It appears that the flagship route didn’t work out for them (I rode my Nokia 8 for as long as I could, but the storage was giving me problems.)
Much like when Motorola went into zombie brand mode (after being sold to Lenovo) they leaned hard on the midrange which appeared to do ok, as well as their feature phones.
Google giving up on KaiOS was probably the other killer, money had to go into redeveloping their feature phone software.
They’ve decided to step up the arms race because they’ve hit peak daily user count and the only thing they can promise to the board is force increasing premium memberships. I take it channel “memberships” are also not hitting the numbers they would like and they haven’t destroyed Nebula or Patreon as they’d hoped.
“One More Lane Bro is the only option, I checked, and it should be subsidised by NYT who make too much money.” - Robert Moses
I also hope we move away from coal, but if environmentalists are hell bent on getting a bunch of Dell monitors and a few keyboards in a museum hit me up.
I’d forgotten about that, I remembered their initial pitch was “It’s your second phone so you don’t have to take your first phone out of your pocket all of the time.”
That would require someone at Google caring about Android. Apart from the amazing team working to modulate the OS, nobody likes working with Android. Look at 14, it’s a code clean up with one feature stolen from iOS (lock screen customisation) which was much better and more interesting back before Lolipop. No master plan, no building up to something. No wonder they can promise 7 years of support for the Pixel 8, there’s nothing in the pipeline.
But it’s not just Android, Google have reached a point where they don’t know what to do about anything. ChatGPT snuck up on them. Rust has decimated any chance of Kotlin being widely adopted. Europe is getting more aggressive about controlling how they operate. Ad money isn’t bringing in what it once did. Any attempts at trying to corner the cookie market are hated. It why we’re seeing the ad block stuff on YouTube and another round of the Google Graveyard, they be running out of money and have no idea how to bring in new revenue.
Have a look at Beeper, essentially an app which connects to the web version of Whatsapp, unfortunately does not support calls but for chats and group chats should cover everything.
In terms of a light version, it’s unlikely. They’re playing to their biggest markets of India and Europe, where these features are well used (I’ve seen a lot of statuses used for “Good Morning messages”, and business announcing discounts or news.)
I dislike stories, but I have a very small social circle, none of which think waking up or buying a pretty looking cocktail as an achievement worth sharing publicly.
I doubt that’s actually the reason. This seems to line up with the roll out of end to end encrypted calls through Messenger, at the same time calling is being depreciated on the Facebook Portal device. My guess is either the library is too big or they don’t have the staff working on the Lite projects like they used to. Bulk of the target audience for Messenger Lite would probably be using WhatsApp.
But the team may have been gutted with all the Metaverse obsession followed by the AI obsession.
I was meaning more in the “trusting Google” sense, how is this different to trusting VeriSign?
Can someone explain to me how this is different to the trust system used by SSL Certificates?
Test out quad9
dns.quad9.net 9.9.9.9
It’s very telling that they are moving away from the Nokia brand as well, probably looking to terminate the license agreement to recoup some costs