Too bad the Google Health app (which is required for FitBit devices since Google retired the FitBit app) is getting mostly 1 and 2 star (out of 5) reviews on the Google app store.
The reviews were ~90% 1 & 2 star within the first month of the FitBit Air release.
Three months later, the app has improved to ~80% 1 & 2 star reviews. At this pace, they'll be on v3 of the device when app reviews are decent...
They force everyone to move over to a different app when the replacement app doesn't have all the features/reliability of the old app.
Genius.
Garmin released the Cirqa band at $199 w/o compulsory subscription a few weeks ago. I may switch to that if the FitBit Air acts up.
I'm waiting for the Apple Health app support. Supposedly it's coming sometime in the fall. The Google app is ok but I don't use the AI features.
I'm not sure if proper Apple Health would help with this but Google tends to be delayed at automatic recognition of activities (e.g. I take a walk it can be an hour or two until it processes automatically). Apple would recognize a walk as I was on it.
At 5:58 of the Gamers Nexus (GN) video about LG TV's spying, GN make a statement:
Now, our lawyers have made the totally unrelated point uh that we cannot legally agree to contracts such as terms of service or conditions while incredibly innebriated.
So they drank a lot of margaritas while video-recording the section concerning reading and accepting the Terms of Service for the TV.
I don't think that would hold up in any court in the world. While sober, and in coordination with legal counsel, they made a plan to accept the terms and conditions. That's like a kid swinging their arms around on a playground while saying "I'm not touching you" levels.
New to the concept of parody? They are pointing out the absurdity of the idea that a click to accept shrinkwrap ToS lets LG infringe the rights of whoever talks in front of the TV.
I personally would not trust legal advice from YouTubers who make money from whatever "content" generates the most views. The more outrageous and controversial the better, making sense or being true a distant secondary priority. Even those who make a name for themselves as trustworthy tend to eventually succomb to the incentives of the algorithm if it's their day job.
I assume that part was for entertainment, this wouldn't fly in court. But they also show the dark patterns used to make you consent to it, and how certain features seem unaffected by these choices or send one last request when revoking consent.
That wasn't the starting point for the webview app DX.
Companies (or their consulting agencies) had tons of webdevs - working on their company public and internal websites, but not many native smartphone devs. Those were the days when people who completed the Stanford iPhone programming course were snapped up lickety-split.
But everyone was clamouring to have their own smartphone app for all the smartphone platforms (well, iPhone, Android, maybe Blackberry)
Hiring enough smartphone devs to fill multiple smartphone-specific dev teams would be like trying to build multiple AI development workstation on the cheap these days.
In the late 2000s, people realized they could write an HTML/JS/CSS website and compile to an app for each J2ME/Blackberry/iPhone/Android platform that would "serve" the website. So their webdevs could be converted to smartphone app developers.
Hey, if you planned your website well, you could use the same business logic for your website AND your smartphone apps.
That was the elevator pitch.
You'd need an actual (maybe two) native smartphone devs for each platform to handle any areas where the marketing didn't meet reality 100%.
But that was doable versus hiring multiple native smartphone devs for each platform.
And in the late 2000s, there seemed to be a lot of potentially viable smartphone platforms - iPhone, Android, Blackberry, J2ME, Windows Phone, Palm's webOS. But we know now that in a few years, all but two would wither away.
Even with native APIs exposed via JavaScript, there were obvious problems with these webview apps. The apps were passable if the app didn't require much user interaction or computation.
Projects like React Native and others tried to reduce the amount of webview usage and increase the amount of native UI controls used.
The mobile platforms themselves aren't going to improve their platform-specific webview to make it easier for webdevs to mimic the "native" experience. Why would they?
So if Shopify had to do major refactors of all their React Native apps, maybe they could look at what it would take to go back to native Platform APIs.
For the Shop App, this coincided with our next major React Native investment: adopting the New Architecture. That work would have required us to revisit native module integrations, rendering, and the boundaries between shared and platform-specific code. Before committing to this investment, we tested whether coding agents could help us build directly in SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose while keeping product behavior aligned across platforms.
The result of that native platform APIs side project involving six devs converting the app's major user workflows?
- startup time reduced: iOS by 23%, Android by 50%
- crashes - 10x reduction
- app size - iOS increased by 1MB (67MB -> 68MB), Android reduced by 109MB (37.2%)
- build time - Android release build time fell ~75%.
- runtime perf - Android builds could draw at 120fps while scrolling feed and switching screens
But! just in my... scattered couple hours of using the iPhone Duo today, the iPhone... has a bunch... of...these tiny, frankly unnecessary, but also very awesome... quality-of-life things... that make it feel...like a more fun phone to use.
I forget the specs and numbers and like raw horsepower and megapixels and stuff, but just, just the... fit and finish and the little animations and stuff like that.
And the... feel of it. I feel like the iPhone kind of mogs the Samsung.
Like, it really all starts with that animation... switching between the inner and outer display. It's... really clean and it's fast.
from the TCEC Season 29 Premier Division tournament, Stockfish was first, Reckless v0.9.0 was second, LCZero 0.33 was third, PlentyChess (won tiebreaker) tied with Torch for fourth.
Back in the day, Windows OS kernel programming avoided use of floating point numbers - certainly transcendental functions would've been frowned upon - when CPUs didn't include an FPU.
I don't know if they've relaxed this since the days of non-FPU CPUs - anyone know? If they let the Weather app use a webview, there must be some floating point usage in there.
This code is at a much higher level though - at the user shell level, explorer.exe.
Anyways, asking Google's AI to remove the above code's use of floating point results in code resembling the original version.
You can run one iphone at a time and lap the duo. 64gb iphone SE is going for $140 at best buy right now. I could tape up 10 of them into a jacobs ladder then I'd have 640gb of storage and maybe 10x the battery life of the duo, and money to spare for future expansion iphones.
You could tape 10 Ford Fiestas together but it doesn't mean it laps a Mustang it means you were fine with what the Fiesta could do which, honestly, most people probably (very reasonably) are.
If apple wasn't so scared of letting people get out of the walled garden, I'd be able to do the equivalent of taking those 10 ford fiesta engines and rigging them into a single 40 cylinder monster.
I was a bit disappointed in these numbers because, despite having two batteries and the outer display being smaller, the Duo still has 1 less hour of video playback on the outer display than the iPhone 18 Pro Max.
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