS app better than ironically, Google's own offering.

Sadly, my positives end there. The Wear OS itself had a giant bug for me where songs wouldn't add to custom playlists (they would add to liked songs, but not to any custom playlists NOT at the first position). Also, for some reason, there is an outstanding bug on Spotify Forums relating to Bluetooth multipoint that causes playback issues dating back to 2020 which has not been fixed till now.

People wax poetically about Spotify Wrapped and other services like YT Music have copied it in form of Recap but since I use Last.fm ; that did not play a significant factor for me. What I wanted was customizability. The simple fact that I can't remap the plus sign to say, add songs to most recent Playlist instead of liked songs is a downer (YT Music does better in that regard).

Other services are fast catching up. Google bundles YouTube (or the other way around) for little more the price (in my country Atleast) and gives Music service. Apple offers lossless audio(though ironically Apple's own Bluetooth offerings can't stream it).

Spotify does have the advantage that it has a partially open API and many third party apps/services can take advantage of it(and many have been written around it) though a part of me wishes that just like there were third party clients for Spotify on Linux/Windows, something like that existed on Android as well. All in all, I personally still have not found any streaming service (Tidal included since I used it once somehow) that rivals the simplicity of locally stored music.

Pre 1990s, there was supply side limit in my country and long waiting time(like years) for cars. This meant that car ownership flourished in the hands of elite only. Post opening up of economy, owning a car has become a status symbol and even villages, where once the ubiquitous sustainable cycle was the way of life, cars now rule.

Cars choke the street like pollution choke my country's cities. Trains carry hundreds of passengers, buses dozens, autos multiple, but a single vehicle mooching on the street just for sake of a single person. Since parking is a joke, people park their cars anywhere on the side of roads creating more traffic (Yes, it's a developing country). Folks here love to blame shared autos or government(and some criticism is valid) but none wonder about cars. What is the need for a single person driving an SUV that takes nearly half the space of a small bus?

I see old images of Bangalore from 1960 or Delhi from 1930s and it was wide open spaces/streets. Now it is choked to the limit. Cars have made my country an urban dystopia. There are many things I would have loved my country to copy from the US. It's obsession with cars is NOT one of them.

For me, cars are an utilitarian waste of space(until they are always running packed to capacity which they rarely do)

The title is err, not correct because the top 2 alternatives Opera and Arc are based on Chromium engine. I have seen tons of people swear by Arc, but I am seriously asking (since as a Linux user I can't use it), how much good can a browser be in this day and age if ultimately it's ad blocking breaks and it will since Manifest v2 will go soon(unless Arc folks have a solution for it)

The rest alternatives are Firefox, Zen (FF fork but honestly Atleast this was something new I learned from this article) and Tor (which is weird since it is not meant for normal web browsing and using it will not only be slow but put additional strain on the nodes, correct me if I am wrong).

An old article but still atleast introduced me to one really weird Keyboard layout

The market is India. 4 out of top 5 phone OEMs are Chinese in origin (last I saw data) with other being Samsung.

Google does not have the same brand value as Apple in India, despite still somehow expecting people to pony up in the same price range. Add to it their custom heating Tensor chips in the past years in a hot climate like India and it doesn't make for a good showcase. Brands like Nothing have made faster inroads in the Indian market both by local production and complete array of their products available from launch time.

Too bad S25 base model still has only 25W charging support and a relatively short battery capacity of 4000mAh

Even simple apps nowadays have become subscription only. Whilst I used to pirate most stuff in the past, but if the app in question is a small one time purchase, it's not bad considering you don't need to sideload updated apk's from Mobilism each time a new version is released (looks at some great cheap apps like Pano Scrobbler).

However, the trend has shifted towards the other side with everything from video recording apps(AZ Recorder), Weather apps(Today Weather) and Battery monitoring apps(Battery guru) offering subscriptions. Some have a high one time purchase option but some like the latter don't.

Battery Guru is an example of enshittification. If phones still came with removable batteries and companies supported them, then for the price of say, a 4 year subscription to the app, I could have just gotten a new replaceable battery. It's not like the app will magically stop my battery from degrading.

Whilst I have done piracy ( and still pirate stuff like films because no alternative, screw you Netflix), I tried to go the legal route for some apps since then updation and management of them becomes easier. But with the subscription scourge, I doubt devs are going in the right direction.

Some companies, most notably Google, have regional specific pricing for their products. So for example, YouTube will be significantly cheaper in India, let's say, than in the US because former's purchasing power is much lower.

However, not all companies do so and that is a prime motivator towards piracy, even for customers who want to go the legal route. There are many examples from niche ones like the streaming app History Hit to mainstream newspapers like New York Times.

I would like to focus on the latter. It's no secret that it's news app in moddable form is easily available though the games section is still off limits, I think. Still, I went to see how much their legit variant cost in my country, India. For first year, it was INR 1000, not bad, considering that rival newspapers in my country have a similar structure. The small thing is that after first year, it will jump eight fold. So, a subscription to a newspaper will cost annually more than any streaming service I can think of(and Atleast streaming services have to offload the Full HD streams from servers, news articles have a much lower bandwidth cost) and almost the price of an entry level smartphone per year.

It's almost as if NYT deserves to be pirated. It is almost as if they don't wish to take users money, even for those willing to pay. For a subscription, that is Twice more than Play Pass, YouTube Premium, Disney combined, it is almost laughable.