This episode of Android Faithful is brought to you by Awesome. The Awesome Privacy Cable gives you much needed control over when and how your data is shared. Get more info at awesomeprivacy.com slash privacy-cable. Welcome to Android Faithful, your weekly source for the latest news, hardware and apps for the wide and wonderful world of Android. I'm Huyen Dweydow. I'm Ron Richards. I'm Vishal Ramat. We are very lucky this week to welcome a very special guest, Mr. Chet Haas. Hey, Chet. Hey, everybody. Chet, why don't you... I mean, Chet is on the Android graphics team at Google, but you've worn many hats, so I don't know. I can't remember which exact hat you're wearing this time, but why don't you let people know who you are and what you do? Yeah, as a good example of that hat switching, I'm actually on the toolkit team now. Shoot, dang it. Again, so I've kind of... You would think I've kind of circled around, but I think of it more as like I took my career in a particular direction now. I basically backed it off another 10 years. So I started out on Android in 2010 as an engineer on the toolkit team. I eventually led that team. I went to DevRel, and then I came back to engineering onto the graphics team as an engineer, and now I'm back on the toolkit team as an engineer. So, yeah, I just, I rewound it all. I feel like that speaks in the pre-show when we're sharing some memories of giving talks and referencing some of Chet's talks at various like Google I.O. and other events. And the more things change, the more things stay the same, where life is very cyclical, right, that theme, so. It is, I mean, there's also, there's an aspect, I don't know what you have found in your engineering careers, but there's an aspect of we tend to work on the same kind of things over and over again. I've written at least three animation frameworks, for example, and I work on graphics and UI and performance, and I just keep doing that. It's like, you know, different variations of the same stuff, because that's what we enjoy. That's where you build your skills, and so you just kind of dig into that hole and you keep going down. I will share that. I'm not as talented as you both are on the engineering side of things, but I've got, you know, 20 years under my belt on product, on the product management side, and I seem to have fallen into content management systems. I don't like, I did, I did one CMS when I was 21, and then every job since is only the first project has been the CMS. So it's hard to shake the things that you do. So good luck finding things that you enjoy working on, because you're going to do that again. And so if you pick a bad one the first time out, it could be a hard life. So that's the limit, but you know, watch that first job, because then your sky will actually kind of get start to get very, very narrow. We're all different paths here. Like for me, change is a constant because I'm constantly going back and forth, trying to keep up with whatever y'all are doing on Android. Like 20 different teams, thousands of employees, trying to figure out what you guys are working on and explaining it is just a never ending battle. We try to make it interesting for you, so. Well, and there's no one better than Chet who wrote the book, who literally wrote the book on it. Literally, yes. Hey, there's a plug, look at that. Yeah, so everybody definitely needs to check out Chet's book, Androids, the team that built the Android operating system. Chet on our former show, we talked to you right I feel like when the book came out, how's the reception been since it's out in the world? It's good, it's had two or three lives so far. So I originally wanted to find like a publisher and I don't know if for anybody listening, if you've tried that, but try to find a publisher, publishers are like, no, we don't want to hear from you, go to an agent, you try to find an agent and the agent basically doesn't respond. And eventually, I think this is an interesting story. I'll just self publish it because I want people to read it. And then once it was out there, it was actually doing pretty well and it was a little easier to approach a publisher, a small publisher at that time, no starch press. And so a second edition of it came out, same book, minor stylistic tweaks to it, but that edition is doing well and then there's also the audio book, which I'm doing through a different publisher through Tantor. So hopefully people again, find this thing and get it where they need it and learn the story. I just, I wanted to tell it because I thought it was interesting. So I hope everyone agrees. We agree. We are the Android faithful, so we definitely agree. Speaking of the Android faithful, we are, this is our brand new podcast. You might have remembered us from a slightly different podcast where we did have Chet Hassan last year to talk about his book and pepper him with questions about it. If you happen to be listening on the live stream, maybe you haven't subscribed yet. So make sure you go to your favorite podcatcher, whether that's podcast, Spotify, Apple and subscribe, or just go to androidfaithful.com and just see anything else that you need, any of the information you need to help us subscribe and listen to us every week. If you feel the need or to support us or you really like what we're doing, we have a patreon, patreon.com slash androidfaithful where you can get in on things like our Patreon news pic of the week, an ad for your version of the podcast and exclusive content and merch. And finally, if you are a social networking type of person, you can find us on Twitter slash X slash whatever that site's called now at androidfaithful. We're also on more, less voluntarily named things like Facebook, Instagram and threads. And we love hearing from our listeners. So always, we were always able to write us emails at contact at androidfaithful.com. Right on. All right, so what do you say? Do you want to get into it? Let's do it. All right, let's do some news, when you got the first story. Yeah, this is an interesting one.  And in fact, we have a story about AI and Google Assistant. So Axios got their hands or their eyeballs on an internal email sent to Google employees. And it confirms more or less what we've been speculating on from like kind of like corollary news that assistant is going to get an overhaul focusing on generative AI technologies, bar, chat, GPT, have your drink. And this will of course fundamentally change many different things for many different people, the developers working on it, the consumers like us and of course for Google employees themselves. And I guess as other third party devs as well, the changes will start with mobile versions. And we previously talked about shifts in the executive leadership and in the email which was signed by Google Assistant VP, Piyush Ranjan and Director Product Duke Tekelis. They basically confirm like some more team organization and unfortunately some small layouts that will kind of be around that reorganization. And Axios, if you're really curious, has the full text of this email in the article. And of course, not surprising given how much we talk about generative AI these days and how other assistants and competitors like Alexa are similarly kind of trying to integrate generative AI into their assistants. So we surprised, not surprised, makes sense. I'm not surprised. I mean, I don't know, I think it makes sense. Michelle, you probably got a POV on this. What do you think? No, I mean, absolutely. Like it's something that's long overdue. I think everyone has had some kind of complaint with the way Google Assistant has not become as smart as we thought it would be in the future. You know, like maybe five years ago, we all thought we'd be using Google Assistant for everything. Nowadays they use it for timers, for checking the weather, for maybe hearing the news in the morning. It's not what we thought it would be when it was first unveiled. But with using BARD as like a back end, maybe it could evolve into what we originally thought it would be. And I definitely am excited to see what kind of, how exactly we'll be interacting with Assistant in the future. Yeah, I mean, I think to a certain degree, I'm having lots of conversations in my day job about generative AI and AI as a tool set and like there's lots of concern. And obviously we're seeing AI in the news, specifically in the entertainment industry is it's a big sticking point in the writer strike and the actor strike currently going on in Hollywood where they're concerned about the use of AI and what that means for their roles. And so it's kind of like, when you joke about like take a drink because it's so buzzwordy and it's so buzzy in terms of what's going on, but it really is the direction of everything. Like is there anything that you, anything technology-based that doesn't have some AI component that we've heard, like to help do what it's doing or anything like that. It seems like everything is going in this direction. So by that logic, this isn't surprising, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I'm still kind of skeptical for various reasons whether that's the economic impacts and like ethics slash economic impacts like things like the writer strike, things like, gosh, I can't remember stability AI and things like learning off of other artists sets. And then also just like the day to day questions of AI is having hallucinations or being slightly off and like the impacts of whether kind of like as Lee people or non-technical people being exposed to when information is not accurate, but is said with a lot of confidence as generous AI does. What is that term? Is it the hallucination? It's hallucination, yeah, oh my God, it's so funny. Like when the AI is convinced it's giving you the right answer and it couldn't be more wrong. And we've talked about that on our previous show and like we talked about in the past. I mean, like I cited the example of I asked chat GPT to write an article about one of my other podcasts and it went through and did this whole very accurate 12 paragraph article about me and my other podcasters until it took a left turn at paragraph number eight where it went out about how one of my co-hosts had cancer and podcasts through his cancer treatment and documented it and he never had cancer. So like so and we found what we found the spot chat GP found a podcast listing page with our podcast and on the side was a recommended podcast about someone with the same name as my co-host who survived cancer. And it just combined the two and made it fact. And so these are just like it's all technology is going to have kinks. I'm not necessarily pro or anti AI. I just think it's inevitable. But doesn't this just mean that AI and computers are just getting closer to human because now they can just make mistakes? That's a very good point. It used to be so dry with like fact, fact, fact. Oh, tired of all the facts. Just make some stuff up and pretend it's real. Keep it interesting, right? Like it's keep people on their toes. So it is so funny because my husband, I just watched Blade Runner 2049 finally this weekend and not to spoil that for anyone who hasn't seen it. I've yet to see it. Okay, so I won't spoil it. But I think not to get too highfalutin with it but obviously, like there was a whole question of like AI and how human AI is. And I suppose maybe we're already kind of there because yeah, exactly. What's more human than being wrong? So maybe we're there ahead of the curve on us. Yeah, but you know, there's a lot of talk about the downsides of AI and obviously there's going to be a lot of work to be done to reign in. I think there was a recent announcement about a lot of companies are adding metadata to images that are being generated by AI so that you can identify them. But I also like how AI is going to make, a lot of these previous technologies a lot more accessible to the user. So going back to the Google Assistant story, one of the problems with using Google Assistant or any voice assistant right now is that you kind of have to understand how it works to be able to formulate a query that it'll actually understand and process. So like my parents right now, they try to talk to it but they don't really understand the right way to say something to where it'll actually respond properly. Like whereas like I know what I want to say beforehand whereas they constantly have pauses they might say something incorrect and it's just not able to search up and get the right answer for that. But with the large language model it'd be much more likely to actually pick up on what they're trying to say and generate some kind of answer that's useful to them. Of course, there's a lot of concerns around that but I think this is one area would be really helpful. Well, I will make one comment and then we'll move on but in terms of Assistant, Lord, things can't get much worse. I kind of want to set up hidden cameras and record my wife trying to talk to the Google Home and get some big full-the-song up that she wants and see how many times she walks away in frustration. So maybe this will help to your point Michelle, get it kind of a little more push in the right direction but we'll see. All right, we'll move it on. One thing on the show that we do like is numbers and looking at the smartphone sales by share, by company in Q2 2023, things aren't looking too great right now for the industry. Smartphone shipments fell 24% year over year compared to 2022 with specific declines across pretty much every manufacturer except for Google although that is deceiving in and of itself. Samsung and Motorola and Alcatel saw pretty steep declines in shipments. Apple was only down about 6% but Google was technically up 48% because their market share in Q2 2023 was 3% whereas a year ago was only 1% but if you actually look at the breakout by quarters Google's market share was 5% and Q4 2022 and they are down 2% there in that regard. So even though inflation seems to be going down, job market is up, people seem to be on pause on their upgrade path for whatever reason and we might get into that when we start talking during the hardware section about Samsung but at least in this past quarter not a lot of reason to upgrade smartphones and it looks like the biggest winner in the quarter was Google probably thanks to the pixel fold coming out of the market which is a very high price point as well as wind shows are off but we do love the numbers. I think it was actually the 7A because the fold came out like a few days before they stopped clicking data. Oh, okay, thanks. Do fold devices get double counted because there's two screens on them? At least two screens. Actually it's more like three devices isn't it because there's like one, two and then you have another one, you three, so triple. So there you go, there are some numbers to keep track of what's going on. I don't know, I mean like whenever we do these or as numbers, it's always interesting what to see what the market share looks like and see what the industry kind of looks like. I'm not surprised to hear a pause in purchasing despite inflation going down because there's still lingering effects of inflation and say like just because prices aren't going up currently you're still dealing with the fact that they went out the previous quarter and you're still saving your pennies and waiting to pull the trigger. So I'm looking at all these reports like over the last couple of months that iPhone keeps gaining ground among young people in the US, in Seoul, in Korea, and around the world. And I'm wondering like what can Google as the maker of Android do to reverse this trend? And one thing that always comes to my mind is support an ecosystem that allows users to makes it harder for users to switch over because that's something I think Apple does exceptionally well. Their Apple watch is pretty much, is only usable if you have an iPhone. If you have an iPhone, you have AirDrop and that's only usable between Apple devices then you have all the integrations with MacBook and so on. And so like I think like I've recently started to think that perhaps maybe the nearby team at Google is one of the most important things they're doing right now. Like all the initiatives they're doing to make Android devices work more seamlessly and kind of helping Android OEMs build an ecosystem that they may not be able to build on their own or like making them work everything better together. So even if you have one Android firm from one manufacturer, if you have a Windows PC on some other manufacturer, you're not just completely isolated from one another. I don't know, what do you have to, what do you, do you have anything to add to that chat? Like how do you feel about, like, I know you can't say much, but how do you, what do you think can be done to draw users back to the Android side of things? Yeah, I think I'm gonna leave this one to the product people because there's a reason I'm in engineering and not product. Which is fair, which is a fair response. I've always thought that I would have made an excellent marketing person for a company that wanted to fail. So yeah, I think I'll just, I'll just step quickly back from this one and go, ah. Yeah, we'll see. Important to note also that those numbers are worldwide numbers too. So Nest is not necessarily what's happening. Like, you know, that's also effects of Asia and that sort of thing too. So, all right. Well, moving right along, Michelle, you and I were talking earlier and I dismissed this story but you said it was actually pretty big. So what's the story here? All right, so there are two aspects of the story. The first thing is what's rolling out starting today. It's the unknown tracker alerts feature that Google announced at IO. So for those of you who don't know, when Apple released the AirTag, they kind of unleashed a menace onto the world. People started buying them and putting them on people to stalk them and figure out where they're going without their consent. So now finally, if you have an Android phone, you'll be able to detect when an AirTag is on your person and unwanted AirTag. And so, you know, you don't have to worry about someone stalking you without your knowledge because previously you had to download an app that was made by Apple, but that app would only allow you to manually scan for AirTag. So it kind of made it useless. But now this is built into Google Play Services, rolling out to everyone on Android 6.0 and later. So all you have to do is just have an Android phone in your pocket and then you'll detect when an AirTag is nearby, you know, an unwanted AirTag is going along with you. And I think you do have to turn it on in settings, like you have to go to settings, safety and emergency and turn it on there.  I don't know. Sorry, too many jokes to be made there. I'm sorry. The second big announcement is a little more unfortunate. It's the fact that Google is delaying the rollout of its Find My Device Network, which was also announced at IO. So this network would have enabled the hundreds of millions of Android devices to turn into, you know, like a location tracking network for one another. So those of you familiar with AirTags, how they work and with iPhones, it basically would have done the same thing, but for the Android side of things. And a lot of tracker manufacturers were planning to release products that were compatible with the Find My Device Network, but because Google is delaying the rollout of this network, they're not able to release their product. And if you're wondering why is Google delaying the release of the Find My Device Network, the reason they're citing is because Apple has yet to roll out unwanted tracker alerts on iOS. And because of that, if Google were to release Find My Device Network right now and the tag manufacturers were to release their product onto the market, then you would have a situation where these new trackers would be able to track iPhone users, but iPhone users wouldn't have any way to detect that they're being tracked. So Google doesn't want to release this new product onto the market and open up potential iPhone users to being stalked. It's kind of protecting iPhone users. That's a real Star Trek. Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few solution there, isn't it? I mean, there's corporate responsibility for you if everybody's questioning that, so. Google's really put into tough spot here because Apple did this, like they released AirTags pretty much without having any tracking capabilities and they didn't really do anything for Android users until much later and the app they gave is just half-baked. So like, Apple clearly didn't really care about the safety of Android users at all, but Google is doing the responsible thing and saying we don't want Apple users to be hurt by the release of this product, this feature. So now it's up to Apple, like, you know, does Apple, and Apple is working on it, but the way Google released their Find My Device Network is they said that they use a custom implementation that was not based on the jointly developed specification that Apple and Google worked on. That's what enabled them to roll this out much more quickly or have them be ready much more quickly, but Apple is supposedly working on their own implementation of unwanted tracker alerts that is based on the joint specification and hopefully once that is released, then Google can release their Find My Device Network. That's the assumption right now. We don't know exactly how Apple will respond. Will they slow walk it? Will they actually release it? Shortly after the specification is finalized, you know, Google is really in a bind here, unfortunately. Well, we'll have to stay tuned and see how it all plays out, right? This is an area of the world that I just don't, I mean, like I understand the importance of it that people use it. I'm not buying air tags. I'm not buying any trackers. I don't use trackers. This is like, that's why when Michelle's like, oh, it's a pretty important story. I'm like, I don't care, but I see why some people would care and it does make sense for them.  So if anything, it's important to get all this, you know, security and privacy 2023 important stuff. Exactly, exactly. Well, okay, so now it's time for our patron pick. So every week we put up for our patrons three new stories and y'all patrons, our lovely, lovely patrons have until, sorry, 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on our show day to vote and the winner is what I like to call an OEM drama story.  And I think it's fair to say that smartphone OEMs and for sure Android OEMs have their own OEM drama. So we've covered a little bit of this with like, you know, RCS drama with like Google using a Drake song to call it iPhone for RCS. Actually last year, Samsung started a little OEM drama with iPhone 14 before it was released. And now in your latest episode of OEM drama, basically as soon as Samsung unpacked started, OnePlus released a tweet which said something like, we open when others fold a little bit, it kind of feels a little bit shady.  And this obviously, other than just being kind of a fun poke at a competitor seems to substantiate some members that OnePlus's entry into the foldable arena will be coming soon and will be called the OnePlus Open. If you want a quick round of stats on what that is rumored to be, it's a password book style foldable like Z Fold. It's slightly larger than the Z Fold industry and at 7.8 to the Z Fold 7.6, but usual specs you might expect in 2023, 2K 120 Hertz inner screen, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with 16 gigabytes of RAM, 256 gigabytes of storage and a 4800 milliamp battery versus the 4400 on the Z Fold 5 or Z Fold 5 or 4, take that. And also they're probably planning to ship the first half of August, which is super interesting because that's when the Z Fold 5 and Flip 5 will hit shelves. So there's your OEM drama patron pitch for this week. There you go. And look at that word play in the slogan there in the tweet or whatever it was. Oh, wow. This is the fold. I was gonna say, as someone who's on the sidelines watching all this stuff, like when brands snipe at one another, is that welcome or is it cringe? Because I trust your humor standpoint, like it's gotta be good, right? It's gotta be a good swipe if they're gonna take it. You're assuming that I actually notice these things which I tend to not, unless it's like some big marketing campaign that gets in my face somewhere, but I don't know, it's a little bit fun to see humans at work behind the corporations, which is what I think of when you see sort of, clever word play or attempts at clever word play. Can be fun. I guess we're gonna get to this for the Samsung unpacked, but they actually had some word play where they kind of talked about funding innovations as being nope, but then nope, they rearranged nope to being open, flip side, flips open. David, we're gonna talk about it after the sponsor. Well, there's my bad. Well, that's coming up next. So coming up next is hardware, but first we're gonna pause and we are going to thank our sponsor for this episode. Which is the fine awesome folks at awesome and the awesome privacy cable. So if you haven't heard about the awesome privacy cable before, it gives you much needed control over when and how your data is shared. It's got a built-in switch that cuts off the USB pin and delivers USB data. So there's no software that could get broken into just a simple straightforward air gap solution. And I've actually got the cable right here and we talked about it before in the past couple of weeks. If you've been watching or listening to the show, you've heard me kind of rave about it, but it's got that fantastic physical tactile switch right there on there. It's got a great little LED light on there. So you know when you're plugged in that it is enabled and what it does is it protects you when you do plug in your device into a USB-C connection. The LED flashes when data might be transmitted when the switch is enabled. It gives you an early heads up when a connected device is doing more than you expect. The cable's got a durable design with abrasion resistant braided nylon sleeve and adenized aluminum end caps. And the switch, like I said, feels so satisfying and tactile when I do flip it. It supports up to 60 watt charging speeds and USB 2.0 data speeds. And if you are carrying sensitive data, if you're worried about people kind of snooping in at what you have on your device, or just generally if you wanna protect yourself when plugging in your device into a strange place, you wanna use the awesome privacy cable. You can go to awesomeprivacy.com slash privacy-cable or go to Amazon where you can pick it up for just $30. And we wanna thank the fine folks for awesome. They've been so supportive of this show and they're gonna continue to be, we're really excited to be working with them. So check it out, awesomeprivacy.com slash privacy-cable. And we thank them for their support of Android Faithful. And with that, we are gonna talk about hardware because it was a big week last week. And I feel like I've been talking about Samsung Galaxy unpacked for like a month already. And Huyen, you've gotta feel worse because you've done multiple shows on it now at this point. So it's okay because I think it's actually pretty exciting. And I'm not just saying that, just to say that. So yeah, Samsung unpacked happened last week. Of course on Wednesday, they need to get the message that we're on Tuesday. So if they could just fit our schedule a little better, that'd be great. So Samsung unpacked was in fact in Seoul, Korea this year. And unsurprisingly, kind of like the big star of the event was of course their flippables and foldables, the announcement of the Z Fold 5 and the Z Flip 5. And I mean, it was, it's about as Samsung as Samsung can get. Of course, being in Seoul, they had access to all of the, all of the K-pop stars that you could want. In fact, BTS's Suga was kind of highlighted, quite a bit in some of the promotional materials, but yeah, the start of the show. Hang on. So that's not the first time I've heard that. And I don't know who that, what that, well, I don't know anything about that. Sorry, so BTS, well, it is behind the stage, but BTS is like the number one K-pop band ever. So it would be like for us, I don't know, having Taylor Swift come in and sell the Pixel Falls. Just to give you an idea, just based on the rumor that one of the BTS members would be there, there was a pile of fans lined up right outside of the entrance. Yeah. Just because of a rumor that he would be there. Yes. Also, our host network, Daily Tech News Show, Tom's Merritt knows an obscene amount about K-pop, by the way. Yeah, I'm well aware of that, Eileen is a big fan. Okay, so that makes sense. But yeah, so Z-Full 5, Z-Flipped 5, and of course another fairly big and interesting announcement was the Watch 6 series with both the classic, with the return of the rotating puzzle, as well as kind of like a standard line. A lot of emphasis on health, welfare, and lifestyle attached to the watch. This really felt like from the announcement, they were trying to present this like holistic, very Apple watchy experience where they want the watch to be not just the thing that sits on your wrist, maybe count steps, maybe sometimes you live in your podcast, it's meant to be a companion for your life and your lifestyle and your health with all the bibs and bops, like ECG, blood pressure and all that stuff. And of course, less seeming fanfare, at least from the live stream side for the S9 series, which of course is like the base, the plus and the ultra. And kind of across the board, I think all the hardware was good, but it seems like a dot release, like more iterative, just a little bit of bumps everywhere. Same thing with the tablet line, although there is something interesting that the tuneable things, one which we noted last week with Max, Wineback is at the base, all of the models have OLED and they are now all dust and water resistant. So if you were waiting for a Samsung tablet and really wanted something dust and water resistant, this is your year. But I mean, I think generally the hardware bump ups were interesting and it's more like the software experience side that sold it, but that's enough for me. I think we honestly should toss to Michelle because Michelle, I think you had a much better experience than I did watching the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked VOD. Yeah, so the reason I was out last week was because I was actually in Seoul to go to Unpacked. Thanks for Samsung for inviting me by the way. Yeah, it was a very, very, very cool experience to be in Seoul. I think it was their first Unpacked held in their home country, which is surprising because Samsung is a, they're a names day in Korea. They're one of the biggest companies in the entire country. And as you mentioned, when like the focus of the event wasn't really on most of the other devices, it was on the flip, like the tagline for the event was join the flip side. Flip was all over the marketing. They took over like an entire street and like had like these flip decorations. They were like handing them out to users to test them out on the street and everything. So yeah, definitely the highlight of the event was the Z Flip 5 because of that big cover screen. That was the biggest change hardware wise in the new device. But yeah, Unpacked was as you'd expected. You, if you saw the live stream and you saw everything they announced, there was not really much to say about the announcement itself other than, yeah, it was cool to be there in person. I was gonna say, I mean, you know, after watching it and when your comments and Michelle, you're thinking like, I feel like this is the same event they put on a year or two ago, just with different, just swap out the hardware. Like it was, it's the ecosystem. It's the watch. It's like, what made this one different, Michelle? Well, the difference is that because it's in Korea, we're able to, well, no, besides that, but because we're in Korea, we're actually able to see more from Samsung. Like being in San Francisco, all you have is the event and that's it. Why did they roll out washing machines and stoves? For a lot of the media, for a lot of the media, we got to visit the flagship store in Samsung in Gangnam, which is like a three story tall, like it's a massive place. Like it's like the Google store in New York, but even bigger than that.  I really want to buy some of that stuff there, but unfortunately they weren't on sale at the actual store. We also got to visit the Samsung Smart City, which is like located three hours outside of Seoul in a city called Gumi. And this is where they actually manufacture a lot of the devices. So like we saw a Galaxy S23 Ultra being created from like beginning to end through the entire assembly. And like they also showed off, like they had fully automated that whole process. I think they're almost completely done automating that entire line. And like there's so many cool things we got to see at this factory that you really don't see how complex a smartphone is until you actually take it apart and look at all these tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny components, right? All you see is the end product, like this Galaxy Z Fold 5 that flips open, but you have no idea how many parts go into the hinge, the display, how much testing is done, the constant folding and unfolding. Like they have a machine where it's like temperature controlled at 35 degrees centigrade. And then like they constantly change the temperature and then they flip and flip, fold and unfold, constantly you test how the durability of the hinge differs with the temperature. They have this robot where it's moving back and forth on a line, constantly vibrating to simulate you walking with your phone in your pocket. They have like a, they have a robot with two arms that's just basically pumping iron all the time to test like risk gesture detection with watches. So much crazy stuff at like their automation lab, their manufacturing line, it was a wild experience. How much do you think is actually in use or just put on for the show to show you all that? Like, I could definitely believe that they're all actually using this, like the amount of changes that Samsung makes to Android and is able to push out, within only a couple of months after Google releases every release, like it's staggering how much they have to test and how much they have to constantly iterate on and how many phones they release and how many different markets it's an immense operation. So, Chet, I would love to hear what your take on the foldable revolution is. Cause like the Samsung built this whole presentation around the fold and the flip and all that sort of stuff. Obviously we've seen Google come out with the Pixel Fold like we're seeing more foldable, Motorola's got another razor coming, there are more foldables coming out. From your perspective, I don't know, do you use a foldable? Have you played with one? Like kind of what is your impressions of them? I do not right now, I'm currently rocking a Pixel 7 because I like that form factor. The thing that I'm trying to figure out is like, how do we get the perfect screen size that is as big as I want to see it when I'm watching stuff but small enough that I can reach my thumb across the screen to tap that button without dropping the phone, right? And I think the foldables are helping because now they can make it a little bit smaller. On the other hand, it got thicker at the same time, thicker and heavier. I'm really interested, actually I was gonna ask Michelle what the big push was with the flip because that to me, I wonder if that's sort of a future of some of this stuff where they know that everybody wants something smaller in their pocket, but bigger to watch, right? So does the flip form factor give you that? So I was curious, like in the big push that they had, I haven't looked into these new devices, was it about, hey, now the tech is finally here and everybody should get one or was it more a marketing thing, just go and everybody should get one? I definitely think that the vision that Samsung has for the future is that there's gonna be two classes of devices. There's gonna be the flip for the everyday user that's gonna replace the traditional candy bar phones that we have now and the super premium high end fold devices that are for business people, journalists, people who need to multitask because the average user is not gonna be opening two apps side by side, pasting links from one email to another, right? They're just gonna be casually browsing their phone on X, Twitter, whatever, Instagram, et cetera. So I think that's why they're pushing the marketing so hard on the flip because it's their most affordable one and I think it has the most potential to break into the mainstream. So that's why they're going so hard with all the customization, all the things you could do with it, the price, the changes. Yeah, and not to continue the play on words as we go through, but the flip is fun, right? Like they're showing how you can take selfies with it. Like it's leaning into the fun aspect of the foldable. There's the world of F's now that we're in, but yeah, when? Yeah, no, so I think what's super interesting is, and this is, so lately we've seen a couple of foldables, like the evolution of the clamshell flippable foldable outer screen, right? So last year, with like the Oppo and the Fold 4 and a couple other ones, they're like kind of tiny, like little outer screens on the outside, right? So you can look at them and maybe like get, like maybe a notification, usually the time and the weather. And then this year, you know, with Motorola, they created a screen on the Razer Plus, which basically the entire like outer half of the clamshell is a screen and with the cameras kind of poking out at it. And I think actually friend of the show, Mr. Mobile Michael Fisher, is he a friend of the show? My bet. He's a friend of the show. Michael Fisher friend of the show did a review and he basically said, this is a kind of, this is a phone that you can use, like it fully use, like be able to do not just like simple checking of notifications, phones and texts, but you could use it as a smartphone without opening it because the screen is that significant. And I think with the Fold 5, it has a similar, you know, very, very large screen. It doesn't, it isn't quite like hinged to cover as the Motorola Razer Plus is, but it's pretty damn close. Dang close. Sorry. You can say damn, it's okay. I can say damn, okay.  But what actually kind of blew me away is the software. So our own Florence Ion had said last year when we were talking about foldables is that the software, at this point, the hardware is kind of like, cover screen is not withstanding. The software experience is what's going to sell these devices, right? Like having software devices that really kind of are like, I can't think of the word like, you know, fashion to fit the form factor. And so what I really thought was compelling about the Flip 5 was the flex window, flex cam. So something that was really interesting, and I might be wrong, but this is my interpretation of it from the Galaxy Impact was that their cover screen isn't just like has widgets or like, you know, usable size apps. They have this whole flex window where it's almost like what wear OS where you can flip between tiles. And so you can very quickly switch between different functionalities, right? Different views and different widgets. And I think that lends to what Michael Fisher is kind of getting at with like, this is a phone you can just use without flipping it open. Sure. Like if you don't want a big old like pixel fold, I thought this is really nice. I love it. In your pocket, you can still have something that's very, very portable, still have a full-size candy bar phone.  This is kind of it. And part of that is the software experience which throw me and other third party dads under the bus, we haven't been doing a good job at at all. And so I think what's interesting is Samsung has kind of taken the initiative because they kind of had to because the rest of us weren't listening and made an OEM, you know, they made their OEM experience really interesting with whatever's going on with that flex window. I pre-bordered one because I'm fascinated, but I think that is what's really interesting is that not just having this like fancy cover, but having a software experience that kind of again, makes it easy for people to have fun and be creative and do all this like fancy stuff. So does that mean that the, all of the stuff happening on the outside, on the exterior screen when it's folded down is all Samsung stuff? Because otherwise like if it's random app stuff, that means app developers need to be plugged into that to some extent to make sure that they have to resign the context. That's what I'm not a hundo piece sure on. It feels like almost like, sorry, go ahead, Michelle, I see you. Yeah, it's actually, I wanted to like a way to actually frame the think of it, the way Samsung actually talked about it at the event was they described it as you're basically using it like a smartwatch. And I think that was a really good way to think of it. It's like a basic a two inch screen that you used exactly like a smartwatch. Of course it's not running Wear OS in any form, right? But the way you interact with it. But what is the connection to the apps? That's interesting though. It's not running widgets. Mostly custom widgets and like a custom quick settings panel, et cetera. Like the way you're able to run full custom apps is you add a widget to the cover screen and then that widget, I think you're just running apps on top of that like an overlay. Yeah, I don't think, I don't know if there's any way for, ad developers actually target the cover screen in any way. Like right now it's all, everything's provided by Samsung with an experimental setting to run apps. Obviously a lot of apps don't properly fit a two inch screen. I mean, it makes sense because they have full control over the system UI or whatever that sort of thin wrapper widget thing is so that they can make sure that that experience is really good for the users. And maybe if things like that come online and they're really powerful, at that point maybe there's a developer ecosystem that makes sense for apps or developers to opt into it but come out with the experience that makes sense first instead of just saying here's a playground and there's gonna be a bunch of random stuff there. Yeah, I mean, I still blame the lagging of third-party developers and I kind of understand at some point, as much as like I think as an Android dev, if I'm like a purist and I'm like, yeah, exactly. Like it makes me feel a little icky to think that this is an OEM driven, you know, kind of like environment, platform, cover OS, whatever you want to call it that is a little bit, you know, extra work, extra development time, whatever, that it's a little bit of a branch but they needed to do it. I'm all for it as a fold fan. So, Michelle, you got your hands on the fold itself, right? Not the flip fold, yeah. I know we're running a bit late and you know, I do have this device on loan for a bit so I had plenty of time to talk about this in the future but I just wanna leave you all with like a one sentence review. I get it, I get it y'all, the fold. I understand now, I understand. I'll elaborate more in the future, but I get it now. Well, no, elaborate, we gotta get a little minute, like just from a productivity standpoint or like, From a productivity standpoint, I definitely get it. Like, especially with the changes that Samsung made on top of Android that allow you to, you know, freely open free form windows to open, you know, three windows at a time to use the S-Pen, the way that's integrated into the UI to be able to hand write and everything. Like there's so many things that has done right on this device that I feel like it's gonna ruin me if I use this for way too long, get used to all the productivity features and try to move back. Of course, like being who I am, like I have to go back to a pixel eventually and just continuously use it but there's gonna be a lot I'm gonna miss, I feel after I'm done with this. One of us, one of us, one of us. The foldable revolution happening live on Android faithful, I love it. Sorry, 10 seconds. I just wanna know for all my stylist fans that something I love about the foldable, like Z Fold 5 is that the pen has a little carrying nook in the case, which was like my biggest thing for dropping off S-Pen last year. Anyway, but I think this goes to show that Samsung is really designing, driving and pushing for this experience, these foldable experiences. Okay, I'm done. Cool. One of us. Well, it's an exciting time, I guess, right? And when you also, you went on Daily Tech News Show and talked to Tom and the crew about it, right? So you can go back and listen. This was recorded the day of Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. You can go to dailytechnewshow.com and find the episodes last week, July 26th. So yeah, listen to more of that. And Michelle, we'll set some time next week, maybe for you to do a more deep, deeper dive on the fold, kind of a full review. Cause I think we all wanna hear it now that you're converted. So that's so to speak. All right, cool. So that was our hardware section and now we're gonna drop into apps because we've been tracking larger screens for a while now when, right? And this is something that we're very interested in. So why don't you take it away? Yeah, so as I hinted, devs have been a little bit dragging their feats on making large screen, like really flagship, let's call them large screen experiences. And I mean, again, you can totally blame us. And as a third-party Android developer, I'm 100% contractually obligated to hesitate supporting large screens because of ROI, which I mentioned so many many times on this show and other shows. And part of this contractual obligation is basically to whine, well, why doesn't Google show us what large screen experiences are like first? And so in response to that contractual whining that all of us third-party app devs do, we have a now large screen tailored experience on the Google Play Store, it's starting to roll it. It's not, I checked my Pixel Fold, it's not there yet, but this is in the process of rolling out. And this is not just necessarily a Google Play, sorry, I can't go to sleep, Assistant. Oops, hey, G. Hey, this is not just a G Play, not just a G Play redesign, but also kind of a reemphasizing within the Play Store as a market on large screens. So there is a revamped UI, like for example, search is now too pain with like your search results and an individual search result that you click on being shown in a detailed display. So again, taking up lots of the layout more appropriately. But there's also other things that are more related to how an app is surfaced, how it's ranked within the Google Play Store. So basically right now as it stands, there's better app, so as you are following, if you are a app that follows the large screen guidelines, and we covered this a little bit last year on other shows about how and others like many tiers that are basically how well you are designing your app and implementing your app to large screen experiences. So there's like tiers, right? Of like, hey, it runs fine and it's not loader box too. Hey, you are taking advantage of large screen features and have a very rich large screen experience. So basically on how well you grade on those tiers, your app actually, your app ranking within the Google Play Store and the visibility of your app within the Play Store can be affected by that. So that's kind of a big change. It was talked about last year, but this is now coming to effect where your ranking will be dependent on how well you support large screens. And this is great, because this is what we've been asking for, which is like, okay, if you know like Android 12 will like support, added the large screen support in Android and now with the Pixel Tablet and with the Pixel Fold, we're seeing more support of larger screens. And they got to walk the walk to a certain degree and get developer and incentivize developers to develop for it. Yeah, 100%. And incentivization is super important. If I go back and tell a product manager that, hey, we won't get ranked as high or our app won't be as visible or we're less likely to be featured as an editor's choice if we have a poopy, sorry, large screen experience, that's going to have impact. That's the kind of exactly the kind of thing that we've been fighting all these years. And as much as someone says, hey, you know, large screen is awesome. You can do like drag and drop and all the kind of thing. That's the kind of thing that as much as any dev might wish to kind of implement these things and have a desire to implement these things, that's the kind of thing that you have, that we need to kick into pants, that we can kick into other pants or kick other people's pants with too. I don't know. We shouldn't, don't kick nobody in the pants, but... Let's be, let's be, let no violence here. No violence, but... No kicking people. A metaphorical kick in the pants of, I'll kick in the product pants. As I told my four-year-old this morning, let's not kick other people. That's... So... Yeah, so yes, be good, like, you know, large screen citizens pay attention to the guidelines. But other things like, you know, if you're a game and you have high quality video to demonstrate gameplay in the new Google Play Store redesign, if you have a high quality video, it actually will become a banner video in your app listing, which is meant to kind of encourage apps, or games specifically, but apps in general to provide high-quality content in their app listing, and app listings will kind of get a redesign to be more, to have more content above the fold that wasn't a pun above the bottom of the screen, and to be able to kind of have more of your content and more of information and, you know, visuals of your app face forward.  But yeah, big redesign on the Google Play Store, both in terms of like the app itself and design, but also in how it functions, and the, again, emphasis on large screens. So yeah, and a couple of things. I guess I kind of just want to briefly mention that navigation is always a pain in the butt for devs always. It's like a big question, like how to implement it, how to implement well, how do we do UI, how do we do it like from a kind of abstract perspective? Something interesting is that Google Play is testing a semi-permanent bottom bar. The bottom bar, I think I rented about it last week, but basically just new things with the bottom bar, which shows games, apps, offers and books, kind of as the top-level destinations in the Google Play Store. You might be getting that in more places in the app to kind of help you navigate a little bit better. This is kind of unique, honestly. I know it doesn't sound like a big deal, but the fact is like whenever you tap into something like a particular app listing or a search result, you lose that top-level navigation and it seems like 95 Google found that they're kind of doing some sounds like A-B testing or something with kind of making those top-level destinations more visible. So lots of Google Play redesign and refactorings and different ways of working on our horizon. Chet, have you gotten to play with the new pixel tablet at all there in your travels or any tablets? How do you feel about large screens? Good. No, I haven't actually been playing with that at all. The stuff I've been working on is more focused on sort of fundamental platform stuff, not that stuff in particular. Some of the people on the teams I was on, the graphics team and the toolkit team like are working on APIs to make these things better or making the functionality easier for devs or better for users or faster, there's always work. Especially if you think about any of the new devices that come online, more screens means more pixels and faster refresh rate means more pixels and all of the stuff means you need to do your stuff faster to get it to the screen faster. So CPUs and GPUs are always getting faster, but not necessarily always in lockstep with the amount of information we're trying to display. So there's always a race in particular the teams that I tend to work on of just trying to catch up or improve and get better and get the stuff to the screen faster so that we reduce jank or just make a smoother experience for users. So all of that stuff is always a race when these new things are coming online. Cause it's all gonna work in concert together, right? Like there might be an advancement on one side of the office, but the other side's got to catch up and vice versa, right? And so, yeah. Yeah, cause I mean you've got super premium devices coming out and they can do all this stuff and they have all these amazing capabilities with the screens and then it's a bummer if applications are stuttery because, whatever. So you just want to make sure. Sorry, what percent do you think is worse like our fault versus your fault? Throw me into the bus if you want. I'm ready, throw me into the bus. I honestly, every performance situation is kind of its own unique thing and it's a little hard to track down. Like there are certainly things that we're doing or can do at the platform level or the Android X library level constantly looking into how we can make stuff faster. There's also stuff that apps can do and kind of starts with the app developers because we can't, we can try to build general purpose libraries and platforms that take care of everything we can imagine but we can't imagine everything, right? We don't know how the apps are gonna be using this stuff and so the finding out the best way to use it and the way to avoid the problem starts with the app developers actually profiling and saying, hey, this thing didn't start as fast as I wanted it to or when I flung the list there was a little bit of jank in the middle and there's always a hiccup when this particular type of view comes into being. Okay, so what's going on there? Like what is the action that triggers that? And then figuring out, okay, well, maybe it's actually app code because you're initializing too much stuff when you don't need to. Maybe there's something going on at the platform level but without your app, without that use case we may not have known that. So at that point, hey, file a bug or help us track down what's going on because honestly, we try to create these situations internally. We're like, well, so what if somebody does this and we have tons of benchmarks and tests that we run and continuous integration tests but these are based on little unit test ideas that we have not real world situations. So it's always really helpful when a developer says, hey, when I did this, the following thing happened which doesn't seem right. And then we can actually like track that down and sort of figure out what the underlying problem was. Whether it's on the app developer side or on our side doesn't matter but having the use case is really important. So it's a conversation always between basically y'all and us and trying to figure out where the problem is. Not necessarily who's fault it is but. Yeah, it can be. I'm just saying like if it does cross the fence then it's really helpful to get a bug report with enough information that we can actually reproduce the problem. Maybe the problem is all on the developer side. Like, yeah, you're just doing a whole bunch of stuff. You're uploading a bunch of stuff in the background when you're trying to display on the UI thread or whatever it is. And hopefully it's all solvable on your side of the fence because that's certainly easier and faster. But if it's not, if you're running into something that is clearly something that we could help out with, hey, file a bug and help us track down what the issue is. Cool. All right, well, not to switch gears but Chet, I couldn't help but notice under your name you have your handle on threads. Yes. Is that say more about threads or more about what's going on across the street? But how do you like threads? Threads came on the scene like a whirlwind. What are your initial kind of thoughts of it? It did. I like the rest of the social media universe. I think I'm trying to figure out where things are going in the future. I was happy with the social media platform that I used for many years and there's a large community of people that are honestly probably following me because they think I'm gonna talk about technical stuff and then I dropped jokes on them instead. But that kind of, that entered a period of chaos that only seems to be getting even more chaotic. And in the meantime, other things have cropped up. So I went over to Mastodon and I joined that and I love what they're trying to do. I also feel like you kind of need to be an engineer just to join. Like when a platform says- Strong barrier of entry. Yeah, it's like, oh, that's great. Please join what server do you want? And what? If you're not an engineer, what are you gonna do with that question? And I am there, I do post stuff there. There seems to be less engagement. I don't know if that's a reflection of how many people are there or just the amount of engagement people are actually doing there. And then this thread thing came online and I have to say like out of the gate, it was a pretty nice experience in terms of being pretty new to the market. Obviously it's coming from a company that's been doing stuff like this for a while. So just in terms of user experience and what they were trying to do at first, I think it is promising. You still have the like the follower problem. Like you can't magically make all the people in your community appear there. Right, well, we talked about it on the show. They did have the advantage of having a time to your Instagram account. So at least your Instagram community could come with you if you chose to go that route. It had two followers. Yeah, so there is an interview. But you know, it's hard to argue that threads had a ton of potential out of the gate. Now the question was, what does the longevity look like? And now here we are seeing, getting reports coming out of Metta that over half the people who signed up for threads have stopped using it already, which I do think might be a little click baity as they are getting through, you know, kind of they're drilling down into what the actual usage looks like. But there is an important note here, which is that like the key, and I think we all in our experience with mobile apps, the key is retention, right? So you introduce an app, you get 100 million users in the span of a week, which is this amazing and record setting. How do you keep them on the platform, right? How do you keep them coming? How do you keep them checking out? I know personally for me, where I mean, for better or for worse, I spend the majority and I might be different, you know, Michelle, you and I might be very different.  So the lack of a web client for threads is a real limiting factor for me. I would be a lot more active who's on the web, things like that. So they definitely need to start, you know, now that they put it out there in the world, they need to kind of step up and give people reason to come back and keep using it. So I don't know, we continue to watch it. We try to talk about apps that aren't Google, because it's so easy to talk about Google all the time. Here's an opportunity of like an app on the scene that's hard to ignore. But when, did you have any thoughts around the threads retention? Yeah, so a couple of things. Like, so number one, I know they talked about retention hooks and, you know, more features. And I think what they cited was a desktop version, which drove me nuts because I don't need a desktop version. I want a web client. I don't need a desktop-specific PC, Mac, whatever version. I also- I do, though. That's okay, if we can have both then. Yeah, but that's the thing, we can have both. Like that was the great thing about Twitter, was that like, you had desktop, I had TweetDeck. They took TweetDeck away from me, that I had, you know, like all those sort of stuff. But like, I'm a desktop user. But Ron, you know that the web runs on a desktop, right? Have you seen this? I'm aware of that. It's a new thing. Yeah. It's something that kind of struck me, though. And maybe like, as a group of like, you know, engineers slash product people, I kind of wanted to ask about first impressions, right? Because the other site that most of us have spent time on and build a community on it and we're able to discover both, you know, new connections and new information on, like, you know, we built up a relationship with that. And we have like expectations of experience and functionality and things that we want to do. And then of course, you know, I think there's like, and when adopting a new thing, there's kind of like an expectation to give it some leeway. But did threads make a good enough first impression? And that's kind of what hit me because like, as you said, the following thing was a little bit weird, like bad experience was a little bit odd. Not having a web client is a little bit weird. Even just not having a followers, is it true that they don't even have like a following tab yet? They have like multiple tabs which show you like, activity and stuff, but they still don't have like your followers or your family. I think one of the, yeah, I think one of the biggest issues is like, the experience really was different. If you were already an established Instagram user who were following a lot of people versus if you weren't, if you were an Instagram user, then you already had a lot of people to follow and then your following feed, you know, you're by default, I mean, now you have a following feed, previously it was just for you, you actually had stuff to go through. Whereas if you're a brand new Instagram user, you just throw on the threads, well, what are you going to do? You have nothing on your feed. You got to start following people and there wasn't any good algorithmic feed for to show like interesting content. So you kind of had to just go find users to subscribe to and that was a really miserable experience. I also found like, I felt like I was an ML model having to like train itself where I had to just start muting posts that showed me pictures of lunch or celebrities or sports or all the stuff that any algorithm in the world would know I never want to see any of, but I had to do that manually because I did not have the follower feed, right? So then I had to, you know, find some of the people that I would follow and see who they're following just to build up some amount of like content that I might be interested in there instead. So there was a bit of a training ground for it to begin with before the feed got a little bit more reasonable. Yeah, and I see this is completely a business issue because like what you have is you have a massive company like Metta who moved very fast to get something out to take advantage of a business opportunity because of what was going on at Twitter. And in doing so sacrifice functionality, if they sat and weighed on it, it'll be perfect. What is the phrase? What is the perfection? Is the... Don't let it perfect. It's not a great movie. Yeah, exactly. The enemy or whatever it is. Yeah, it's the enemy of perfect. Yeah, no, like, and, you know, an advisor to one of my startups gave great advice once which is that if you're not embarrassed by your first release, you're doing it wrong, right? Which I think is totally true. And what we normally see is we see an app come out into the world, give you a paradigm or this is what we can do and slowly add functionality as it slowly builds user base. And then by the time it gets critical mass, the features have matured and evolved. They've gotten user feedback. And here you just had not even a hockey stick. This is like a rocket launch, right? Where all of a sudden a hundred million people are expecting the same functionality of a Twitter which is hard to do. So I don't know. Anyway, but... But I think it's interesting because again, like if it was something new like, sorry, we're both referencing the Black Friday because it's something novel and interesting. So there's no expectation, you know what I'm saying? So a first impression can be overcome with all the other Twitter, X, whatever alternates, does the threads have a chance of getting over a lukewarm first impression? That's a good question. I mean, with that met with a hundred million users, I think so. Even if half the people don't come, that's 50 million users. How many people with a web app would die for 50 million users? Fair enough, right? Yes, please. All right, cool. Well, tell us what you think of Threads. Email us at contact.androidfaithful.com. We want to hear from you. And speaking of that, we did get some emails from you. And I know, Chet, you've got to run soon, so we want to get through these quickly so we can say goodbye. But our first email comes from Chuck in Thousand Oaks, California. And he says, I'm a longtime listener, 13 years of listening all about Android. You are the Android expert, or so I thought. I listened to your review of the Pixel tablet in episode two. I was pretty disappointed you had no idea. It's a pretty killer, good dashboard. Really it is. Watch this video from a YouTuber I follow. This guy's not known for his Android expertise, but he sure knows how to make the Pixel a great dashboard. And I went and checked out the YouTuber that was talking to this is somebody named Smart Homesolver. And what he does is basically suggest installing a kiosk browser onto the Google tablet to make it the dashboard that we wish the Google Home app was. Which I get is an option that you could do. And didn't really bring that up, though, in my review of it because I was looking at the Pixel tablet out of the box. But Chuck, I really do appreciate you keeping us the task. And thanks for the feedback. So yeah, so go check out Smart Homesolver. He does a great video on the Google Pixel tablet. It is a Smart Home dashboard. So, all right, our next email, win. Yeah, so this is from John from Cincinnati. Hello everyone, thank you for bringing the pod back. Glad to be back. I have a bone to pick. Android makers should indeed give us SD card access. I use SD cards to hold all of my music I listen to when flying. It's important for travelers to be able to access media when offline. Luckily, I work for a company that manufactures rugged Android mobile devices so I can have this all-important offline capability. Bring back the SD card readers. Thanks again, John from Cincinnati. And I guess this is a reference to last week where we had Max Wineback on and talking about things that we may not need or do need. I guess everyone always has something that they want. And for sure, John wants SD card readers. I love the SD card reader camps, by the way. They really want those back in their phones. And I get it. But I moved on. So just like I moved on from the headphone jack. All right, great. Well, that's gonna bring us to the end of our show. Chet, thank you so much for giving us some of your time. I really appreciate that. Where can people find you on the internet? Where can they find what you do? There's that thread thing. There are also other social media platforms. I also write a bunch of articles, technical and non, on Medium. You can find me there. Chethost.com is where I have info about the history book and the other stuff I do. And that's probably good enough. Awesome. And we appreciate you joining us, Sarah. Yeah, thanks for having me. Always fun to have a conversation.  And I concur, you're probably the funniest Googler that I know that I follow on social media. Ooh. Okay. I'm not sure if that is a low bar or a high one. Intentionally funny as well. Intentionally funny is key. Yeah, they're just planned. Your jokes land all the time for me. All right, appreciate it. Well, speaking of that, Michelle, where can folks find you? If you wanna follow dry Android news, just the news, then you can follow me at MichelleRamon. All my links are at this link tree link right here. My handle is pretty much the same everywhere. Twitter slash X, threads, Instagram, mastodon, et cetera. All right, excellent. Well, thank you, Michelle. And when, where can people find you? Yes, I'm an Android developer. I talk about Android development things, like large screens. Actually, I don't talk about large screens because again, contractually obligated to be hesitant about it, at least for now. But you can find all my stuff on randomlytyping.com and I am at QueenCodeMonkey on places where you can be an at something, social media networks like ThreadsX and other places like that. Cool. And for me, I am Ron XO all across the board and I didn't pull up, I never pull up any of my stuff when we're doing the show, but I was very excited because I did have an experience of one of my Instagram posts of this band called Lincoln that I saw, sorry, I'm not logged in, went a little viral. I posted a video and it got picked up by Stereo Gum and some other sites out there. And I had people asking me permission to repost it and all that sort of stuff. So I went to a fun show this past weekend in Washington, DC, saw bands play and went viral in the process, which is pretty cool. So follow me at Ron XO on Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Mastodon. I think I'm still on Flickr. I might not be Ron XO on Flickr, but I'm somewhere on there. There are pictures from 20 years ago on Flickr that are out there. All right, well, let's get a wrap it up for this week. This podcast publishes every Tuesday evening. You can go subscribe at androidfaithful.com. Of course, if you'd like to support the show, head over to patreon.com slash androidfaithful. We love our patrons and please, please support us. You can get an ad-free version of the podcast, exclusive content merch, all that fun stuff. As always, email us at contact at androidfaithful.com. We love to hear from you. We'll get your emails on the show. Until next time, we will see you next week on the wonderful world of Android Faithful. Thanks, everybody.


Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. Narrated by Daniel Highland, Thomas Paine versus Edmund Burke, Part 9. As noted in a previous essay, I disagree with the common assessment that Thomas Paine was a mere popularizer of ideas rather than an original thinker. This essay presents some reasons for my opinion that Paine was a political philosopher with considerable merit, who did far more than market standard libertarian ideas to a popular audience. Paine frequently brought a fresh perspective to old controversies in political philosophy. Whether we agree with Paine or not, we can appreciate his many insights and novel twists on traditional arguments. In Rights of Man, while explaining the nature of a republic, Paine invoked the distinction between the principle of a government and its form. This distinction is also found in the Declaration of Independence and other writings in the Lockean tradition. The principle of a government refers to its basic purpose or function. The purport, matter or object for which government ought to be instituted, as Paine put it. In the Federalist Papers, number 10, James Madison had described a republic as a government in which the scheme of representation takes place. Paine regarded this common conception as flawed because it defines republic in terms of form rather than principle. What is called a republic is not any particular form of government. Paine pointed out that the word republic derives from the Latin res publica. It means the public affairs or the public good or literally translated the public thing. Thus republic, properly understood, refers to the fundamental principle or purpose of a government, namely to further the public good. Every government that does not act on the principle of a republic or, in other words, does not make the res publica its whole and sole object, is not a good government. Republican government is no other than government established and conducted for the interest of the public as well individually as collectively. It is not necessarily connected with any particular form of government. Paine used other terms, such as general happiness, to signify the object of a republic. But all such terms meant basically the same thing in the libertarian tradition that Paine exemplified. The public, or common interest, was contrasted with partial or particular interests, or special interests, as we might say today. And general happiness, which signified the equal right of every individual to pursue happiness in his or her own way, was contrasted with the pursuit of happiness by privileged elites who use government to further their individual purposes. Paine divided the forms of government into four basic types, the democratical, the aristocratical, the monarchical, and what is now called the representative. He condemned monarchical and aristocratic forms of government because their purpose is to further the good of rulers and their minions rather than the public good. Neither form of government can qualify as an authentic republic regardless of how governments may characterize themselves. We now turn to Paine's discussion of the two other forms of government, the democratic and the representative. It was a popular piece of political wisdom in Paine's day that republics are suited only to small geographical areas with small and relatively homogenous populations. James Madison had famously criticized this notion in Federalist Paper Number 10, but Paine approached the problem from a different angle. To those who mistakenly treated a republic as a form of government and insisted that this form is inappropriate for countries of great extent, Paine replied that such critics mistook the business of a government for a form of government. Furtherance of the public good, which is the defining characteristic and animating principle of a republic, appartains to every extent of territory and population. In other words, the proper function of government to protect individual rights as a means to attain the goal of the public good always remains the same. Regardless of the size of the territory or population within its jurisdiction. Therefore, according to Paine, the traditional argument against large republics resulted from a conceptual confusion. To clarify what is involved here, we need to differentiate between the democratic and representative forms of government. Although it is correct to say that a pure or direct democracy, such as found in ancient Athens, would be unwieldy and ultimately unworkable in a large republic. The same is not true of a representative form of government. Unlike a relatively small community in which individuals can participate personally in almost every governmental decision, large republics rely instead on the election of representatives. And nothing in this representative form is hindered by the extent of a territory or by the size of its population. The case therefore is not that a republic cannot be extensive, but that it cannot be extensive on the simple, democratic form. And the question naturally presents itself, what is the best form of government for conducting the res publica or the public business of a nation after it becomes too extensive and populace for the simple, democratic form? In the course of answering his own question, Payne developed an ingenious and original defense of the representative form of government. His discussion resembles and anticipates what has become known in economics and political theory as the knowledge problem. Payne maintained that it is a fairly simple matter to lay down a system of principles on which governments shall be constitutionally established to any extent of territory. Such abstract reasoning can be undertaken by a single mind, but the practical problem of how to apply those principles to specific cases, to agriculture, manufacture, trade, commerce, et cetera, is far more complicated and difficult. To apply principles to practice requires a knowledge of a different kind. Even free people who agree in their general principles will sometimes view their own interests as conflicting with the interests of others. And if a Republican government is to serve as an objective arbiter with the task of resolving legal conflicts, a society must have some way of gathering adequate knowledge of the multitudinous interests that generate those conflicts, whether real or apparent. No single person can possibly possess the assemblage of practical knowledge that is essential if governments are to apply abstract principles to complex practical problems. This is why even well-intentioned monarchs will necessarily be hindered by an incompetency of knowledge when pursuing the public good. Even if we suppose that a monarch acts with the purest motives, he will never possess the disparate bits of knowledge needed for governing in the public interest, especially when dealing with a vast territory and a large population with varied interests. Only a representative form of government can deal adequately with this problem by coordinating knowledge of different interests in a manner conducive to the public good. That which is called government, or rather that which we ought to conceive government to be, is no more than some common center in which all the parts of society unite. This cannot be accomplished by any method so conducive to the various interests of the community as by the representative system. It concentrates the knowledge necessary to the interests of its parts and of the whole. It admits not of a separation between knowledge and power. A nation is not a body, the figure of which is to be represented by the human body, but is like a body contained within a circle, having a common center in which every radius meets, and that center is formed by representation. This reasoning explains at least in part why Paine objected vehemently to vesting the power to declare war in a monarch or in any other single executive for that matter. Only a popularly elected legislature should have this authority because only this procedure will greatly lessen the frequency of wars. Let's take a look at Paine's thoughts on this important topic. Although it is customary to associate civilized life with felicity and affluence, and to contrast this condition with the hardship and want of uncivilized life, those relationships were not apparent in 18th century Europe. On the contrary, a great portion of mankind in what are called civilized countries are in a state of poverty and wretchedness. Why was this so? As Paine saw the matter, the problem lay not in any natural defect in the principles of civilization, but in the fact that governments had prevented civilized principles from operating universally. European governments, including the English government, had smothered their peoples in a perpetual system of war and expense that drains the country and defeats the general felicity of which civilization is capable. In contrast to the inhabitants of a country who easily associate together, governments are like so many individuals in a state of nature relative to other governments. And while in this uncivilized state of nature, rulers engage in frequent wars that benefit themselves at the expense of the taxpayers who must finance those wars. By thus imposing the costs of their savage behavior on the people, governments pervert the abundance which civilized life would otherwise produce. In an exhibition of disgust that may cause modern readers to long for the good old days, Paine noted that more than one-fourth of the labor of mankind is annually consumed by this barbarous system. What has served to continue this evil is the pecuniary advantage which all governments of Europe have found in keeping up this state of uncivilization. It affords them pretenses for power and revenue for which there would be neither occasion nor apology if the circle of civilization were rendered complete. As Paine put it in a striking passage from part one of Rights of Man, war is the art of conquering at home. The object of it is an increase of revenue and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretense must be made for expenditures. In reviewing the history of the English government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars but that wars were raised to carry on taxes. Paine's opposition to war was tied to his defense of low taxes, commerce and free trade. I shall discuss these and related matters in the next and final installment of this series. I shall also consider the last part of Rights of Man in which Paine outlines his plan for what has often been depicted as a mini welfare state. That part, which has puzzled many libertarians and gladdened the hearts of socialists and other left-leaning intellectuals is not quite what it may appear to be so this series will end on a revisionist note. Thank you for listening to Excursions. To learn more about libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.libertarianism.org.


Welcome yet again to the video game storytime advent calendar, and a miniature video about gaming history. Ever wondered why Luigi isn't in Super Mario 64? Earlier this year, the characters' art assets leaked online, definitively proving that he was in the game at one point. So why did he get cut? According to Shigeru Miyamoto, well, until February he was in the game, ultimately due to memory issues we had to take him out. Then we were going to include him in a Mario Bros style minigame. But because most users probably only have that one controller when they first buy their N64, for that reason, and others, we decided not to. So apparently if the N64 had come with a Joy-Con style 2 controller bundle, Luigi might have been left in Super Mario 64. We did a video on the infamous Nintendo leaks earlier this year that you can watch. Or otherwise, we'll see you tomorrow for the next video.


The first live video of five or six weeks, I've been on here for a while, as many of you already know, I was targeted by the narcissist, but I can't say too much about it because I don't want to experience any more financial trouble, as you know I have been targeted. But yeah, what I would like to do is get things back to normal on you and just start doing things the way that I did before. As you know I am very passionate about helping people all over the world, improving your lives, helping you to overcome toxic people. That's what this is all about. So yeah, I'm just happy that I can get back to doing that. So let's just get into this. Why does the narcissist come back again and again? When they discard you or you leave them, why can't it just be over? Like a normal relationship? You have problems, disagreements, fights, you'd think it would just be over after that, but no it doesn't work that way with the narcissist because let's say you left, you chose to leave the narcissist, they look at it like you can't just decide that on your own. Like they have to agree to it, they have to say as well okay fine it's over, that's the way you look at it. But also if the narcissist discards you, it's never permanent, they could discard you in one moment but then they just come back like nothing happened, as though they never did any thing. They just come back again and again, they come back because they're not finished with you. Maybe they want more supply, think that you may still be susceptible to their manipulation. There could be other things, maybe they want money or place to stay or it could be for sexual purposes. There's a reason why they keep coming back, they're getting something out of it, it's fueling them in some shape or form. If that was not the case they would be long gone and you would never hear from them again. They come back because they're getting something and if they weren't getting nothing then you see even in situations where you would think there's no reason for them to come back. Like let's say in many situations people lose everything when they're involved with these narcissists. They lose everything, they're miserable, you would think they have nothing to give but the narcissist still comes back because that's fuel for them to see you down and miserable about fuels the narcissist. They want to see you down but then even when you're up they're still coming back even then because they can get something out of it or they can sabotage it and that fuels them. There's always something. The only time the narcissist won't come back is when they're too busy occupied with what they perceive to be something better and that's when you want to see them for a while or the other option is they just want to make you think they don't need you. It's one of those two things. It's either they're occupied with something else which they think is a better option or they just want to make you think that they don't need you anymore but otherwise they will keep coming back.  You have it and they want it and that's all you really need to know. Now they're just not going to stop. You have what they want. They will just keep coming back again and again and you'll just be wondering when is it going to end but now in many situations it just can't end because you're like their life support. You're keeping them alive emotionally.  So in many situations, of course, the only option is to come back again and again and if they can't access you in person or on social media, they'll talk to people who know you and then that's keeping them going because there has to be some form of access to you because otherwise they wouldn't last a day. Narcissists can't go even a day without some form of contact even if it's indirectly there has to be something otherwise they would go insane.  I mean you know you're all probably sick of validating the illusion you don't want to be involved in that anymore but yeah you know the Narcissists doesn't get it they're looking at it like you need them but they're only thinking like that because that's what validates the illusion deep down they know you don't really need them they know they've got nothing to bring to you they're aware of that deep down but on the surface they have to cover that up to protect the false self and to survive emotionally that's the purpose of the disorder because yeah it's as crazy as it sounds you know the disorder does have a purpose there's a reason for it it's to protect them helps them to cope and it defends them against these feelings and views of themselves that they don't like the disorder has a purpose but the disorder doesn't function very well when they're on their own without a source of supply so of course yeah they will keep coming back again and again and again not gonna stop all you can really do is protect yourself and even family members and friends yes you may have to cut them off as well if they're in contact with the Narcissist it's just something you have to do emotional health because otherwise you're still indirectly and it's still going to have an effect on you it's a lot worse than a normal relationship it really is a normal breakup is hard enough but this is a hundred times worse because you just don't even know when it's going to end it's like it feels like it's going to go on forever and sometimes it does last for entire lifetimes until one of you dies because they just don't know when to stop a lot of them can't stop it's like a life or death situation for them to leave you and many of you will see that and how they react to you when you try to leave you cut contact with them just look at how they react they go insane and that's how you can tell how desperately they need you it's for their emotional security and stability when you leave that's when you'll see how unstable they really are that's when you'll really see the disorder because as long as they have their supply that's what's keeping them in order but yeah that's why the narcissist keeps coming back again and again that's why anyway I hope that this video has been helpful for you I'm just out here at the beach and there will be many more live videos coming soon I want to do them more often now more often than before and I just have to say thank you to all of you for supporting my work I was gone for about five weeks and it really shows you know what a strong community we have for me to go for five weeks and still every day we had about 20,000 views per day and I didn't post a single video for about five weeks and now I've come back and straight away it's jumped up to over 30,000 views a day and I know that it's gonna keep growing we have a really strong community on here and I'm so grateful for all of your support I know I've helped all of you but honestly I don't know where it be without you so thank you all for supporting our community it means a lot to me it means a lot to all of us and I will talk to you in another live video very soon