Damn commie!

AV1 content is rather rare and encoding even 1080p content (from BD) is pretty slow unless you have a 9985WX Threadripper Pro (which costs over $11 K retail where I live).

And AV1 client support (HW decode) is lacking compared to HEVC/x265.

Don’t know which country you live in but $160 for a 14 TB HDD is a good price. It’s been a while since I lived in North America, but from memory this is a good price for US/Canada.

One general tip for saving space is to get x265/HEVC content, as it tends to be most space efficient on both an absolute and a “quality per GB basis” (some caveats of course, but I digress). That being said you may want to make sure all your clients support x265 (I prefer to simply never have to transcode and have all clients support Xvid/x264/x265 and all major audio formats).

Seems like a very minor, but useful addition.

OxygenOS 16 is described by OnePlus in grandiose terms as “a defiant rebellion for authenticity.”

Oh, the irony of describing such a “basic bitch” releases as “a defiant rebellion for authenticity” …

It’s better than nothing.

And I think the most viable strategy is to let them know that we will all move to iOS if they go through with it

They are both corrupt. Just read this today:

Apple removes ICEBlock, won’t allow apps that report locations of ICE agents

The only option is to not use American products and services whenever possible.

I’ve been slowly getting rid of American products/services. App distribution lockdown greatly increases the need to move off Android.

I will of course keep my current Android phone for banking and government apps, but I am not looking forward to carrying two phones.

I am talking about a more higher level.

Imagine the meetings of mail.ru/VK leadership on new UX and initiatives. They are not idiots and they may have good ideas and yet it is reasonable to be sceptical of their ability to implement such initiatives (even if there is genuine desire) because they operate under certain restrictive parameters.

And so does Google. A high-level example, they will always claim any regulation is bad even if it does has zero impact on their business. Even if regulation may be the best option forward.

Do you trust mail.ru/VK? I don’t trust mail.ru/VK or Google, irrespective of the situation at hand.

Now back to the low level stuff, this thing will be abandoned in a year or two once the product manager gets promoted. We’ve seen this before and we will see it again.

I don’t think they really care. Or take a more holistic (philosophical?) perspective, they don’t have any incentives to make this work.

The culture of an entity like Google is incompatible with implementing what they are trying to achieve.

I was honestly surprised when they launched CMF. It is pretty clear Nothing wants to be a premium product (with a premium price).

You answered your own question in your last paragraph.

The market is simply to concentrated and institutions are too corrupt for any real competition.

I don’t know how I feel about this. While easier icon theming is a good thing, I don’t think more power to Google is desirable.

We need less control from Google over the Android ecosystem, not more.

Why not just use something like rutracker.org ?

All the netflix releases are on there and vast majority of them can be streamed via bit torrent. Just select language defaults in your media player and you’re good to go.