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.
OBS Studio. It’s probably a terrible idea, but I have a real Jenga tower of a setup, and any time I update it seems to break something
iTunes was better before they got rid of Party Shuffle. It’s such a good feature and I continue to be frustrated than no other music player offers something similar.
How is it different from other random/shuffle options?
The three big differences are these:
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It doesn’t shuffle a playlist, it adds to a queue by pulling from a playlist at random. This means that if the playlist changes, eg. because it’s a smart playlist, you get the new songs added to the queue later.
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You can change the playlist it pulls from without interrupting playback or resetting the queue.
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It keeps track of which songs were just played as well as what is about to be played.
It has other great features that are present in some or most other apps. But the third thing I’ve only seen in one other app, the first two in none.
I really miss party shuffle. I swear it used to have a feature where other people could add songs to your party shuffle too?
That’s one feature I wish would come back to streaming services
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Deezer, because I maintain a usertheme based on an old version of the website so I use on old build of the app as reference.
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.
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.
Kindle (Paperwhite). Never registered since I bought it, never will. Not once did it touch any network. I only use Calibre to manage books.
The Tesla Super Bowl rom hack from when my favorite team was still good. :(
Windows. Haven’t booted to it in years and am afraid of it fucking up my Linux partition.
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.
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.
Some apps that I’ve patched with revanced manager like messenger to remove the inbox ads for example.
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.
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.
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…
I’ve still got Twitter installed on my iPhone, despite rarely ever using it in the past and having not even launched it in well over a year.
But out of principle alone, as a form of silent protest I refuse to update it to X.
