Samsung and Xiaomi apps on their factory defaults are mostly fine, update them once and suddenly you have ads flashing after every 2 interactions with your phone
Nvidia Shield - The Android update (from 9 to 10, iirc) turned mine into a sluggish, unresponsive piece of crap. I ended up downgrading back to Android 9 and blocked the update servers in my router.
Switch Joycons - This might be a placebo, but I swear that every second Joycon update completely messes with their ability to connect to the tablet via the rails. They still disconnect every once in a while, but I swear certain versions of the Joycon firmware made my Switch completely unusable in portable mode.
Audacity. I stayed back at whatever old version for quite some time before finally switching to Tenacity.
What’s up with audacity? I use it like twice a year so I just download it whenever I need and uninstall it. I don’t really do anything except some incredibly basic things (like record audio, cut segments out, maybe some noise reduction if I’m feeling fancy)
The developers sold out, and the new parent company wanted to add opt-out telemetry IIRC. They received a lot of backlash and apparently reduced the data collected, but they had proven that they could not be trusted, and multiple forks were made before the new version with telemetry even released. Tenacity is what came of at least two of those forks.
Some apps that I’ve patched with revanced manager like messenger to remove the inbox ads for example.
The Phillips hue bridge app. They forced online login in the new version for “security”. I don’t see how connecting to Philipps servers is more secure than local only.
I have wifi lights, when I move they will 100% be changed to zigbee. The cloud and iot has gone off the rails in security and convenience.
Feels like a lot of programs that I use. It is like, if they’re still working as is and nothing is happening to them, why bother?
But specifically, my pick is Windows. I have the most lapsed way of handling Windows OSes over the years.
I was on Windows 98 and it lasted until roughly mid-2000s did I finally get on Windows XP. Didn’t touch Vista. Didn’t touch 7. Got into Windows 8 mid-2010s after buying a friend’s PC. Didn’t get on Windows 10 until a few years ago. Not going to touch Windows 11.
Get win10 LTSC iot. Have to reinstall, not sure you can just convert, but will help if you don’t want Linux. LTSC iot is good til 2032 I think.
Windows. Haven’t booted to it in years and am afraid of it fucking up my Linux partition.
Discord and spotify cus I modified it illegally:3
None, because I get almost all my apps from F-Droid and the repository maintainers themselves will quit making updated versions available if the app enshittifies.
Also, I cannot imagine accepting that shit from Samsung or Xiaomi in the first place. Believe it or not, instant boycott.
Everything on F-Droid is open source. Someone will just fork an app if the current maintainer starts pushing negative stuff into the app.
The dev of simplemobiletools selling out is an example.
Blokada. I downgraded to V5 and I won’t change it anytime in the foreseeable future. Whenever I can no longer use v5 I might have to find a different method of filtering ads.
Edit: also, OP, I recommend trying Blokada 5 if ads is what’s annoying you in other apps. Blokada blocks ads on your phone, for all apps, not just a specific app.
Is it a “decent set it and forget it” kind of blocker? Because I might try that on my girlfriend’s phone, I tried TrackerControl with her once, but it kept “breaking” some apps and she didn’t have the patience to just switch the thing off/on.
I don’t understand how people would rather see ads and be tracked than flip a few switches.
That being said, I do think TC would be vastly better if it had per app defaults that guarantee that everything works out of the box.
It is a decent set and forget universal ad blocker, however, you need to make sure you are downloading a v5 and not the v6 or it will not work. Also, you need to deactivate it and reactivate it whenever you restart your phone, this is a minor issue but it needs that kick every time your system reboots.
Full disclaimer though, if you are playing games or running something that relies on ads to work (ie “watch the next ad to get 50 points!” ) blokada may break these types of apps so it may not be suitable for you.
This sounds like a lot of mess to deal with instead of just setting adguard private dns in your phone which generally blocks most ads for me.
I’ll give it a shot, most of the ads my gf gets are the unexpected ones from simply opening the app or starting a new brain game
Give adguard dns a go…
Android TV launcher on my shield tv so it doesn’t get terminal advertising disease. DNS blocking hides the ones in the old version of the launcher.
TreeSize Free (Portable), versions older than 4.7.3 can run on Windows Server and still work just fine. They added a restriction on 4.7.3 that disallows server OS.
I started using BeyondPod for podcasts in 2009. At one point, they came out with an UI update that everyone hated but I was able to save an older version, I just had to avoid updating it in the store. I did that until they went out of business and it disappeared from the store a year or two ago. I’m guessing the version I still use came out in 2012
Maybe AntennaPod is for you: https://antennapod.org/
I’ve tried it multiple times. I’m not sure why I didn’t like it but every few years I try a bunch of them and I still like BeyondPod. It still works perfectly.
This reminds me, I updated Android the other day and now my phone is running like shit. Damn planned obsolescence
Vscode always breaks something so I do it as rarely as possible. Still can’t remember a single new update or feature adding anything for me other than github copilot.
On fairly older version of 3C all-in-one tꝏlbox (2.6.6b) bcus has only reliable way for me to keep screen on all the time (hate screen timeouts sorry) . That function appears to be missing from newer versions , all other “keep screen awake” type apps I tried don’t work very well for me , so just rolled back lmao
