Be Excellent To Each Other

Nova used to be the popular one, but I've not used it for ages.

Same. Have Google made the Pixel Launcher public like they did with the Nexus?

No. It’s just for Pixels.

Yeah Nova launcher is solid.

Cheers all. I'd gone with Evie before checking back in on the thread. Seems neat though I'm not convinced I prefer having an app search bar rather than a google search bar. Time will tell.

Huh, just had a weird Google Play moment there.

I bought a game this morning (the lovely Gorogoa) on the website at work and pushed it to my phone from there at the time. This evening I finally fire it up on the train to play a bit and decided this was the kind of thing that really needed some proper time and to be played on the big screen of my tablet. So, I uninstalled it there and then, ready to install it on my tablet when I got home.

Fired up the Google Play app on my tablet ten minutes ago and it was looking to charge me the full price again. Checked on my phone and no, it was still listed as purchased and installable there. Killed and restarted the GP app on the tablet; still no dice. Fired up the Google Play website on my PC and tried to push it to the tablet from there: "an unexpected error has occurred".

Finally it occurred to me to go to the Library tab of the "My apps & games" section of the Google Play app on the tablet and I was able to see and install it from there. So, almost a pointless moan from me there but maybe that workaround will be useful to someone in the future. At least until they fix the bug. *glares at DocG*

Hmmm. Must have been a consistency error of some weird/unlikely type. I'm probably not spilling trade secrets to tell you that Play's global architecture is complicated and has lots of layers of storage and caching. They must have gotten out of whack. You wouldn't actually have been charged twice, I think, even if you had gone through the purchase flow the second time.

BTW I'm leaving Play in a few weeks (but transferring to a job on Android.)

As long as you work for Google, you'll have to fix anything that breaks there.

Sure, that's how that works.

I recently got myself the Honor 10 unfortunately stacked with lots of EMUI bloatware (it came with a bloody spiderman game installed) really nice phone other than this.

Other than sideloading; any suggestions on the removal of said bloatware (the ones that are uninstallable on the phone)

That's not sideloading; sideloading is installing APKs. What you're talking about is installing a custom ROM. The latter is the only way you'll get rid of apps installed by the OEM into the system partition but in general don't do that. It's very easy to accidentally fuck up the security of your device and/or use some dodgy ROM with a bitcoin miner pre-installed for your convenience.

You should be able to "disable" the app, at least, which should hide it from the launcher and so on. But I'm not that familiar with EMUI.

Nah when I say sideload, I mean plug it into my computer and use the "adb uninstall [applicationname.apk]; I apologise I did state the incorrect term there.

I've flashed plenty of custom ROMs on many phones before; not wanting to remove stock because I like using Pay too much.

I figured you may have some little tasty secret to get rid but seems not

I don't think adb uninstall is any different to uninstalling through the launcher. In the app info page, where a normal app has uninstall, do you not see a disable button?

I was fairly sure I wouldn't end up being charged twice, but I didn't want to risk it purely because it seemed that a really good way of making the situation even more complicated and fucked up would be to actually try and buy it a second time.



So instead of just blaming you for issues with Play specifically, we can now blame you for everything Android related? Noice!

I am still waiting for the book I bought from Google play to arrive.

The issue with disabling them is that once disabled and all possible updates removed; it tries to update every time and once "Auto-update" is unticked when you go in and it says "45 UPDATES AVAILABLE?!?!?!?!" You then click update all and you're back to square one.

If you've got auto-updates in general turned on then surely you never need to manually choose to update anything?

If the permissions change you do, I think.

Only for apps that are still targetting API 22 or below, which is Lollipop. I doubt you have many of those. From November, you'll have none.

I'm not sure why you'd remove the updates for a disabled app. Just let it carry on updating, who cares?

It'll chew up storage. "Disabled" should be the same as "uninstalled" in UX terms. I wonder if the behaviour being described is a Play thing or a EMUI thing.

Surely storage is solved these days.

You have no idea how many 4 GB and 8 GB Android phones are in the world. And I'm not talking about RAM.

I've just tested this by disabling Chrome (which also uninstalls any updates) because I don't use it anyway. If I go into Play now it doesn't show up as an app requiring updates so that presumably wouldn't change even if there were other apps awaiting updates. I think that solves your issue Kris?

ETA: Also just did the same thing with Excel which is baked into my phone's ROM. The Android Webview app then popped up in play as requiring an update and I used the manual 'update all' button; neither Chrome nor Excel were updated or reactivated.

I mean, I really do have an idea. But if you narrow that down from the world to 'beex users' I'd expect that to trend sharply down

Ok so do you think Google makes a tailored build of AOSP for Beex users or...?

I'm not really that bothered, I was just hoping for a fix and it gave us all something to consider for a short time.

This was more of an issue on my old HTC with only 32gig of space! (Side note, I have 128gig of space so it's not really an issue)



What would such a build contain?

They fucking should.

It's not automatic to delete the updates when you disable an app is it? I assumed it was something Kris had manually chosen to do. If it's automatic and it then still tries to update them later, that's bonkers.

Yay! Windows phone. I knew I was ahead of the curve.

Yes, it's automatic to delete updates, and it shouldn't install them later.

There's something non-obvious at work here. Storage under Android is partitioned into system (which is read-only during normal use) and data. Pre-installed apps are usually in the system partition. Updates are always put in data. So any pre-installed app is immediately stored twice over once it has an update. Obviously, this is wasteful.

In that case no need for a specific beex version, just fix the broken one, thx

What's broken? Other than maybe something weird that Honor have done to Kris's phone.

Nothing, it just amuses me to make everything Google's fault, and by association yours.

The Honor is Huawei.

No, the Honor is mine.

I've gone for a OnePlus 6 in the end. £469 and seems to do everything I need, hopefully this will last me another 4 years... The Note 3 was great, but it's getting long in the tooth now, and no android OS updates is annoying.

OnePlus have a notoriously bad reputation for doing Android updates.

Good phones, though.

Actually they've been pretty on the ball recently

My note 3 won't update past 5.0, so it has to be more recent than that at least

I've been pleased with my Moto G6 Plus so far. Only negative so far has been the glass back to the phone, which makes the phone look and feel a bit nicer than the cheaper model but does mean that if it's placed on any kind of slight slope, it'll be on the floor in no time.

My Moto G5 is a twat for many, many reasons and I won't be buying a Motorola/Lenovo again.

That Android Auto won't start is the least frustrating of them.

We truly are at PEAK PHONE in our house now. When my contract came up earlier in the year I decided to stay with my S7, which is still 100% adequate for my requirements despite being nearly 2 1/2 years old. I used my handset renewal to get a phone for Jnr.

Now Mrs Hearthly's is up for renewal (so the phone is 2 years old) and she's like, 'I don't want a new phone, I'm completely happy with the one I've got'. (She's got an Xperia Z5 Compact.) Obviously we don't need a phone for Jnr now, and I'm still entirely satisfied with my S7.

PAYG beckons, we'll save £15 per month on the cost of the 'with handset' contract.

I've also noticed that no one really gives a fuck about phones these days either, I remember in the early days of smartphones everyone was excited to see the new tech and we we all showed our new phones off to each other and so on - now no one cares and the prevailing attitude is pretty much, 'They're all the same really, aren't they.'

I'm amazed manufacturers are still managing to sell so many of the fucking things TBH.

I suspect most people will just be taking the upgrade every time their contract runs out. Which, given the state most phone batteries end up in after two years, makes some amount of sense. Also, manufacturers (probably rightly) trumpet camera upgrades all the time and that's an aspect that pretty much everyone uses all the time so it'll seem attractive. I mean your standard person-in-the-street doesn't necessarily need the latest Snapdragon processor or another 2GB of RAM, but a better camera is one of the few features I think most people would appreciate.

The battery in my S7 is still in fairly good shape, it's definitely not lasting as long as it was when the phone was new, but it's not causing me any issues either. (It loses about 15% overnight with the always-on screen doing it thing, for example.)

I get you on the better camera aspect to an extent, but how good do most people need the snapper on a phone to be? I'm no Ansel Adams, however, the output from me and Mrs Hearthly's phones is entirely acceptable, and certainly good enough for family pics and videos, it's not like the early days of smartphones where the quality was noticeably poorer than you'd get from a dedicated camera or camcorder.

I reckon if batteries were still user-replaceable, a lot of people would keep their phones for considerably longer than two years. (And there's also a certain degree of inertia when it comes to contract renewals, a bit like car or house insurance.)

After the sad demise of my S7 Edge, and the issues I am having with the battery on my old S5 (I replaced the battery about 9 months back), I just bought an Honor 9 Light (in blue, as you asked). I think i'll just giffgaff it from now on.

It is pretty nice. Good for 150 notes.

How's the camera compare with the S7?

My phone was delivered today!
I wasn't in
It was taken to a local ups pickup place for me to collect, the nearest one is 300yards away and is open till 10
The driver took it to one 2 miles away that closes at 6...