I'm looking for suggestions. The Internet has become very small over the last 11 years. My go-to for the moments of downtime was RIF. I was able to consume all the little spaces with it since it was an infinite feed - that's a bit harder now. All sorts of apps are welcome, but I'm not looking for things that require high effort or attention span (unless they are worth it). Games are fine, but other apps that fill your time are very good - preferably SFW and audio-off! I use Android, so I prefer those, but our Apple brethren are also welcome to share.

I just got a new phone, and I opted to download all the apps I usually use manually, rather than having them transfer over automatically. It's like a nice cleanup thing that I get to do every couple of years. I feel like I partially should just have a list somewhere of the apps I usually use and was wondering what people would download first (plus if I forgot anything)

For me, this was my process yesterday:
Password manager - Bitwarden - mostly so I can copy/paste my logins for everything
Authentication - Not listing these but ya know
VPN - MozillaVPN - just something for hostels and travelling
Browser - Firefox Beta or Nightly - for downloading my new wallpaper and general use (including Tildes!)
Sleep + Alarm - Sleep as Android
Car things - My car app, EVGo/Electrify America - getting around and things
Rideshare - Uber and Lyft - When I'm in a new city!
Food - Doordash, Grubhub, asian specific food apps - to eat when I'm lazy!
News - Boston Globe, AP News, BBC - Kinda obvious what they're here for
Todo - TickTick - Checklists and all that
Fitness - Fitbit, my smart scale app, and my gym app - general fitness stuff
Language Learning - Duolingo and Lingodeer!
Banking + Investment + Payments + Insurance - not listing these but yeah!
Music + Podcasts - Spotify
Streaming - D+, Netflix, Vudu, Peacock, Max, Movies Anywhere, Dropout, Hulu, Prime Video, Twitch - General Streaming
Books - Kindle and Audible
Messaging and Social Media - Signal, Beeper, Messenger, Discord, Slack, Instagram, etc. - just daily entertainment and connections
Games - Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, Nonograms, Don't Starve, Cards of Terra, Bloons, etc.

Bonus Q: I've been thinking of trying to add Obsidian to my general day to day, how? Might ask a question about this later though!

Official Announcement

NYTimes Article

Apollo Apollo (well known iOS client) developer talking about the specifics. Sounds like the API will now be paid based on usage.

It's a bit easier to have an opinion after the Apollo developer revealed the specifics Reddit gave him. Other than the NSFW part, which seems odd considering the API will be one of the revenue streams that isn't advertiser supported, it seems reasonable, of course waiting on the final price per usage.

It was never going to be sustainable for Reddit's API to be fully free. It was just silly - you could use the whole site, which certainly costs money in both AWS fees and developers doing KTLO, and not see any advertisements via the API.

App developers will pass the costs along to the user, many will likely fold because it won't be commercially viable with the additional cost, but, well, that's the way of things.

I've noticed that my phone's home screens have become a bit cluttered and figured it's about time to clean it up. So I tried searching online and found tons of recommendations and suggestions, but figured I would ask users here if anyone has any tips for productivity or efficiency, or just something that works for you. Might give me some good ideas to try out, and hopefully can benefit anyone else reading this thread.

Do you have tons of home screens or just one with a ton of folders? Do you use many widgets or not at all? Do you organize apps by how frequently you use them? Or how similar the apps are to each other? By color of the app icon? Or something else entirely?

Seriously, any help/suggestions/ideas would be appreciated.

Basically the title. I've been an Android user since 2012, but have have an iPad and a Macbook that I really like, especially how well they work together. My pixel 5 was on its way out, so I finally took the plunge and bought an iPhone 15 Pro earlier this week. I'm still getting everything set up, and I'm particularly excited to play with the different focus modes and shortcuts. I'm curious what apps and features should I be using to make the most of this switch?

I'm open to hearing from folks who have used iOS longer than me. How is the iOS dialer so terrible when it's supposed to be the primary usage of a phone, calling people?

1. Why can't I type the letters of a name in my contacts list, eg "5-2-6" for "JAM" and have all the "James" show up? Android has had that since forever because it's not rocket science.
2. Why can't I type to correct a digit in the middle of the number dialed? Or correct a number I've pasted in?
3. Seriously, is there no way to replace the dialer with something better? And if there is and I just missed it, what are your recommendations?
4. Same question for the god-awful contacts list. I use Google Contacts, have 3 google accounts in which the contacts are… and the syncing seems piss-poor.

Ok, this turned out to be more of a rant than I anticipated. I've gotten to like iOS quite a bit, especially because the android ecosystem has become a very "worst of both worlds" option. But man the dialer's shit. Someone please tell me I'm missing something obvious.

I can install Linux or Windows or even BSD on my laptop without much hassle, and get the updates directly from the OS vendors.

This isn't the case for smartphones. You don't have choice over your OS. You don't even get android updates directly from Google, and have to wait for device manufacturers to release the updates. Why is it so?

What are some apps that you use that aren't particularly well known? Let's help each other discover some interesting new tools!

lichess - best chess app out there IMO. Completely free and open source, has daily puzzles, and a pretty active pool of users to play against!
Syncthing - file syncing tool that works with just about any operating system (although I don't think it works with iOS). I use it to take notes and write lyrics/my journal and sync them back to my linux laptop.
Untappd - social media app for tracking craft beers that you drink. I've only just started using it, since I was on holiday and wanted to keep a note of the ales I was drinking. It's a free app, but supported by ads. I believe there's a paid tier, but the free version works well enough, and it's useful for encouraging me and my friends to try new beers when we're out and about.
WK - Japanese flashcard app, which is technically a front-end for the wanikani service. As you learn new radicals, characters, and vocabulary, it serves them back up to you after a certain length of time. If you remember it, it'll wait longer next time, and if you don't get it right, it brings it back to the top of the pile.

Starting on Thursday night, Twitter cut off API access for some of the biggest third party clients.

From The Verge:

It’s hard to tell whether the third-party client outage is due to the API. Attempting certain calls from my individual Twitter developer account seemed to work, while Twitter’s own API explorer tool is currently broken.

It definitely seems like it is on purpose. For it to last this long without any update definitely makes it feel like it was done on purpose. Many developers' apps have started showing up as "suspended". In looking at my own account, I can see that both Tweetbot and Fenix are gone from my list of connected apps.

The Icon Factory (makers of Twitteriffic) have a blog post about it as well.

The complete silence from Twitter is completely baffling. Burning more than a decade of working with developers overnight seems incredibly stupid. As Paul Hadad, one of the makers of Tweetbot said:

Even during the darkest Twitter 1.0 days they were pretty open about what they were doing. I remember getting a call prior to the 4 quadrants token limit where they explained what was going to happen and answered questions. I wasn't happy but at least felt there was respect.

Like many on here I've been moving away from cloud services. I used to think that the open-source-heads that grumbled about loss of control were just out of touch. Just "get-off-my-lawn-types" but now I'm one of them. One of the things that pushed me over the edge was Amazon removing a bunch of tracks I had in my workout mix. Just so not cool.

So I'm done with Amazon but hesitated to stop paying for Prime because I couldn't figure out a good way of getting music onto my old iPhone 5S that didn't involve the absolute steaming pile of garbage that is iTunes sync. Why oh why does ti have to be so hard? And the answer is DRM. It's always DRM. Fuck DRM.

I have mp3s from hundreds of CDs I bought and burned to my computer back in the 90s and early 00s. These have largely sat unused. But not now! Now they are free!

And that is all thanks to the magical open source media player VLC. I've long used it on my laptop and desktops but didn't even know there was a mobile option for iOS. I stumbled across it while struggling to find the default iPhone Music app in Apple's app store. I never found it - I found one that looked like it could be it but it talked about an online store to buy music from so I wasn't sure. Anyways, up popped VLC.

The VLC app is awesome! I can get audio/video to it so, so easily in a variety of ways. I can drag-and-drop across my network, use a number of different kind of online services like dropbox, etc (which is not what I did, but that's cool). In theory, I could sync through iTunes as well, but F that noise!

So now I have 5-10 of my favorite albums, including good music to work out to. And best of all, I have "you are my sunshine" which I was able to download off of Youtube. I play that every night for my daughter and ever since they nerfed the YouTube app to prevent it from playing music while other apps were open, well it's been a pain to just sit an listen to it while she falls asleep each night without doing anything else. But not now! VLC isn't trying to market the shit out of me and lock me into their app. I can put on a song and finally use other apps.

So if you are one of those "get-off-my-lawn" types like me, I invite you to check it out. I don't know if there is an Android version but I sure hope so.

This is all stream of consciousness so forgive my typos and likely poor grammar. I'll clean it up after a I get tired of rocking out to these awesome tunes (maybe...)

Having been on Android since day 1, I've had to pick up an iphone for work purposes recently. It's a great, high end one. The hardware is clearly fantastic.

But the software. How do people put up with this? I've been trying to get accustomed to it, but it's so clearly lackluster.

Aside from a plethora of minor issues I've been encountering, what's most unbelievable to me is how clear the lock-in is all over the place.

Things like the story about all browsers having to use the Safari view really seep out, for example I can't change the launcher/home screen to something that doesn't suck (lets me position things around and doesn't have the display density of a toddler's typewriter).

And then it was a chore to even figure out how to disable iMessage (unpopular in Europe) so I'm only sending sms via the .. sms app.

Incompatibilities all over the place. Hotspot sharing doesn't work across my 6T and iPhone, it looks like iOS hotspots are again some kind of proprietary crap. Pictures and videos being in not quite standard formats. AirPods sound quality only being decent in the Apple ecosystem as well; couldn't release an Android app to support whatever Bluetooth enhancements they're doing?

And of course, the Lightning connectors which only exist in the apple ecosystem. I agree they feel better than usb-c even, but, more of those same incompatibilities.

It almost feels like a parallel universe where everything works slightly differently, and doesn't quite have as many freedoms.

I can't deny there's some nice things in there. I actually like Safari's hold-preview for example. I also appreciate the very fine grained permission system and warnings such as "such and such app has been accessing location in the background a lot". And FaceID is really well built. But, whew, i do not know how so many people swear by it.

Some things are just different and that's okay, but some things are shockingly inferior and incompatible Just Because, and that feels super insulting 🙃

Thanks for hearing my rant.

So far I have been having a surprisingly easy time learning iOS. It is incredibly intuitive! Though to be fair, my friend who has always been on iOS said the same thing about Android when she switched.

There are so many things that are basically identical on the two operating systems. But I am sure I am missing out on a lot of things that my iPhone 13 can do that my Samsung A50 could not do.

So far I'm really loving the switch, everything feels smooth. But I am very accepting of any tips and tricks that anyone might have up their sleeves! 😊

I know the scene is in a rut right now with iOS 16 having pretty much no hope (and with iOS 17 right around the corner), but I wanted to see if anyone else is using a jailbroken iPhone (or any other device) on a day to day.
If you are, drop your device, version and tweak list, I wanna add some new tweaks to my collection! My favs at the moment are Jellyfish (LS clock replacer), Saw (removes space at the bottom of the screen) and Ampere (iOS 16 style battery)

I've been all in on Android for quite a while, but I'll be making the jump to an iPhone with the next phone I get, which will end up being soon, as my current one is having some hardware issues.

What do I need to know about crossing over?

In particular, I would like to leave my Google account behind and NOT have it logged into my new phone. I use Fastmail for my email and contacts -- will I be able to sync my contacts easily to an iOS device from it, or will I have to import them into iCloud?

I'm also open to app recommendations for basic stuff -- preferably ones that are open-source and privacy-friendly. On Android I run a lot of stuff out of F-Droid, but I know iOS is a lot more locked down, so I'm interested to know what the best options are in their store (I have no interest in jailbreaking mg device).

Also, are there any huge disadvantages I should be aware of regarding older models? The new line just came out, which means the older ones are cheaper, and I'm a casual enough phone user that I should be fine with older hardware, but I want to know if there are any big tradeoffs.

Finally, if there are any cool iOS tips or tricks I should know about, let me know!

I figured one thread for all of Apple's new product announcements would be enough.

The new MacBook Air with the same redesigned keyboard as the 16-inch model and newer processors. I'm glad to see that they're bringing the keyboard to the rest of the lineup so quickly (I'm writing this on a 2017 MacBook Pro and this keyboard is not pleasant even after two and a half years of adjustment).

The new iPad Pro is where things get interesting. Same design as the previous iPad Pros, but now with an ultra wide camera and a LIDAR sensor.

The iPad Pro also has a new keyboard and trackpad accessory that looks interesting. It has an adjustable hinge that can hold the iPad at any angle, which is one of my biggest complaints with the current keyboard case. I'm interested to see how well it works in a lap when hands on videos start coming out.

I'm excited that Apple is bringing official pointing support to iOS (beyond the basic accessibility feature in iOS 13). This could be a game changer. I'm also excited that it's coming to iOS 13.4 (and all iPads that can run it) and they aren't waiting until iOS 14 to roll out the feature. I've wanted Apple to start rolling out features on an ongoing basis (like Google is doing with the Pixel Feature Drops) rather than as one big drop every fall.