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The real trick is finding that one thing that does the job you want it to.
For years I'd been looking for an app to tune my guitar with. All the ones I could find would just play a fixed set of 6 notes, then you have to tune it by ear. Half the screen was taken up by ads.
Then some random thread pointed me towards an app called Tuner on FDroid. This uses your phone's microphone to listen to any note you play, then it shows the note on a musical stave, and the bottom half of the screen is actually a frequency chart which shows the bounds of the note and where the microphone hears it. You can actually see the bending of the note from when you pluck the string and raise the pitch slightly to where it rings on its own, and decide where to tune to fit as you like. You can also tune to any sort of alternate tuning that your heart desires. An in-line tuner is probably still better (in particular against background noise) but this was the kind of thing that should have been widely available from the start in phones.
But such apps are not advertised, you have to stumble across them, and there's no easy way to sift through all the shit to find them.
The real problem is in how everything is monetised. Most of these apps and services are very cheaply and easily made, and as such there are people who want to make them, purely on a whim. But the good ones get drowned out by the money-grabbing ventures that don't actually fulfill objectives. Somewhere around the 00's the ethos of software development changed from being focused on the user experience to being focused on how the publisher could extract revenue from users, and that is a monumentous shame.
I've been using a tuning app that's similar through 4 phones now. It was taken off the store like 7 years ago, but I kept the apk and keep gimping it along.
The lack of support is actually great, because all the ads went away a few years ago.
Here's a screenshot:
Thanks for posting this picture. I had a different app with the name "Tuner" (by Bill Farmer) installed, also from F-Droid, and thought you were praising that one, but while it has a lot of advanced options one might never use, as well as an incredibly ugly UI, this one (by Michael Moessner) just seems more user-friendly to me.
Other tuner apps in F-Droid worth mentioning:
Yeah, like I say it was something of a Eureka moment when I came across it. It just works, then the fiddling is with the fine tuning of the instrument to get it exactly where you like. There's also a "scientific mode" which shows some funky waveforms.
Practice Suite definitely sounds interesting, I'll be sure to go through them all and check them out.
Is that the brown note?
Yes. All software companies now seem to go through the same cycle. Offer a good product at a cheap price or free. Build market share. Start adding features for a fee. Start packaging those features, so you can't buy the feature you want without buying others. Move to a subscription system. Keep updating to add more monetisation. Start hiding original features behind paywalls. Start to die off.
Obviously, there is the user as product version too which is similar but with ever worsening waste of your time rather than money.
There has been very limited improvements from a general user perspective in either phones, PCs etc over the last decade. It's been incremental cosmetic only for many. An iPhone 4 or old Nexus phone does most of what current phones do. Graphics has improved for gaming, but games are often less fun and more grinding and cosmetics. It's infuriating.
We should have a vast wealth of knowledge that is easily accessible. Instead search engines are programmed to sell to us rather than inform us. I think the biggest part is the disparity of knowledge. If Facebook Google etc had to document how much, to the cent, they made off each customer and each search, users would be more savvy and perhaps more willing to avoid them. I think Facebook will try to avoid the paid users in Europe as they will likely be less valuable. If the make their price high enough to cover the same revenue, they will likely have no customers and spook existing customers.
It's maybe not a perfect fit, but personally I think it's all shades of enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctorow here:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Yes, it matches in a way. However, I think it's not just enshittification, it's that the good or even slightly better products get buried beneath all the trash.
Unfortunately,.monetizing users leads to a rush to gain users over having a viable business model or a viable product. The users become the goal and decisions around the product are guided by that Enshittification is definitely a result of that.
See I find this trend kind of interesting. Performance in desktop PC's plateaued long ago, and soon after laptops, then phones were a little way behind but now they're at the same point. There really isn't that much benefit to getting a new phone, so long as your current phone still works (and the main thing there is battery life).
Phones definitely need to be more open. However, I believe that state actors have got their fingers far too deep in the pie - no open source hardware has ever managed to find its way to market, because doing so would deny low level access to the device, perhaps via the black box "security chips" that encryption is often offloaded to. But these are the most personal of devices - they're the ones we carry with us everywhere we go. They're the ones we should have the greatest level of privacy with, and instead they have the lowest fundamental security for the user. Even in hackable phones, you often have to "ask permission" from the manufacturer to unlock the bootloader.
Granted, I don't think low level exploitation is something that most people need to worry about. It seems like whatever backdoors may be in there are kept very well guarded and seldom exploited - rather, they'll exploit the apps you use first. But apps have so many security holes it's almost comical.
The NSO's Pegasus toolkit infiltrated Android phones by sending a WhatsApp call. Through this, they were able to gain full access to the phone in a zero-click exploit. I'm sure there was a bit more nuance to it, but ultimately they expoited privilege WhatsApp had that it really, really shouldn't have had. WhatsApp patched the exploit, not Android (although I suspect maybe it had something to do with hidden Facebook system apps that manufacturers bundle, outside the Google Play Store).
TL;DR Don't run any apps unless you have to, or you particularly feel like you can trust them. FOSS is a good start, in particular popular FOSS apps where you can be reasonably sure that someone else is checking the code for their own benefit.