The unknown phone is Techno

You wouldn't pirate a medicine, would you?

A decade old longread from Wired that also shines a light on how trivial it was to bypass mechanisms of some online services back in the day.

(I am not sure if Wired has this paywalled because I had the BPC extension installed but it opens properly with it).

It is at a slightly cheaper value than YouTube Premium in my country and offers multiple games and few apps. Though the quality of the games are sometimes poor (I think Apple Arcade has some exclusive games for itself something which Play Pass lacks) and apart from apps like Tasker or KWGT, one would be hard pressed to find a good dev offering for apps in general.

This was seen on two phones, one running near Stock Android 13(Nokia G20) and another on an usual OEM customized variant of Android 14. When I sideloaded two different apps on each phone and attempted to give them Read notification access in the settings, a message came that it was restricted for my security and no way to bypass it.

Is this by design? I don't think it improves security in any way except to restrict the user to Play Store apps. And when ironically, the latter is plagued with so much quality control issues.

I had a Youtube Subscription mainly for using Youtube Music since last year. I used to be on Newpipe before that. However, the mobile app always made be feel uneasy. From not being able to choose system wide video quality for all Youtube videos at once[ seriously, there is like 'High' or 'Data Saver' only and explicit options are available per videos only ] to Youtube nudging me to purchase/join a Youtuber's membership channel really irked me [I just paid you, Youtube ; why are you constantly asking me to pay more for something I don't want? Why can't I disable those notifications ?]

I have some time remaining on my subscription but converted to Tubular [Newpipe fork with Sponsorblock] simply because it doesn't treat it's end users like trash. Even for YTM, I switched to Revanced version which offered endless customization. I could hide useless stuff like cast, share buttons to even functions in the Account tab. The granular control was so much that I was able to get a simplistic neat looking UI setup.

In the transition, I understand, I lose some of my playlists [under a throwaway Google account since I don't wish to risk my main one getting banned] but I understand that the only true way anyone controls their music[or any form of data is by truly owning them and streaming services don't allow that]. It might sound stupid, but I have been downloading music from Soulseek for some time and now just plan to transfer some of my favorites over to the SD card.

It was never a money problem. It was an experience problem. I paid money to Google and all I got was Shorts, Games and other stuff I didn't wanted. I never got customization or fine grained controls. The open source community offers that. Sorry for the long rant.

Amazon Prime, like many services, is a DRM hell. It won't go to over 480p on Firefox on Linux at my end. However, instead of a rant, I am interested in why this is happening. Say, I rented the same film from YouTube Movies(Yes, such a service exists) and the quality can toggle all the upto 1080p but the same title on Prime Video is stuck at 480p. Is it because both services use two DIFFERENT kinds of DRM?

What is exactly Google Play System Update buried deep in the settings that can be manually updated and usually has a date of say, eg, May 1. Is it part of Project Treble from Google to decouple parts of OS from full system upgrades and make more Modular updates possible?