I’ve tried them all, and as of right now Connect feels the most polished and feature rich. So that’s my recommendation.

Nostalgia is really interesting in that it’s inherently bittersweet. It’s nice because it grounds us in a shared timeline and focuses on mostly positive aspects of some past point in time, but it’s also sad because it means thinking back fondly on a time that will never be again.

So maybe it’s the bitter half of that bittersweet feeling that you’re subconsciously averse to? Either that or maybe your past/childhood was mostly negative or even traumatic? I’m no psychologist, so really I don’t know what I’m talking about.

An empire that we lived in and got to experience when it was thriving. That’s why dead malls in particular have a distinctly bittersweet feeling to them. Those of us who frequented malls in the 80’s and 90’s can vividly remember when they were filled with people, commerce, and social activity. They were such lively social spaces back then, so seeing them slowly succumb to the ravages of time and fade into irrelevancy is both sad and fascinating.

Nah. It’s morbidly interesting IMO.

We’re so fucking cool, aren’t we?

“Shouldn’t we wait for reinforcements?”

“I am the reinforcements.”

• Vagrant Story, PS1

This is sadly still the case and one of the main reasons I use Samsung phones today instead of Pixels. One Hand Operation gives me more ergonomic and easy to use gestures while also playing nicely with third party launchers.

There’s just no way in hell I could use the pixel launcher as my daily driver. It’s too simple and lacks the bare minimum customization options that I would need to be able to tolerate it.

It is already pretty great. The one thing that annoyed me enough to stop using it (for now) is that it displays two refreshing spinner animations whenever you pull down to refresh the feed. It’s a small thing, but it irked me enough to just stick to using the mobile app for a bit longer.

UPDATE: Nevermind, it looks like this was fixed in a recent update. I’m back on Connect now, and it’s pretty great. Probably the best Android app for Lemmy right now.

Adguard is the best option for system-wide, rootless ad blocking on Android IMO.

It’s the best because it also performs cosmetic filtering to reclaim the empty space that most other blockers leave behind after removing an ad from a web page. This makes web pages look much cleaner and is something that I value in any adblocker, mobile or otherwise. The free version works across any browser or embedded webview instance within apps, and the paid version filters all ads within apps as well. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Completely negligible impact on battery life as well.

One UI has been crammed with features for years now, many of which would be very nice to have in Pixel phones. Maintenance Mode would be good, I guess, but I can think of several others that would be far more beneficial to have merged into AOSP in some form.

For example, One Hand Operation + is the best implementation of gesture navigation in all of Android IMO. It’s quicker and more efficient than traditional gestures, more customizable, and plays well with third-party launchers. It’s one of the killer apps that makes it hard for me to consider anything other than a Samsung phone these days, especially since Google has made no attempts at fixing the wonky behavior of the native gesture navigation and third-party launchers.

I wouldn’t say that I’m against subscription models as an option alongside a traditional purchasing paradigm for games, but if what we’re seeing now is simply a trojan horse for a wholesale upheaval of that traditional purchasing model sometime in the not-so-distant future then I’d happily see it fail. Just in general the constant push toward an all-digital gaming future consistently concerns me.

But I’m old. I’d be willing to bet that most young people and teens gaming today probably couldn’t care less about that prospect since they’ve never experienced this medium during a time before digital distribution, day 1 patches, etc.

Do they? I’m not so sure.

While exclusives certainly limit access to those who own a certain platform, they also usually benefit from being developed for one specific piece of hardware in terms of polish, stability, etc. Some of the most ambitious and polished games ever made have been exclusives, mostly on Sony or Nintendo platforms.

They also help to engender a distinct identity for each platform, IMO. This is a more ephemeral thing, mind you, but I think that both Sony and Nintendo have succeeded in carving out a clear brand identity for themselves via the kinds of exclusives that they’ve gotten onto their platforms from their stables of first- and second-party developers. Does that make sense, or am I just talking out of my ass at this point?

More options is always better for consumers, of course, but I think that exclusives also come with their own set of unique positives as well. I’d be curious to know how most people feel about this topic. I could very well be an outlier here.