HN user
hanks to Google efforts switching to GrapheneOS mean tons of apps either not working or break every few months.
I've been using GrapheneOS for years and that hasn't been my experience. There are two financial apps that don't work for me, and that's it. Pretty much everything else I use is fine. But, to be fair, I'm very scrupulous about my apps and tend to avoid installing an app for every little thing that wants me to.
I want to love all these "alternative" phone projects but shipping Android 14 in 2026 is just a non-starter. IIRC the Sidephone also runs an old version (12 or 13). Why does this keep happening?
I wanted to love my Garmin watches so much. I've tried a couple of Forerunners and an Instinct 2S. The hardware is great, but the software UX is so poor... I had to memorize an archaic maze of presses/long-presses to get to various features.
Just putting the watch into DnD mode required flipping through a ring of shortcuts hidden behind a long press menu. My Pebble can do this with a shortcut I assigned to a back-button long-press. Pebble's shallow-menu + shortcuts system is brilliant.
I ponder what Garmin is like in an alternate dimension where _they_ bought Pebble and used their UX chops for their own devices...
There's plenty of ways to make games outside of Roblox. Maybe they could sit down together and work through some Löve2D or Godot tutorials? No one can take that away arbitrarily
A question is whether infrastructure needs to be built. Unfortunately, yes. Because we live in an economy that only works if things grow, we can expect life to be worse if things don’t grow.
The infinite growth beast cannot be sated. If we keep feeding our communities, populace and resources into its maw, it will still eat us all in the end.
I agree that infrastructure buildout is important, but the incentive is backwards: we need to build infrastructure for communities, not for the quarterly-growth ouroboros.
So... you would be fine with your home being leveled to make way for power lines?
Establishment Dems looking at the GOP's plummeting approval rating and looking for ways to sink their own numbers, faster.
Like cutting your own brake lines after you watched your opponent drive off the cliff in front of you.
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Also baffling: why the hell would you take a manifestly unpopular thing, image wise, and try to make your own version of it, but liberal-er?
If you're like me and want an open or non-google-play alternative to these, this is available on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dev.davidv.motionsickness/
I can't vouch for it (yet) but am going to give it a try!
This really resonates with me, and reminds me of all that I've missed in the years since COVID and going full remote. There's magic in a room when a mob programming session results in a breakthrough that just can't ever be replicated remotely. Not sure I'd jump to sign up for a daily commute again, especially where I live now, an hour away from a major city without traffic, but I do miss that.
I fondly remember loading up a janky version of MAME that only ran Pac-Man via the newly discovered kxploit on my PSP in ~2005. That sent me down a two-decades-long road of fiddling with so many devices, making them my own.
I have huge respect for the folks who spent countless hours freeing devices like the PSP from the control of the corporations that wanted them locked down. I think we'll need a lot more of that spirit in the years ahead...
I'm interested in the hardware on this... does anyone know if this laptop can boot arm64 Linux natively? Perhaps with an alternate bootloader install?
I've read about plenty of other Chromebooks that can do that, but I can't find any info on booting Linux on this one.
ChromeOS would be so much more compelling if it could be degoogled... An Ungoogled-ChromiumOS would be amazing.
I believe they're specifically referring to energy policy. As they said:
massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects
The protectees in this case are fossil fuel interests.
Would be great if we could buy/drive these in the US. Funny how we have a "free market" only when it is convenient for certain interests...
[citation needed]
Humans can be held accountable. States have not yet shown the will to hold anyone accountable for LLM failures.
Also true on my 2020 RAV4 and 2025 Tacoma.
I tried a 2025 Ford Maverick for a year before I traded it for the Tacoma. All the AC/Heat/Etc controls were on the screen. Couldn't stand it. Put me off of ever considering a new Ford again.
What difference does that make, exactly? I'm fairly certain there was only one finger on that trigger...
Taking my technician test tomorrow! Wish me luck!
Not only am I pursuing this because I want long-range emergency comms in case cell networks go down (like what happened with Verizon recently), but also because I see a very notable contraction on what communication is allowed to be done on the internet, especially in the last year. Censorial regimes around the world seem to be accelerating and I don't want to be cut off from communications because I am not of an "accepted" identity.
And yes, I'm aware that states police the amateur airwaves too. But I see it more like how getting a driver's license doesn't mean I can't flee a country with my car... Learning to drive, or operate a radio, is still a valuable skill to learn and practice.
[citation needed]
I run GrapheneOS and use several US-based banking apps. I'll not name them since I don't really want my HN account associated with my financials in any way, but I've got a mix of well-known national bank apps and smaller local credit union apps working.
I'll admit there is a single institution's app I've found that doesn't work, but that is just one of several that I use.
This is why every device should be bootloader-unlockable (with legal enforcement). There's billions of old phones and IoT devices out there locked to outdated software. This has to change.
If it can't be unlocked, it can't be sold. That should be the law.
Pretty much the same setup here. Pixel 9 Pro GOS + iPhone 15 (USB-C everything!). The iPhone is a Canadian model that retains the SIM slot.
Most of my banking apps work fine on GrapheneOS, but I've adopted this because I'm confident they'll eventually break. And access to Apple Pay is nice.
Carrying two phones is annoying, but, agency over my main computing device is worth the price.
I'm making a subjective comparison here, true. But spend fifteen minutes with each company's watches and you'll see what I mean.
Hard to say this is true when Garmin watches are far more successful than Pebble.
A company's success != UX efficacy. That's like saying Apple's products had terrible UX in 1997 because they were flailing up against their Microsoft counterparts of the same era, despite the fact that Apple's UX guidelines of the nineties are regularly raised here as a rubric for UX evaluation, even against Apple's own modern products!
The better Garmin comparison is the Venu series which only have two buttons
I'm not sure you've ever used a Pebble, but Pebble OS is entirely button-driven with four buttons, whereas the Forerunner and Instinct have five. I've never used a Venu, but isn't it primarily touchscreen-driven?
(yes, the upcoming pebble watches do have touchscreens, but I believe that's just for use in apps and watchfaces, not navigating the system)
Exactly this. Pebbles feel like they were built from the ground up to be a watch, whereas the Apple Watch and Android Wear feel like they started from a phone and stripped things away until it became a watch.
Separately, it baffles me that Garmin, despite them having also built a watch OS from the ground up, never understood watch/limited-button UX. Their Instinct and Forerunner watches have all sorts of wonky, hidden and arcane interactions with buttons (long press this to X, press this here to Y). Pebble proves that a simple, shallow, and linear menu system works great!
This is a popular thing to say, but is an oversimplification...
Call it anec-data but all my banking apps work in GrapheneOS, and I have several installed. There is one that reduces functionality if SafetyNet fails (have to do the 2fa flow every time I restart the app, can't set as a trusted device and notifications don't work) but it still works to access my account.
That said... I haven't tried to use NFC payments and do carry around a secondary iPhone 15 as my "business phone" these days that pretty much just has payment/banking apps on it, just in case one bank or another decides to suddenly nuke their app on my main phone...
It's great to see the app open-sourced! Hopefully this can be distributed on F-Droid one day soon!
And the ability to choose app repos is also a wonderful development. Nothing against Rebble at all, but more choices and more openness is always better!
Thank you for all your work on this!
I know it's not your focus, but what's your take on the Core app frontend being closed source? I know libpebble3 is open and has the important bits, but it still feels bad to be unable to build an APK or grab that from F-Droid.
I had initially assumed it was because of some kind of dependency redistribution issue, but I think I read somewhere it was to stymie clones being developed and using the app. But that's part of an open ecosystem, no? That anyone can integrate into it?
This whole thing is presented a bit hyberbolically on both ends.
Rebble has valid concerns about the ecosystem surviving beyond Core. Their concerns about the closed-source parts of what Core has developed is valid (WRT the Core app frontend) and Eric positioning himself as a "benevolent dictator" is a reasonable red flag to raise. The next dictator (in case of acquisition) may not be so benevolent.
But while their stewardship of the app store and continuance of services is laudable, they can't really justifiably cry foul when someone "scrapes" their archive of mostly-scraped (from the original store) content.
Hopefully this teaches both sides that an open ecosystem means operating in the open. Which means making all source available not hiding vital components, and also not squawking about someone scraping the store.
Can you elaborate? I am hesitant to support a sleazy company, and am not aware of the behavior you suggest.
Amazfit is closed, Pebble is open. That's reason enough for me to avoid the former.
As enshittification encroaches on every corner of the technology ecosystem, a company putting out products in 2025 in a way that embraces its community and works in the open is laudable.
Maybe Pebble will turn evil one day, but at least the watches we have today will still work until they physically wear out, not when the company decides they should die.
"They sold cheap" as soon as they encountered some hardship
Nobody is perfect, and running a small hardware startup is difficult. I'm not saying Eric and co are perfect, but it seems like he's been fairly forthright about the mistakes made at Pebble[1] and what Core aims to do better.
Shit happens, people make mistakes, Apple/Google decide to compete with you and/or lock you out of parts of their garden.