 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including John and Becky Johnston, Chris Benito and Steve Aderola. Coming up on DTNS, you can now buy a decent Android phone that doesn't allow Google surveillance, plus why they're killing the TweetDeck app and do text message apps need to be more like AOL Insta Messenger? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 1st, 2022, who let it be June? In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merrick. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And filling in for Roger Chang, I'm technical producer Amos. Thank you, Amos. And I was talking to Roger today. We have proof of life. He's doing good, and he'll be back tomorrow. But thank you, Amos, for filling in. Thank you for increasing the suspicion. I don't know what you've heard, but he's just fine. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Got a couple of new supply chain notes starting with Panasonic, which makes car sensors, also consoles, batteries, and other automobile parts, told investors it believes global car production will recover in its fiscal year. This fiscal year. And Nakaya Asia's sources say that Apple is moving some of its iPad production from China to Vietnam. Back on May 12th, the episode of Daily Tech News show went into the Texas law, HB20. That's the one that makes it against the law to ban, demonetize, or otherwise restrict social media content based on the viewpoint of the user or another person. Go listen to that episode, May 12, 2022. We've got a link in the show notes. If you want to understand all of the parameters around that law, but we have a development here, at the time we talked about it on May 12, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had overruled a district court and allowed the bill to go into effect. So technically the bill was enforceable, although nobody brought any lawsuits because of it. NetChoice and the Computer and Communication Industry Association appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court as what's called an emergency request. That puts it on the very fantasy-sounding shadow docket, where it was reviewed by Justice Alito, who referred it to the full court. He didn't have to, but he did. The court ruled five to four to vacate the circuit court ruling, meaning the law will not go into effect until the initial lawsuit in the lower courts is conducted. So now the actual case about the constitutionality of that law, which will likely make its way along with a similar law passed in Florida back to the Supreme Court, starts its long journey at the lowest court. So we're basically starting over from scratch, but the law is not in effect as of now. TikTok confirmed it began testing a distraction-free scrolling experience called ClearMode. If you use TikTok at all, you know that distraction is rampant. So this will remove things like captions, buttons, and other on-screen items while you're viewing video content to strip it out. Keep it a little bit more simple. Google continues its march towards consolidating message apps. If you've ever wondered why Google had a video conferencing service called Meet and also a video calling app called Duo, wonder no more, they're merging. The Duo app will soon be renamed Google Meet and the Google Meet app will be renamed Meet Original and then eventually deprecated. Garmin announced two new four runner smartwatches. The 255 starts at $350. It offers a new racing widget, multi-band GPS, heart rate variation status during sleep, and the ability to switch tracked sports with a single button. The 955 is Garmin's top-end model with an always-on screen and 15 days of battery life. 15 days. Pretty good. An optional solar model can get up to 20 days on a charge as well. It offers a new training readiness metric, can store up to 2,000 songs from streaming services, and includes the features found on the 255 as well. I kind of like that solar watch idea. That's cool. And then right before we started recording this show, CNBC reported that Cheryl Sandberg is stepping down as COO of Metta but will remain on the company's board of directors. Metta's chief growth officer, Javier Olavina, will take over as COO this autumn. All right, let's talk about that Android phone that I mentioned at the top of the show. Yeah, this one's a little different. So Mirena makes EOS. If you're not familiar, it's a phone operating system. It's based on Android, but it doesn't use Google service for its apps. Mirena's 1x2 is the company's first smartphone that's running EOS. Mid-range piece of hardware has a 6.53 inch, 1080 by 2242 screen, 128 gigs of storage, micro SD slot along with a 4200 milliamp battery and an 8-core MediaTek processor. LTE phone, dual SIM slots, also has a 48 megapixel main sensor on the rear camera, 25 megapixels on the front selfie camera. So yeah, there are flagship phones that have better specs than this, but not bad. However, let's go back to the software and the no Google services part of it, Tom. I mean, that's unusual, right? Yeah, Mirena's Gail DeVall, who you may recognize as the founder of Mandrake Linux and one of the co-founders of Mandrieva, started working on EOS in 2017. By the way, EOS has forward slashes or in front and on either side of the E. Slash E slash OS. Yeah, they're not pronounced though, so we're just going to say EOS. EOS is a forked version of the Android 10 version of lineage OS, which itself is a fork of cyanogen mod. And lineage OS currently is available with Android 12, but EOS has not caught up. EOS is still based on Android 10, which is the source of some concern for some people. Anyway, it uses an open source project called Micro G to replace Google's own libraries with clones that do not have hooks into Google services. That means it can provide Google Play maps, geolocation and messaging services without sending telemetry to Google. It also replaces Android's DNS and network time protocol with versions that don't use Google servers. Okay, so how is it handling these apps? And is that is that unique and interesting? Yeah, it has its own messaging app, its own browser, its own search engine. It's powered by Mozilla Location Service and OpenStreetMap for your location and mapping needs, has its own email calendar file storage system and contacts apps. Also has apps for notes, tasks, music and voice recording. I think the music is just locally stored DRM-free MP3s. It does not yet have a virtual assistant, but they are developing one called Olivia. That's in the works. It uses its own Marina Cloud for cloud storage. That allows you to have cloud email calendar contacts and online drive. And there's a productivity suite in the cloud that is powered by OnlyOffice, which is an open source project. Marina Cloud gives you a gig of storage for free. You just create an account and 20 gigs is pretty cheap, 20 euros a year. The app store is where it gets really interesting. Marina's app lounge uses the Google Play services to get apps. So you're getting the apps that are in the Google Play store, but it can add its own descriptions like privacy ratings, for instance. You can either log in with your Google account or browse anonymously, but either way apps come from Google Play and use Google Pay if you want to buy something, if you have to pay for the app or do in-app purchases. Marina says its system anonymizes your data even if you're logged in unless the app requires payment. The app lounge also includes open source apps from Eftroid and some progressive web apps as well. Those are things not found in the Google Play store. And the phone offers something called advanced privacy that will block trackers from the apps you install and use VPN to mask your location. Well, if you're curious, Marina won cost $369, launches in June, so this month, in Canada, Switzerland, the UK, and also the US. Yeah, Marina isn't the first to try this. The road to independence from Google while using Android is littered with previously mentioned cyanogen mod, Ubuntu, Mozilla, Huawei, HarmonyOS. They didn't want to do it, but they were sort of forced to do it. None of these has been terribly successful yet. It's interesting. First of all, go with Olive, not Olivia. There's too many syllables in that. That's my advice to them before they do the voice assistant. Oh, for their assistant. Yeah. It's a little bit with an E, right? Yeah, just got to be two syllables only. That's the rule. Not really. But anyway, I can't help but think, Tom, when we talked about the story on TMS and now we're talking about it again, it sounds like this kind of a literal side loading of the Google Play Store. And that sounds crazy to me, but is that concept even close to what they're doing? Sort of. And I don't think they're going to get in trouble for this. G-Hacks has not gotten in trouble for the cloning of the services. And they're using G-Hacks to call the Google Play service, which means technically they're just using Google Play with a different front end, which I'm not 100% certain you're allowed to do. But I can see why that might be okay if they're like, because what Google Play says is you have to use our services. They don't say you have to use the app usually. So I imagine that what they're doing, because they use Google, they use a Google Play service, even though it's G-Hacks version of it, and they preserve the payment system, which is one of the biggest things Google is concerned with, that it's not technically side loading. It's more of like a very fancy front end that does some privacy protection to kind of prevent tracking. And they still get their chunk. I mean, it's not like Google is suddenly not getting their door to close. They don't get their data, which is valuable, but they get the money. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And that's the bigger question. If this phone sells like wild, wild cakes, wild cakes, that's not a thing. Hot cakes, what I meant to say. No, I like wild cakes. Wild cakes are tastier. That's spicy. Let's say this thing does like two, three million in sales units or something. I don't know. It just feels like Google might pipe up and go, eh, you know, we kind of that information is valuable to us at that level, at that volume of telemetry data that we now don't have. I don't get the sense that anyone's worried about this because G-Hacks has been around for a while. And so I think it's tolerated quite well. I suppose if Marina got really popular, we'd find out. I'm sorry, not G-Hacks, Micro G. I suppose we'd find out for sure, but I also don't think it's going to get popular enough to make it a problem. It could, but I don't think it will. I mean, like I said, I don't get the sense that anybody's worried about that part of it. People are more worried about uptake. They're more worried about, is this going to be just too fiddly for people? The fact that it's kind of doing it means you're not getting the full privacy protection because Google is in your phone a little bit, and you can use the Micro G to log into Google services. So you're not perfectly privacy protected, but also that lets you have the apps. But it's sort of this middle ground of not the best of either world, but certainly better than one or the other if you want to strike a middle ground. But it's a mushy middle. I don't know. Well, something that some folks, anyway, consider to be bad news. Maybe that's you, maybe not. Twitter announced that TweetDeck for its Mac clients will be removed beginning July 1st, meaning it's not going to work anymore. Twitter says we want to put our resources elsewhere. In fact, the company specifically said we want to make TweetDeck better, so we're removing something that people like. TweetDeck on the web is going to remain available, so TweetDeck has not died. It's TweetDeck for Mac specifically. If you are a TweetDeck for Mac user, you'll notice that starting today, Twitter has started placing a blue banner at the top of your client warning you it will only be available for one more month. It's June 1st, you have till July 1st, everybody. Depending on how you use Twitter, you might say, well, it's fine. I have other options, right? I mean, I can still access Twitter. We still have a web TweetDeck we can use right, which is true. Allow me to read a few Tweeted responses though from TweetDeck for Mac users that suggest otherwise. Hayes Brown wrote, this is a bad idea and I hope that the number of power users who will be mad convinces them of this. Alex on Twitter wrote, Twitter, what the flying bleep are you doing? The bleep is mine. He was a little bit more forward with what he tweeted. Corey Foy wrote, terrible decision. I don't understand why companies want to push people to web only interfaces. Jonathan W. Thomas wrote, hey, Twitter, how dare you? I don't want to use TweetDeck on the web. I want a dedicated app on my computer. I do not need another bloody tab open in my browser. Clearly there are some TweetDeck users that are somewhat up in arms over this decision, but it's not really much of a surprise. Twitter hasn't used development resources towards TweetDeck for Mac for some time. It's been rumored to be going away for some time. People are mad, but they shouldn't really be surprised. But not everybody cares about native apps. I do. I use TweetBot as not only a mobile app, but I pay for the native Mac app. I really prefer it over web Twitter for a variety of reasons, but I kind of wanted to go around the horn and see, how do y'all feel about this? Up in arms? First of all, when people make native apps out of things, you hear the opposite from other people. Why are you closing it up in an app? The web is good for this. That's why progressive web apps exist. Blah, blah, blah. And my guess is that Twitter might finally pay some attention to TweetDeck and give it some development and maybe make a progressive web app out of it, which would give you a Mac app back that isn't controlled by the Mac store. I don't know. Usually when you take something away from anyone, you're going to hear people complain. And on the internet, when you see three people complain about something, it feels like an overwhelming number. But my guess is they wouldn't be doing this if there was an overwhelming number of people. The number of people using the Mac app is small. There is a legitimate alternative in a browser. Just pull that tab off for a while and treat it as if it's its own app, and it will look and feel exactly like the TweetDeck app that you had before. I know it's annoying when someone changes something on you that you love, but yeah, I don't think this is a horrible thing that they're doing. That is a really, really good point you made. There is virtually no difference between the interfaces and the functionality. In fact, some of the functionality you can get out of TweetDeck on the web is enhanced by third-party plugins for your browser that give it more functionality than it already has natively. None of that available on the desktop version. So I don't quite understand why people are up in arms about that. Also, just a little bit of history there here. That version of TweetDeck, the Mac version, existed and was a thing before the acquisition of TweetDeck by Twitter. And everybody thought, oh, good. We'll have that app. And those guys who they bought it from really seemed to like Mac as a place to put their thing. Maybe we'll get a Windows version now. And when that never happened, I just felt like the clock was ticking on how soon we would not have this web thing anymore because it does feel like you're doing redundant work. Like why have a development resources thrown at an app that you're kind of doing the exact same functionality with an open tab on your browser? And I understand people liking native apps. I get it. And I think in a lot of cases, you 100% do want a native app. I'll never not want, at least now, a full version of, say, Photoshop on my desktop rather than some web-based version of a photo editor. It's never going to be the same. Or it's not going to be the same in the foreseeable future. Those things make sense to me. But something where you're opening up a message and replying and sending and whatever, I just don't think it's that big of a deal. And my guess is, if you might say, like, well, why don't they just leave the app, the native app there until they're ready to revamp that web app? And my guess is there are changes they want to make to the back end that would change the functionality of the native app. And they don't want to spend the time maintaining the native app and the web app at the same time. So it will speed up the process and bring you features to TweetDeck faster if they don't have to maintain the native app. Sure. Yeah. As a native app, I'm a native app fan. At any point, if there is a native app, I mean, as long as it's functional, I would prefer that to open in another tab. You know, like, like, like that gentleman said on Twitter, who was upset about this whole, this whole thing. What I think, I think, you know, for folks who were like, well, this sucks, you know, I wanted a native app, I liked, I liked TweetDeck, and I'm mad at the world. It's like, okay, well, let's see what company can use the open API to make something that is TweetDeck, either, you know, comparable or a lot better. And by the way, there are some options right now. If you're curious, we will have a link in our show notes to the 9 to 5 Mac article that had some just kind of like, here's some solutions for now. But we're going to see more innovation in this space. And so, I don't know, it's, yeah, think positive, everybody. Yeah. Also, it's okay. If you thought there were slowing product or slowing development on the desktop app, boy, you should see TweetDeck for the web. They haven't done hardly anything to it. There's a beta version. And some people have access to it. And you can turn it on or off or whatever. So maybe that's some progress, you know, Tom informed me earlier that Twitter is getting better about making that API more open to third parties. Or at least they said they're going to say, yeah, they've been slowly killing that for so many years. I was, I was worried we were done, but it sounds like maybe there's hope. So I hope the future of Twitter is more third party, bigger, open, easier to use API, less reliance on their own services and apps. That's what I want. That's the future. Well, if you want to call me an open app apologist, an open standards web using tab loving guy, you could do that if you want to, anywhere you want to. We have social networks. We, you know, just just be nice. DTS show is our Twitter account, DTS show on Twitter and DTS picks with an X DTS picks on Instagram. You can follow those there. Wired's Lauren Good has an article up called it's time to bring back the aim away message. The live chats of the past are now in our pockets and inescapable. We need better boundaries. She's writing this in observation of AOL instant messenger or aims 25th anniversary this month. Good recalls the away message that used to let people know you weren't at your keyboard, often with a message like a song lyric or movie quote, kind of a little personality badge. But we don't have that now, do we Scott? No, we don't. Instead, we have do not disturb. This is basically a mode which shuts out everything. Then there's focus mode, which lets you work without an interruption and mute notifications. So there's some minutia going on there now. Some apps like Apple's high messages, for example, will let you see that notifications have been silenced. But as Google points out, it's often seen as an invite to message instead or sorry, since the person won't be disturbed. Yeah. The psychology around SMS has changed over the years. Lauren points this out too. Back in Ames Hay Day, instant messaging was real time and text messages were for looking at later. Lauren Good calls it synchronous and asynchronous, right? However, whether it's SMS, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, what have you, text messages have become real time. Email is now for later. So what do you think, Sarah? Would an actual away message on your WhatsApp help people? Or would they still just send you that message and be like, wow, they'll read it when they get back? Sarah If I were away on AIM, I could still get a message sent to me. I think that it was much clearer to the sender. She's not going to respond. She's away. Wherever she is, she's not going to talk to me right this second. I mean, maybe I could be lying about that, but assuming that when we're away, we're actually away, there's so many of these little helpful notifications, even if it's a notification to somebody else that I've turned off my notifications, that's supposed to help us understand, okay, where are you right now in the conversation that we're having? Are you there? Are you present? Are you busy? Did you, I used to have read receipts on iMessage, and so many of my friends were just so horrified, like, Sarah, my God, why would you give anyone that information? Who am I hiding from? It seemed fine to me, but I eventually turned that off kind of peer pressure-wise, but I felt like that was a good tool to be like, I've read it. I'm not responding. So you know that I've read it, so I'm obviously busy. Yeah, but people think that's rude. If they can see you, if they can see you read it and you don't respond, they're like, that's so rude. Are you mad at me? Why, yeah, why isn't she getting back to me? Yeah. Like, and I feel like the away message could be good for that, or even like a stoplight thing, whereas it's like green, send all the messages you want. Yellow might be slow to respond. Red, I'm not going to read this right now, just so you know, like, oh, okay, if I see the red, I may not want to send it. Just like right now when notifications are snoozed, I think twice, although it does tend to end up with me sending them anyway. I've sent many a note to Scott when his notifications first came. Yeah, and I'll answer them even though it still says I'm away. Yeah, and then I feel bad. I'm like, oh, never feel bad. No. I kind of have, I actually at least write into what I wanted to say. I'm glad you brought that up. I think there's a whole other layer to this that we haven't discussed yet, and I would love to hear what people say about this at home, listeners and whatnot. But I think we are hitting a saturation point where all of us are crazy busy and all of us kind of dread, already really dread phone calls and avoid those. And I think we're starting to get to the place where we're getting just overwhelmed with texts. I know that I leave my do not disturb on all the time during the day because I just need to focus. I have some exceptions. My wife can get through a couple other people, my family can get through. But for the most part, I just sort of do that. So I want to pull just real quick from gamer culture and what people do on steam as one example and other consoles do the same thing. Those devices let you appear offline and a lot of people use that and it has the effect of saying, oh, well, they haven't been on in a while. That's one effect. Number two is, well, they're not going to see this because they're not on. And so you just get less messages. Now, if you're just trying to avoid people or you've got a fandom, let's say in a bunch of people are trying to contact you, that may make more sense, but I do think there's a desire by people right now to kind of make it so nobody can get ahold of them. And I don't know if that's good, that's bad or what it says about us or where we're going or where we've been. But I really think some of this is don't bug me. And I don't know how we get around that without and still make this usable and functional for those who are not trying not to be, you know, hard to get. It goes both ways too. It's like, I can sit here and be like, I'm not mad at you. I'm simply busy chill. But then I've definitely sent somebody a message before where it's like, you see the little like avatar has read this person has was active 32 minutes ago. And I'm like, I sent that two days ago. Like, what are you doing? The worst is when you get the three dots and then they don't send a message. Yeah. Well, that's, then you know, there's, they're probably out of you, but something else catastrophic happened. But yeah, there's so many nuances in this. And I think it's, it's easy for people to be like, well, I know too much about where you are right now, what you're probably doing, you know, and what your phone settings are, why aren't you getting back to me? Yeah. Yeah, I honestly, I think what Lauren's column is emblematic of and the general frustration people have around, around the nuance of this is this is still, even though SMS is decades old, a new tool, we, we, we got used to phones, but remember phones came around in the late 1800s. So we had a long time to get used to like, when the phone rang, you'd go and answer it. And you might, and Lauren mentioned this in her article too, you know, is this a good time to talk? Like there was a, there was a protocol around when to call, don't call after 9pm, you know, don't call during dinner, that, that kind of stuff. But, but we haven't developed that. And this, this is us developing that around text messages. Yeah, I agree. I do think it's going to get better. And I think it probably get better faster than we think, but there's been a bit of a get away from the simplicity of what SAA needs to do. And now I feel like maybe we're just pulling back a little, maybe just need to simplify. So yeah, I'm all for it. Well, let us know what you think should happen with away messages for SMS and otherwise in our feedback at dailytechnewshow.com address, speaking of which, let's see what's in the old mailbag right now, Sarah. Oh boy, I have more opportunities to speak some French. Andrew wrote in, Andrew from Montreal, who said yesterday, well, he didn't say this, but, but we did this yesterday. We told you about how France's Academy Francaise is banning English terms for the English words like streaming or cloud gaming. This is in official government documents. That's not like for the general populace or anything, but Andrew said, ah, ah, this is a hot button issue here in La Belle Provence. That's Montreal. The government body, la office, qui a, qui a, de la langue français is always on our cases about using French words and terms in business. Andrew points to a newly passed bill, bill 96 as an example of that. He says, sometimes it works, but sometimes English terms just stick, especially in verbal communications. The bonjour, hi greeting used by clerks and stores drives the regime insane. That's so funny. Cause the first time I ever went to Montreal, I thought they were saying bonjour, hi, because they were saying bonjour and then quickly realizing we were Americans, and then switching to hi, but apparently it's just, uh, you just, uh, you know, covering all bets, just kind of situation, which is funny. I love that. Hi, hi. Maybe we'll start DTS that way from now on. Maybe tomorrow. Why not? You know, it's June. Why not? It's good as, as we all know, uh, the Frenchest of months. Yeah. Of all the months. Frenchest by far. Uh, Scott, you know, I don't know how French you are, but we sure like having you on the show. So thank you for being with us today. Let folks know what's been up in your world. Well, my wife is French Cajun. So maybe that helps. Hey, look at that. Yeah. That just mostly means I eat really well, but, uh, as far as I'm concerned, there's tons going on, but the one thing I wanted to mention was, and I've talked about on the show before, I've got a 12 some year old, more than that now, 13 year old show called film sack where we cover old movies, sometimes newer movies, but old movies usually, and, uh, have a great round table discussion about the impact of those films in the 80s, 90s, 70s, 60s, whenever we, you know, whatever we pick and do. And, um, I'm excited because we hit a bit of a milestone. We decided to finally start crowdfunding that thing. So if you haven't heard film sack before, go give it a listen, check out film sack.com or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like film entertainment and you want to hear for, uh, hosts who are really close friends that have been doing this for a long time, now's your time to hop in. That's film sack.com. And for everything else you can find me at frog, or excuse me, frog pants.com and Scott Johnson on Twitter. We also want to thank a brand new boss, brand new boss, names Kevin. Kevin just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Kevin. Keeping the street going, Kevin. There's also a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. A lot of fun. It's available at patreon.com slash D T N S. We roll right into it when we're done here. But just a reminder, we do the show live. If you can join us live, we'd love to have you. Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Marver young joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.