…I should’ve added the /s, come to think of it.

When are Denuvo games coming to GOG and itch.io? We feel extremely left out guys.

Am I going to have to wait 24 hours to open apps I already have installed? Will they all get auto-removed and need reinstalling?

At the start I would have thought this was possible but pretty ridiculous. Why would Google do any of that?

But it turns out this was not ridiculous, as Play Protect literally just removed Ankiconnect, an app I already had installed for months, without giving me the choice to keep it or axe it. They certainly could force us to go with their “Uncle Google can I have permission to use my phone?” flow for apps we already use.

WE MUST CONTINUE TO OPPOSE THESE CHANGES, THESE ATTACKS ON OUR ABILITY TO INSTALL APPS AS WE WISH.

HECK YEAH

I hope Valve loses.

If only any of them defended those who can’t defend themselves from evil. But the suffering and the cruelty is sadly the point.

What a horrible workplace this was. I’m really sorry to hear about that. May all of these terrible workplaces go bankrupt!

So it wasn’t just me then.

Yeah, martyring yourself for the cause is the greatest honor and gets you into the door of heavens. Opportunistic stuff like that.

All the employers where I am. Heck, they have some group chat “newsletters” and such set up to let us know of updates and things. Sometimes it’ll be used for informal group chats where things aren’t really binding, and reserve email for official communications.

A premium tier for WhatsApp? The app I want to get rid of but can’t because employers can’t be assed to send emails or make phone calls first?

No, it’s not. It’s extra not wrong if the “legal” method includes DRM or forces you into any DRM platform.

This reminds me, the Mojo Launcher is available on Google Play. You can download the app for free, create a local account, download whatever version you need, and you’re already in-game.

I only created a local account because I was too lazy to log into my MS account (can Mojang die for this migration sin?) before I realized I just downloaded Minecraft Java Edition for free with an app from the Play Store.

You didn’t hear anything from me.

No, what you mentioned is just one of the options. They literally go over “bare metal” installs even if it’s just a skim. I always find their article funny because of that.

Does it really freak them out?

I think you might be underestimating how some people type really slowly when given a full sized QWERTY keyboard, numpad and all.

Then again the one limiting factor of phone keyboards (touch or physical) is that they’re designed for two thumbs, instead of just whatever fingers happen to be closer to the button you want. Though I’ll admit I do miss when Nokia, BlackBerry, etc, came up with unique solutions for how to get a small physical keyboard attached to a phone.

Might be an unpopular opinion but

In the late 2010s or early 2020s, I wrote a short story in the Notes app on a Nokia C3-00. It was one of the budget offerings with a QWERTY keyboard and WiFi support, and it was pretty awesome for the time, and still is to an extent.

By that point I cycled through a few touchscreen phones beginning from tiny Samsung junkers to mid-range Chinese phones we would have called “phablets” a few years back and got used to touchscreens. I’m typing this right now on a touchscreen and it’s pretty nice, yeah autocorrect is wrong some of the time but it is solid most of the time, and I can type really fast. Typing on a phone with a small physical keyboard was eye opening in a way. It felt slow, and I had to actually put some effort into pushing the buttons to make them register. In all fairness, it could be the age of the phone making the buttons stiff.

Something else is how the labels on the buttons eventually wear out. If this was a physical keyboard I could just replace it, but a small panel of keys built into a phone? Yeah not really replaceable.

I get that all those very tall, very flat slabs of plastic and metal can get boring very quickly, but I guess because there’s not so much more left to perfect that form factor.

Only if there are free and fair midterms. If they’re not canceled, they’ll be neither free nor fair. I live in a country where an authoritarian regime was voted in. Do you know what happened next? None of the elections were canceled, but all of them stopped mattering, they became circus shows that people only attend by force or to receive a not even that good reward for it. MAGA knows you want to pull them out of power and they’ve got the means to ensure their rule continues.

I wish Americans would just STOP waiting for the ballot box to right the wrongs. The time to do something is now.

I’ll raise you one and say I’d rather pirate games than use either of them. At least there’s GOG, itch, Zoom-Platform, putting aside games that never come there until a decade later.

How’d it get enshittified? Last I used it, it was essentially the same ol’ reliable one, but some things randomly break when you switch the launcher on HyperOS.

Yeah, no. EGS is a piece of shit DRM launcher, just like Valve’s own piece of shit, but it has the Epic logo. Heck, they even have free games and not even that is enough to kill the vitriol, so yeah it’s just “no steam no buy” all over again, or Steam would also be chided for many of the same things - which would be very dandy if it happened, after all, neither of them respect us enough to own our games without having to phone them home first.