The only scripts I’ve seen still leave a giant empty box at the top… Are there any that fix this too?

My experience is dated, but figured I’d share it in case no one else has any input.

I owned a few Motorola Android phones before and after the Google involvement. I think my most recent purchase was 2015.

At that time, they were extremely “pure android” with very few additions beyond the stock experience. The things they added were way ahead of their time - I still think those devices had the best “always on” display implementation to this day, and they did it way before it became a norm.

Their software and update support was rivaling Google at the time, and most other manufacturers were still in the days of 2 years of updates if you’re lucky.

They just stopped making phones it seemed like. I ended up moving towards Pixels over the years, but Moto is the one company that would tempt me to switch back. That or maybe HTC but they’re dead.

Hope you get a more recent answer - I didn’t even realize they were still making phones to be honest.

There’s isn’t enough physical space for three sensors on a smaller phone especially if it’s the size of the iPhone mini

I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that “more cameras” is the complaints being made here. Sure, telephotos make sense as things that take up more space. But most people are using them for like 1 in 50 shots or something. I have an extremely hard time believing that someone would genuinely notice the difference unless they’re an extreme case or they’ve been told the other ones are better. Within reasonable effective focal lengths, these are pretty negligible in the sizes we’re talking about.

If Apple couldn’t make a smaller phone sell particularly well, I doubt anyone else could.

I hard disagree with this. Apple is literally the worst company to try to make this shit work. Apple’s core selling point is the status symbol of it all. People trying to show off having the flashiest phone are not going to buy a product being touted as a half baked smaller and cheaper version of something else. Their entire marketing was about it being mini. Apple customers are not the core audience for something like this, and Apple marketed it as exactly what people disliked about small phones.

around or less than 5% of total iPhone 12 and 13 sales

I find it more surprising that this was below expectations than I do that only 5% of people bought a smaller phone. I doubt much more than 1 in 20 people really is after a smaller phone. I’m sure they exist, but based on the people I know and the number of people I’ve heard interested in smaller phones, I’d estimate it more like 1 in 20 to 1 in 40. It’s not for most people by any means. But 1 in 20 is still a decent number of people.

They have to understand that the cameras on the biggest flagships occupy a lot of space and it isn’t feasible to bring it to a smaller form factor.

Not… Really… Sure it makes some difference, but the much more constraining factor is the money. Cameras arent that big, but they’re one of the priciest pieces of hardware in the device.

The problem is more that they keep trying to sell small phones at cheaper price points. So they end up with much worse screens, socs, and cameras so they perform like shit. People don’t want a small phone because they don’t care about their phone. People want small phones because the standard size is fucking huge. They need to make a high-ish tier small phone instead of low tier small phone that performs like the 50 Walmart shit.

I know it’s not everyones cup of tea but…

I ended up buying a Pixel Fold for the Fold aspect. There’s an added benefit that it’s really short when folded so I can reach the entire screen one handed. It’s heavier and thicker than a slate phone, but I actually enjoy the folded experience way better than other phones.

I can understand that Valve doesn’t want to give false impressions that a game runs perfectly when there are imperfections as mentioned

Idk, I disagree with this. It means that games are being labeled as “not verified” because of things that don’t really hamper what people would care about - the keyboard popping up for naming your character or seeing “A” in a green circle isn’t going to make people be like “oh no, this doesn’t work well on my steamdeck, I’m not playing it”. Does it look unprofessional? Sure. But that’s not what people care about when looking at the ratings for compatibility. They just want to know if it’s going to run well.

These systems are all about trust and evaluating the right metrics. Having the right button icons matters to Valve but not the player. Once players play games that aren’t verified and they run fine, and they play games that are verified but still have performance hitches in some places, etc, the rating system loses its credibility and then it’s meaningless.

On top of this, developers are already shunning the verification and just not bothering. Some of the things they ask for don’t directly affect the playability of their game. It’s an extra hoop for the developer to jump through, and if people don’t trust the badge, there’s no point in chasing it. Valve is literally undermining their own system from both sides by doing this.

There’s already people in this thread touting protonDB being a better evaluation. It’s exactly this that will happen and will continue to happen and continue undermining their rating system until Valve aligns their verification system with what users actually care about.

I’d actually bet it’s something different…

It’s less that you game on a steam deck because it’s portable, and more that because it’s portable you can game. There are people here and there that are like “yeah, I have a steam deck so I use that instead” but the sentiment I see more often is “I wouldn’t be able to game at all if it wasn’t portable - I can’t sit down for that long, I only have time on the train, I need to be near my kids” etc.

And this changes the dynamic. It’s less that these people have “desktop gaming” and “portable gaming” and are choosing to play the AAA games while portable. They only have portable gaming. And they choose to play the same good games everyone else is playing. The only gaming they do is on their deck. And they’re not going to be like “oh, why play a good game like BG3 if I can play a shitty portable game like xyz”.

These are just people’s primary gaming devices now. And if they can, they will choose to play the same good games everyone else is choosing to play. It doesn’t matter if it only runs OK, playing a good game with OK graphics is still better than playing a shitty game.

Yes, it requires it runs well with default settings, everything is accessible with the standard deck controls, that all the control displays use the steam deck icons, and it doesn’t reference controls the deck doesn’t have. It’s a very high bar.

Amongst many other reasons, my biggest is it’s not searchable by search engines.

Well gee, I hope you don’t use texting, phone calls, emails, private forums, social media DMs, or talk to anyone IRL, because those aren’t searchable either!

This argument seems like reaching for something to complain about rather than having a legitimate problem with discord. If anything, you don’t like the “large group chat” paradigm, but that’s like hating a screwdriver because it’s not a hammer.

I think discord is primarily just useful for voice chat, yes.

But:

It’s a closed ecosystem that locks what would otherwise be searchable knowledge on the web, with an unsearchable, proprietary lockdown of that information.

Yeah, no. Proprietary, sure, but you can say that about almost communication mechanism that’s not a website with an API. It’s not like people would otherwise be posting these things somewhere else if discord didn’t exist. If it wasn’t discord it’d be slack or something. Discord is an entirely different medium and complaining that it isn’t a forum is just not a legitimate argument. They’re entirely different things.

This whole comment/complaint is just the pros and cons of different types of communication. None of this is discord specific, it’s just complaints that real time chat isn’t indexed by search engines and isn’t organized into clear topics.

Sure, some IRC chats were logged/posted, but that still has all the same searchability problems, and that process can still be used within discord search. It’s just not useful because real time chat doesn’t have any sort of topic organization.

This whole thing is like complaining that signal is worse than email because it’s not as organized. It’s not worse, it’s just a different medium with different goals and purpose. And you’re not giving any specifics as to why signal/discord is bad, just that you don’t like direct messaging/chat rooms.

There the solution was to go into the Apps settings, find Pixel Launcher, and choose force stop, then clear cache, then clear settings.

Fwiw, force stopping your actual launcher should fix the issue without restarting etc but it does come back.

I think I’ve tried doing this on the Pixel launcher with no dice, but going to give that a shot since it shouldn’t hurt. I doubt this would impact the issue if it’s actually based on what you claim though.

I’ve been crazy for months over this lmao. Glad I could help 😜

That’s great and I’m glad that works for you.

But most people buying portable gaming handhelds are not doing that. And the people looking for things like that are likely landing closer to a surface or standard laptop, which Windows already supports well.

I don’t know that Microsoft has any business trying to make Windows support these devices better…

Windows is entirely built around two pillars:

1. Enterprise support for corporations, and team machine management
2. Entirely open compatibility so they can run almost any hardware you put into it, plug into it, and backwards compatibility for all that for as long as possible.

Portable game machines are not an enterprise product. Nor do you care about broad hardware support or upgradability. Nor do you care about plugging in your parallel port printer from 1985. Nor do you care about running your ancient vb6 code to run your production machines over some random firewire card.

Windows’ goal is entirely oppositional to portable gaming devices. It makes almost no sense for them to try to support it, as it’d go against their entire model. For things like these, you want a thin, optimized-over-flexible, purpose built OS that does one thing: play games. Linux is already built to solve this problem way better than Windows.

But, Microsoft will probably be stupid enough to try anyway.

Now we just need that GFX software from intel / amd / nvidia that is available on windows, taking advantage of that newly supported hardware

Stop, you’re making me too hard. I might be able to like, ditch Windows if that happens.

I wish I had a better answer for you… But…

This seems to be some bug in Android 14. I reported it numerous times during the beta program MONTHS ago, and it’s never been fixed. The public release came out and multiple friends have told me they’re having this issue too. It still isn’t fixed.

I don’t know what the fuck Google is doing, but I’ve heard people have this issue with different launchers so I can’t imagine they’ve all got the same bug - this seems to be Google’s fault. The launcher I use has fixed multiple Android 14 bugs, but not this one. I don’t think they can.

Fwiw, you should be able to force stop your launcher which is a little faster than changing launchers and changing back. And it’s a hell of a lot faster than a restart… Pull down notification shade, tap settings, type Kvaesitso in the search bar which should let you tap to get to the app settings, and on that page should be a “force stop” button. Tap that, tap home, and it should be fixed.

I find this shit infuriating and I don’t understand how Google deems this OK. I doubt this gets fixed before Android 15 at this point. Google has their fucking heads up their ass on this one.

I don’t know if it does anything, but there’s an issue about it here: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/302132145 Commenting/subscribing/etc might help get this more attention.

Sure, dependence on Qualcomm isn’t great… But I find having a phone with no functional signal to be worse. And if you want to argue “then buy a Samsung” etc, then you’re just replacing a CPU dependence with a manufacturer dependence. I find that to be even worse.

I totally feel this and really wish Google would just drop this tensor bullshit. I absolutely despise Samsungs software, but much to my chagrin, they were basically the only ones creating a decent foldable. The second the Pixel Fold dropped, I jumped ship, but holy moly the Tensor is fucking this device sideways. I get more signal problems than I should, and my wife’s pixel 6 is having the same shit.

I was fine on Pixel 4 and don’t remember having much issue, but holy moly is this one noticeable. I hope they either fix it or switch, but I hear the Tensor 3 isn’t much better.

YouTube purchases also don’t work beyond 480p on any desktop except for Mac Safari. These companies are fucking insane.