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Posts in Mobile (20 found)

iDiallo 5 days ago

Amber Alert with Spam URL?

Well that was weird. I just received an Amber Alert and the link led to a spammy looking website. The link leads to a 3gp file converter which is highly unusual. But the more I look at it, I have the impression it's a mistake. Most likely, they have exceeded the maximum number of characters for the Emergency Service alert. Here is the message: AN AMBER ALERT HAS BEEN ACTIVATED BY THE CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL. DALEZA FREGOSO WAS LAST SEEN ON MAY 24, 2026 AT 0400 HOURS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY. THE SUSPECT VEHICLE IS A WHITE 2019 WHITE LAND ROVER DISCOVERY CA 9DAW715. CLICK ON THE LINK FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION. https://bit.ly/A0 It seems like the total character count is 288. I'm not sure if the title should be included but if I add and the double space after, then we have 320 characters. Is this the character limit for emergency services? When I clicked on it, it took me to the bitly preview page: And clicking on the button, I'm taken here: Suspicious Link I was starting to wonder if this was even a real Amber alert, and if somehow this was a spam message that was sent through. But unfortunately, it is a real amber alert, as I was able to find the matching alert on missingkids.com . However, I don't see a way to request a correction. I understand that bitly was often used to shorten links, but there should be a way for a service like amber alert to test those links before they are sent. At least on my android, once I click on the link, the alert is dismissed never to be seen again. When the link is incorrect, now we have this problem where we can never get the information back. In this case, I was only able to get the link because I received the alert on both my phones. Also I've learned that Amber alerts have a character limit of 360 characters . So I'm still not sure what went wrong with this one. Update: 39 minutes later (8:25pm) a second message was sent with a correction. Corrected Link Most likely a copy and paste error.

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Oya Studio 1 weeks ago

Rive is the server-driven UI engine I wanted

Rive is sold as a tool for cute animations. The more I use it, the more I see something else entirely: a genuinely cross-platform engine for server-driven UI. Here is how to load a component from a remote .riv file and bind it to dynamic, per-locale data in Flutter.

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James O'Claire 1 weeks ago

AppGoblin App Ecosystem Report 2026 Q1

The 2026 Q1 App Ecosystem Report is here with a special section for those attending MAU in Vegas this week. Ad Networks were led by Verve once again after its strong Q4 2025, with other notable breakouts from Snap Inc. , TaurusX , adjoe , and Moloco . Business Tools were led by small but super fast growing Luciq . PayPal also posted strong mobile growth, while emerging companies like AppHarbr stood out. In attribution analytics, growth was broadly healthy across the category and was led by Tenjin . Open source product analytics platform Matomo also looked great heading into 2026. One notable absence from the growth list was AppsFlyer , which has historically been one of the category’s largest and most consistent performers but saw a small down tick in tracked market share. For Development Tools, Divkit posted solid growth. The framework launched in 2025 and is backed by Yandex . Report is totally free and the raw data is available as a free dataset download for the top 1000 app companies / ad domains to see their quarter-over-quarter 2026 Q1 growth: https://appgoblin.info/reports/app-ecosystem-report-Q1-2026

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Unsung 1 weeks ago

“Accents are an opportunity, not a burden.”

The iOS 26 update introduced a bug in the Czech keyboard. Instead of the customary háček (ǍǎĚěǦǧǏǐǑǒǓǔY̌y̌) in the bottom row, another key was duplicated, removing access to the accent character (or, a diacritic ) very popular in that language. Here is the before and after of this situation: = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/1-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/2-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Ordinarily, this can be frustrating but not insurmountable; you can always copy/paste, rely on autocorrect to help out, or even add some topical text replacements for common phrases. The problem is that this bug only appeared on the keyboard used for logging on, and at least a few people used that character in their password. There, none of these workarounds were available – and so those people were now completely locked out of their iPhones. The Register reported on this on April 12 , and a few days later suggested that Apple was working on a fix. I won’t keep you in suspense; I just verified that the fix landed with the recent May 11 update. This is, in an of itself, not a fascinating story, but with interesting things to talk about at its periphery. First of all, The Register never showed a single screenshot. This led to a lot of confusion and speculation in the comments. Turns out, screenshots are valuable not just with bug reporting, but also with bug reporting . Second, check out this Czech keyboard. Even within the limitations of the ancient QWERTY, there’s a lot of cool stuff happening here. Two new accented keys just appear on the top layer when you switch to Czech. Both have magical properties, too. They’re the modern “ dead keys ” that either stand alone, or get combined with the previous letter if that makes sense. This is the stuff typewriters, and even desktop keyboards, could only dream of. But, as always, more software means more bugs, including some with unforeseen consequences; a typewriter could never break this way. Thirdly, there is this interesting tension between us being led to believe “more interesting passwords are safer,” but then sometimes being penalized for actually making them interesting. A decade ago someone used emoji in their password without realizing they won’t be able to input it, and I’m sure there were other examples. But the most interesting, to me, part? It’s the diacritic itself. Under one of the posts, a commenter wrote: Stick with the 7-bit ASCII subset. You will never go wrong. 7-bit ASCII basically means “26 Western letters and nothing else.” I hate this. I know it’s objectively true – in the late 1980s I felt a sense of relief my name didn’t have any of Polish language’s nine diacritics, which would complicate my life. Even just yesterday in Germany, I spotted this: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/4.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/4.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/5.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/5.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Software still struggles beyond ASCII. But this is why we need to keep pushing. Diacritical characters are to be found everywhere in the world. They’re detailed, and varied, and filled with histories. Umlaut is not diaeresis . Kreska is not the acute. A háček is not a breve. They’re rarely optional decoration, and often not even decoration at all; learning about Turkish dotless i might completely upend your understanding of what’s an accent and what is not. If you don’t have a favourite diacritic , you are missing out. Even the names – grave! ogonek! horn! – are beautiful. (Háček is also known as caron and a wedge depending on context, and in other regions referred to with beautiful words kvačica and strešica.) If you’re interested, here is David J. Ross’s 22-minute talk about getting to love diacritics from the perspective of a type designer. It’s filled with craft and playfulness: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/yt1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/yt1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> My favourite accent is, obviously, ogonek. Just looking at Adam Twardoch’s guide on how it should be drawn fills my heart with joy: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/6.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/accents-are-an-opportunity-not-a-burden/6.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> #bugs #david jonathan ross #localization #security #typography #youtube

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

A phone battery experiment

I’ve done all sorts of experiments over the years when it comes to my phone usage. From cutting down my screen time as low as possible, to not using the phone at all, to running it in black-and-white mode, and many others. But this morning I woke up, unplugged my phone from the charger, and I thought «I wonder if I can only charge my phone once a week» . That was a thought half-asleep me had without realizing that what I was actually thinking about was charging it twice a week, not once. So starting the week with a fully charged phone and only plugging it in once until the next Sunday night. I believe it can easily be done, and it might even be doable to use one full charge for the whole week, so not plugging my phone at all for the next seven days. Experiments are fun, and there's only one way to find out, so I’m going for it. I have a Pro Max with a healthy battery that is currently sitting at 100%, and I have put it in low power mode to give myself the best chance. We’ll see how far into the week I’ll make it before I have to charge it again. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Mobile Electronics

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Unsung 1 weeks ago

Safari and system design, pt. 1

To me, “tap anywhere at the top to scroll to the beginning” is an amazing and underappreciated mobile gesture: It not only provides an alternative to desktop‘s Home and ⌘↑ keys, but the student laps the teacher here; it’s actually better than every way to scroll to the top on desktop (do you like pressing ⌘↑? do you even have a Home key?), and it’s an icing on a cake of a regular flick to throw the page to the top already being pretty nice. Tap to return to top is also distinctively mobile in that it allows you to tap just anywhere near the top edge that’s not already a tap target; as far as I can observe, traditional GUIs detest being imprecise in this way, always asking you to click on something specific (although window moving on macOS in the post-title-bar era is also starting to feel similar). The iPhone gesture seemed to work so well that, over the years, more patterns started borrowing from it. In Bluesky and tons of other apps, you can tap on any tab with scrollable content a second time to scroll all the way to the top. (Again, something that’s hard to imagine on desktop, where you pretty much almost never think of clicking on an already-selected item.) It’s not just the top, either. In Podcasts, tapping Home goes back to the left: And in Photos, to the bottom: To me, the whole “tap to return to the beginning” gesture universe feels ascended to be the core property of the interface. In that way, it is similar to scrolling, undo, copy/paste, arrow keys moving the text cursor, and so on, all inducted to the National Register Of Historic Gestures. Why? Because these gestures can only blossom if they work consistently , everywhere. You need to start trusting them so much they slide into your subconsciousness. Breaking the gesture in one place will make it less trustworthy in other places, too, ejecting it from motor memory back to the level of deliberate effort , and therefore making it a lot less usable. “Does this thing work here or not?” is a death knell of flow. The fact that tapping on tabs is idempotent means there’s also no penalty; if you’re already at the beginning but are not sure, tapping it mindlessly won’t hurt or send you back somewhere else. This is all great. And this is why I’m unhappy Safari started mucking with it. Safari has tabs at the bottom – starting with two (regular set and “private” set), although you can add more. Above is a long list of site cards, with newest at the bottom. It’s exactly the same situation as in Photos, and yet tapping on either tab doesn’t restore the scroll position. Instead, it opens the settings dialog: And, tapping around the buttons does nothing. I would imagine Safari is a pretty important app used by many people, and so this feels like a bad place to introduce an inconsistency that could have a more serious consequences of un-teaching people about tap to scroll to top in the long run. The funny thing is that the solution is already there: you can tap ··· in the upper left corner to get to the same functionality. The long press on the tab also opens the same menu. Messing with a “tap to go back to the beginning” system gesture like this means to me the design team doesn’t fully share the understanding of the value of their own creation, or maybe that stewards of the gesture system are not vigilant… or perhaps the awareness is there, but the caretakers aren’t recognized, rewarded, or empowered enough. It’s similar to the “ no, thanks ” example I shared before, a possible worrisome tragedy of the UX commons in the making if the respective teams do not change course. Because, wedging that sort of an exception in – even if you have a great set of reasons in the moment – creates a precedent . Inevitably, from my experience, the next team that will want to override scroll to top, or misuse “No, thanks,” will now require less of a justification. #definitions #details #flow #interface design #touch

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Alex White's Blog 2 weeks ago

What Time Is It?

On Palm OS, the interface for picking the start and end time of an event is represented as two columns, hour and minutes. The hours list either starts at 8AM and shows until 7PM (covering a full business day, or it starts at the next hour (if creating an event for today). Minutes are represented for every 5 minute interval, allowing every option to be shown at once. This interface is simple and requires an extremely low cognitive load to use. It's scannable and adaptive to the current situation (today vs another day). It limits options (ie you can't set a time of 12:33) to drive simplicity. If we compare to the time picker on Android, we can see it's significantly more complex. One must first tap the hour, then tap AM/PM, then tap the minutes section and tap the minute they need. While minute intervals of 5 are shown on the screen, the user is able to select specific minutes, if they know how (one must drag the circle to get a specific minute). The interface has many more taps, states and cognitive load. How about iOS? Like Palm OS, iOS limits you to 5-minute intervals. Similar to Android though, an additional interaction is needed to pick AM/PM. Picking hour and minutes is more involved as well, you must scroll the picker to the desired value. The Palm OS UI might not be the prettiest, but it's the fastest for most use-cases. The most common options (business hours and 5-minute intervals) are presented without the need for multiple states or scrolling. Setting the time is 2 taps away!

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iDiallo 4 weeks ago

Disable Auto-Update

How is it possible that a feature I use every day, in an app I rely on daily, entirely offline, just disappeared from my phone? I use a fitness app. My metrics, such as steps, workout routines, heart rate, are collected from a wearable device like a smartwatch and sent to the app via Bluetooth. No third-party servers are involved in that transaction. The data lives on the phone. It costs the developer nothing to maintain, because there's nothing to maintain on their end. Then the app updates, just once, and that data is no longer accessible. Not because it was deleted or corrupted. Because the developer decided you now need to create an account on their servers to access information that already exists on your own device. That's why I have auto-update disabled on every device I own. Some of the apps on my phone are older than my children. You couldn't download them today even if you wanted to. The developer no longer offers that version. One of my apps is a single screen that displays information based on GPS data and compass orientation. I downloaded it in 2014. I've switched phones twice since then, and each time I've made sure to carry that app with me. I didn't keep it out of nostalgia, and because I have a hard time letting go. I kept it because the current version has three ads crammed onto that single screen. A full-screen ad hijacks the display at random intervals, complete with one of those countdown timers that slows down as it approaches zero. And of course, there are notifications now. None of that is for my benefit. I just need that one screen. Open the app, read the information, put it away. You might say I'm being cheap. That if I've used the app for over a decade, I clearly value it. So I should pay for the subscription and lose the ads. Fair point. But I have the old version. It was free, had no ads, and worked flawlessly. No future version can improve that. On top of it, those ads expose me. Advertising is one of the most common attack vectors in mobile security. Malvertising is a real thing. Updating to the ad-supported version wouldn't make my phone more secure. I don't update apps unless I've read about a specific vulnerability. Even then, I'll often delete the app rather than update it. I can't accept software that changes arbitrarily, especially when those changes almost never benefit me and almost always serve someone's bottom line. As a developer myself, I have the advantage of actually reading changelogs. When an update says "bug fixes," that's not a reason for me to act, unless I've encountered those bugs personally. Every user engages with a different 20% of an app's features . Someone else's bugs may never be mine. And why do developers push account creation so aggressively? Because your account is the product. An account means data. Data means third-party revenue. Every update is a decision point for me. It requires me to set aside time, read about the changes, and think about what I'm about to embark into. My workflow matters. My data matters. My time matters. If a developer breaks what worked for me without a compelling reason, I'll find another app that respects those things. There's always one out there, probably one that hasn't been improved yet.

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Unsung 1 months ago

“The system is so twisted that even Apple itself begs for these reviews from its own apps.”

A good post by John Gruber on Daring Fireball investigating why apps pester you with the annoying “enjoying this app?” windows and attendant semi-shady practices (choose 5 stars and you get sent to App Store, but choose anything less, and your review will get redirected to Mr. Dev Null ). The answer? They don’t really have a choice: “[Steven Troughton-Smith:] Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positive reviews, and thousands of positive reviews. […]” You have to play the game as the game stands, and Apple controls the game. And in the game as it stands, apps need 5-star reviews to gain traction in the App Store, perhaps especially so for apps in crowded categories. And for most apps, the only way to achieve that is through prompting. But the right thing to do, for the user experience in the app, is never to prompt for reviews. I think it’s worth knowing about stuff like this for another reason. Absent understanding or institutional memory, any exception gets normalized and ceases being an exception. If specifically iOS apps have to do this for reasons explained in the post, this is still not an excuse for web apps or websites to indiscriminately pester people with prompts like these , too.

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Alex White's Blog 1 months ago

Back to Palm OS

Over the winter I was super into Palm Pilots, I even picked up a few new ones and swapped the batteries. My current collection includes a Tungsten E, Tungsten T3, Tungsten C and a Handspring Visor. I was daily driving the C for quite awhile, but fell off when I upgraded my phone. Well, today I'm going back! I recently posted on Mastodon about my struggles trying to track calories. Everything on the iOS store is enshittificated garbage. I shouldn't have to pay a monthly fee, see ads, have my data sold, create an account and agree to ToS to track freaking calories. Palm Pilots are from an era when software was allowed to be complicated, and to that end there are a number of applications that allow you to essentially create your own applications! Using SmartList To Go , I was able to create a database with a form for entering and tracking daily calories. It's not complex, but it doesn't need to be. I have a screen for seeing my daily log, sorted by meal then calorie count. There's a form for recording a new entry, and there's a screen to sum up all the calories in the day. I also keep a running log in each entry of the daily calories (previous record total + current calories). I might expand the functionality by adding a second database that remembers food items and their calories, then join it in with the log view so I don't have to lookup calories each time. The fact that it's an option to do that is awesome. I also love that there's the ability to build logical evaluators in computed fields. Yeah, I had to download and read parts of the 136 page SmartList To Go 3.0 Handheld Reference Guide , but why is that such a bad thing? Why have we given up on making software that serves our needs, and instead just let companies shovel subscription based crap at us? SmartList was not free back in the day (looks like it was $50 USD, which is $84 today), but quality software shouldn't have to be free. What it should have to be is yours. Pay once, no ads, no data collection, no online requirement. Someone that paid for SmartList in 2005 can still get value out of it 21 years later. Wish me luck as I restart my journey of weight loss, hopefully I can shed some pounds and get faster on the bike! I'll also be using the Weight Tracker application I previously wrote for Palm OS.

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Unsung 1 months ago

Only time will tell

Why is there a short wait if you press a button on your headphone remote or your AirPods to pause the music? Because the interface has to let a bit of time pass to figure out if you’re going to press the button again, making it a double press (advance to next track) instead of a single press. This kind of disambiguation delay is everywhere for simple gestures. Why is there a short wait if you press a button twice in that situation? The double press processing also has to be delayed, because there is a chance it might become a triple press (go to previous track). Why is there a short wait if you press a button to go to the next track on your car’s steering wheel? It’s a delay of a different kind, but the same principle: the function cannot kick in on press down, because press down and hold mean “fast forward.” So, software has to wait for button up event to go to the next track (which feels a bit slower than button down), or for enough time to pass so we’re certain it’s a button-down hold rather than a slow press. Here, both interactions experience a penalty for coexisting. The most infamous of those disambiguation delays exists in mobile browsers. Since every double tap can zoom into the page ever since that famous 2007 iPhone presentation , every single tap on a link or elsewhere has to be delayed by about 300ms. This has been a source of contention since it does make the web feel a bit slower, and today browsers suspend double tapping on sites designed for mobile, trading zooming affordances for higher interaction speed – after all, you can still zoom in by pinching. But if you always wondered why older websites tend to be a bit sluggish to interact with, now you know. Different tradeoffs are possible. In the Finder, clicking on icons isn’t slowed down even though double clicking exists, because selecting an icon is compatible with opening it! So in effect it’s not a choice between a faster A and a slower B – it’s A or A+B. Even in the iPhone presentation above, you can see the interface highlights the link on double tap, to at least make it feel snappier, at the expense of the highlight being “wrong” and potentially distracting – or even confusing – when you end up double tapping. (You can imagine smartphones pausing on the first remote/headset button press, too. It feels like it would be compatible with advancing to the next track, but I think it might also feel too “choppy,” too chaotic, in practice.) Lastly, why is there a short wait if you press a button on your hotel TV to increase the volume? Oh, I think that one is just sluggish for no good reason. #details #finder #interface design #performance

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Evan Schwartz 1 months ago

Scour - March Update

Hi friends, In March, Scour scoured 813,588 posts from 24,029 feeds (7,131 were newly added) and 488 new users signed up. Welcome! Here's what's new in the product: Scour now does a better job of ensuring that your feed draws from a mix of sources and that no single interest or group of interests dominates. I had made a number of changes along these lines in the past, but they were fiddly and the diversification mechanism wasn't working that well. Under the hood, Scour now does a first pass to score how similar articles are to your interests and then has a separate step for selecting posts for your feed while keeping it diverse on a number of different dimensions. Content from websites and groups of interests you tend to like and/or click on more are now given slightly more room in your feed. Conversely, websites and groups of interests you tend to dislike or not click on will be given a bit less space. For Scour, I'm always trying to think of how to show you more content you'll find interesting -- without trapping you in a small filter bubble (you can read about my ranking philosophy in the docs). After a number of iterations, I landed on a design that I'm happy with. I hope this strikes a good balance between making sure you see articles from your favorite sources, while still leaving room for the serendipity of finding a great new source that you didn't know existed. After you click an article, Scour now explicitly asks you for your reaction. These reactions help tune your feed slightly , and they help me improve the ranking algorithm over time. Before, the reaction buttons were below every post but that made them a bit hard to hit intentionally and easy to touch accidentally. If you want to react to an article without reading it first, you can also find them in the More Options ( ) menu. Thanks to Shane Sveller for pointing out that the reaction buttons were too small on mobile! Scour now supports exact keyword matching, in addition to using vector embeddings for semantic similarity. Articles that are similar to one of your interests but don't use the exact words or phrases from your interest definition will be ranked lower. Right now this applies to interests marked as "Specific" or "Normal" (this is also automatically determined when interests are created). This should cut down on the number of articles you see that are mis-categorized or clearly off-topic. Thanks to Alex Miller and an anonymous user for prompting this, and thanks to Alex, JackJackson, mhsid, snuggles, and anders_no for all the Off-Topic reports! Sometimes, I see an article on Hacker News or elsewhere and wonder why didn't this show up in my Scour feed. You can now paste links into the Why didn't I see this? page, and it will give you a bit of an explanation. You can also report that so I can look into it more and continue to improve the ranking algorithm over time. Here were some of my favorite posts that I found on Scour in March: Happy Scouring! P.S. If you use a coding agent like Claude Code, I also wrote up A Rave Review of Superpowers , a plugin that makes me much more productive. For anyone building products, this is a good reminder to make sure you're trying out and experiencing the bad parts of your product: Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts! . This was a brief, interesting history and technical overview of document formats, from to and and why Markdown "won": Markdown Ate The World . A reminder that any user-generated input, including repo branch names, can be malicious: OpenAI Codex: How a Branch Name Stole GitHub Tokens . This is a very detailed and informative visual essay explaining how quantization (compression) for large language models works: Quantization from the ground up . I'm not currently using Turso (the Rust rewrite of SQLite), but I think what they're doing is interesting. Including this experimental version that speaks the Postgres SQL dialect: pgmicro . And because I like making -- and eating -- sour sourdough: How To Make Sourdough Bread More (Or Less) Sour .

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Manuel Moreale 2 months ago

Step aside, phone: closing thoughts

Four full weeks of paying more attention to phone screen time are behind us, and it’s time for some closing thoughts on this experiment. But first, a quick recap of how the final week went. The average was slightly higher than the previous 3 weeks, and that was mainly due to what happened on Tuesday and Friday, which, as you can see from the weekly recap, saw higher-than-usual phone usage. On Tuesday, I passed 1 hour of screen time for the first time since the start of this experiment, and that was because of a…phone call? I’m not entirely sure why screen time registers a phone call as screen time, but that's why I passed the 1-hour mark on Tuesday. I had a 30-minute phone call for something work-related, and that apparently is picked up as screen time. Go figure. Aside from that, as you can see, usage was business as usual: about half an hour of messaging and a minute here and there for a few extra things. Friday, I passed the 1-hour mark again, and this time it was actual usage, and it was just Telegram. As you can see from the time distribution, I spent almost 40 minutes chatting with a few people late in the day and aside from Telegram, I barely picked up my phone. The rest of the week was very uneventful. Looking back at these past 4 weeks, I feel like, for me, the way my life is structured at this moment, 4 hours of weekly phone usage is the sweet spot, and I intend to keep it that way. I’m happy I managed not to consume content on my phone. Podcasts, music and RSS are gone from the site, and I feel like my relationship with this stupid object is in a much better place. I have deeper thoughts I want to share, but those will get their own dedicated post, likely tomorrow. How about the others, though? I started this thing to help Kevin get off his phone, and I succeeded so well that he jumped off iOS entirely and moved to Android. Not exactly the outcome we wanted, but hey, at least it's a change. He'll be back using his phone 5 hours a day now that nobody is paying attention. Kev instead is too busy vibe-coding blog platforms to pay attention to his phone, and he abandoned us after one week. As for John, Thomas, and Alex, they all did great, I'd say, and I love that Thomas tracked time spent in front of his computer and not just the phone. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs Read Kevin's week four recap Read Thomas' week four recap Read John's week four recap Read Alex's week three recaps

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Manuel Moreale 3 months ago

Step aside, phone: week 3

Three-quarters of the way through this “challenge”, and the findings are mostly the same. Phone usage is very easy to keep in check if you decide to put your mind to it. The past seven days have been very similar to the previous seven, and that’s good, since this type of phone usage needs to become the new normal. Contrary to the previous week, this time it was the first half of the week that saw higher usage, and that was mostly due to a few long Telegram sessions late in the day on Monday and Tuesday. 44 or the 54 minutes logged on Monday, and 32 of the 45 logged on Tuesday, were spent on Telegram. Only 26 minutes out of 46 on Wednesday, the rest of the usage was work-related since I had to do a few phone calls and test a couple of things on mobile Safari. The second half of the week saw a lot less phone time, but I did have to spend a lot more time at my computer, taking care of client stuff, and that’s why I barely picked up the phone. Which is fine. I still have not consumed content on the phone, three weeks in. That’s awesome, and I want that to stay that way. Again, very pleased with how this month-long experiment is going, and I do have some takeaways, but I’ll wait until next Sunday to share them. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Pete Warden 3 months ago

Announcing Moonshine Voice

Today we’re launching Moonshine Voice , a new family of on-device speech to text models designed for live voice applications, and an open source library to run them . They support streaming , doing a lot of the compute while the user is still talking so your app can respond to user speech an order of magnitude faster than alternatives , while continuously supplying partial text updates. Our largest model has only 245 million parameters , but achieves a 6.65% word error rate on HuggingFace’s OpenASR Leaderboard compared to Whisper Large v3 which has 1.5 billion parameters and a 7.44% word error rate. We are optimized for easy integration with applications, with prebuilt packages and examples for iOS , Android , Python , MacOS , Windows , Linux , and Raspberry Pis . Everything runs on the CPU with no NPU or GPU dependencies. and the code and streaming models are released under an MIT License . We’ve designed the framework to be “batteries included”, with microphone capture, voice activity detection, speaker identification (though our diarization has room for improvement), speech to text, and even intent recognition built-in, and available through a common API on all platforms. As you might be able to tell, I’m pretty excited to share this with you all! We’ve been working on this for the last 18 months, and have been dogfooding it in our own products, and I can’t wait to see what you all build with it. Please join our Discord if you have questions, and if you do find it useful, please consider giving the repository a star on GitHub, that helps us a lot.

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iDiallo 3 months ago

Last year, all my non-programmer friends built apps

Last year, all my non-programmer friends were building apps. Yet today, those apps are nowhere to be found. Everyone followed the ads. They signed up for Lovable and all the fancy app-building services that exist. My LinkedIn feed was filled with PMs who had discovered new powers. Some posted bullet-point lists of "things to do to be successful with AI." "Don't work hard, work smart," they said, as if it were a deep insight. I must admit, I was a bit jealous. With a full-time job, I don't get to work on my cool side project, which has collected enough dust to turn into a dune. There's probably a little mouse living inside. I'll call him Muad'Dib. What was I talking about? Right. The apps. Today, my friends are silent. I still see the occasional post on LinkedIn, but they don't garner the engagement they used to. The app-building AI services still exist, but their customers have paused their subscriptions. Here's a conversation I had recently. A friend had "vibe-coded" an Android app. A platform for building communities around common interests. Biking enthusiasts could start a biking community. Cooking fans could gather around recipes. It was a neat idea. While using the app on his phone, swiping through different pages and watching the slick animations, I felt a bit jealous. Then I asked: "So where is the data stored?" "It's stored on the app," he replied. "I mean, all the user data," I pressed. "Do you use a database on AWS, or any service like that?" We went back and forth while I tried to clarify my question. His vibe-knowing started to show its limits. I felt some relief, my job was safe for now. Joking aside, we talked about servers, app architecture, and even GDPR compliance. These weren't things the AI builder had prepared him for. This conversation happens often now when I check in on friends who vibe-coded their way into developing an app or website. They felt on top of the world when they were getting started. But then they got stuck. An error message they couldn't debug. The service generating gibberish. Requests the AI couldn't understand. How do you build the backend of an app when you don't know what a backend is? And when the tool asks you to sign up for Google Cloud and start paying monthly fees, what are you supposed to do? Another friend wanted to build a newsletter. Right now, ChatGPT told him to set up WordPress and learn about SMTP. These are all good things to learn, but the "S" in SMTP is a lie. It's not that simple. I've been trying to explain to him why the email he is sending from the command line is not reaching his gmail. The AI services that promise to build applications are great at making a storefront you don't want to modify. The moment you start customizing, you run into problems. That's why all Lovable websites look exactly the same. These services continue to exist. The marketing is still effective. But few people end up with a product that actually solves their problems. My friends spent money on these services. They were excited to see a polished brochure. The problem is, they didn't know what it takes to actually run an app. The AI tools are amazing at generating the visible 20% of an app. But the remaining invisible 80% is where the actual work is. The infrastructure, the security, maintenance, scaling issues, and then the actual cost. The free tier on AWS doesn't last forever. And neither does your enthusiasm when you start paying $200/month for a hobby project. My friends' experiments weren't failures. They learned something valuable. Some now understand why developers get paid what they do. Some even started taking programming bootcamp. But the rest have moved on. Their app sits dormant in an abandoned github repo. Their domain will probably expire this year. They're back to their day jobs, a little wiser about the difference between a demo and a product. Their LinkedIn profiles are quieter now, they have stopped posting about "working smart, not hard." As for me, I should probably check on Muad'Dib. That side project isn't going to build itself. AI or no AI.

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Manuel Moreale 3 months ago

Step aside, phone

I was chatting with Kevin earlier today, and since he’s unhappy with his mindless phone usage , I proposed a challenge to him: for the next 4 weeks, each Sunday, we’re gonna publish screenshots of our screen time usage as well as some reflections and notes on how the week went. If you also want to cut down on some of your phone usage, feel free to join in; I’ll be happy to include links to your posts. I experimented with phone usage in the past and I know that I can push screen time usage very low , but it’s always nice to do these types of challenges, especially when done to help someone else. Like Kevin, I’m also trying to read more. I read 35 books last year , the goal for 2026 is to read 36 (currently more than halfway through book number 5), and so I’m gonna attempt to spend more time reading on paper and less on screen. It’s gonna be fun, curious to see how low I can push my daily averages this time around. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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James O'Claire 4 months ago

Mobile B2B Trends in 2025 SDK Usage across 50k Apps

At AppGoblin we just crunched the top 50k apps in 2025 and their SDK usage over the year and the report has gained a lot of attention on the socials for mobile B2B marketers, so I wanted to share it on my personal blog as well to give some background for the report. Looking at the trends of for which apps added or removed SDKs gives insight into the trends fueling adtech, revenue services, mobile analytics, MMPs and more. In 2025 there were some clear winners and losers, so let’s look into it more. Some of the highlights: Moloco saw massive growth in their SDK clients X3M has been growing for a couple years but 2025 looks to have been a breakout year for them. FlareLane ‘s push notification SDK has a small base of apps but it’s growing rapidly. Superwall paywall SDK is gaining in popularity among big and small apps Airbridge saw a great boost in growth. Their MMP offering is growing rapidly. PostHog and Parsely saw great growth. These more business / developer focused analytics platforms are growing rapidly. Flurry saw big drops in their SDK usage. Some drops in usage for ad networks like LiftOff/AdColony/Mopub. Don’t be fooled, though Liftoff Mobile saw shrinking trends, it’s partnership/parent Vungle saw a healthy increase. This isn’t necessarily an issue as their older app clients are absorbed into Vungle. A similar situation can be observed for AdColony (Digital Turbine) and MoPub (AppLovin). The whole report & CSV is free on AppGoblin: https://appgoblin.info/reports/mobile-apps-growth-sdks-2025

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@hannahilea 4 months ago

Ensembler: Swipe to match with musicians near you!

An app for building community through playing music, one ensemble at a time. Meet your musical neighbors and make some noise

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Heather Burns 4 months ago

The worst fucking app idea ever

A page out of my Mphil project research. This is not a joke.

Mobile Research

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