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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I keep using Eternity and even contributed some patches to it because it is Open Source and Android native, which might sound like a low bar, but really:

    Open Source

    • It’s free
    • I’m not the product. Really, even if some closed source alternatives have relatively cheap Ad and tracking free experiences, you’ll always be seen as the source of monetization. And I’m too weary of having paid for a good app only to see it try to twist my arm and squeeze more money or sell out to a big corp.
    • I can fix what’s broken. If I find an issue with an otherwise unimportant part of the app, but that matters to me, I don’t need to wait and pray it doesn’t get forgotten. I can fix it myself and end up helping the devs and whole user base in the process.

    Android native

    • It shows. I use a 5 year old phone that still kicks ass. But the otherwise good cross platform alternatives out there make the user experience more jittery than is excusable. Even PWAs (Web Apps) are snappier than those!
    • It is not a Flutter ListView powered timeline. Trust me, I’m lazy, and if cross platform frameworks were up to the task, I’d be among the first to endorse them. But they aren’t. Have you noticed that the timeline tends to “jump around” if you’re scrolling around on other apps? Yeah, the Android RecyclerView that Eternity uses doesn’t have that (apparently unfixable) problem.

    Thanks Bazsalanszky!





  • On handling downloaded songs and offline playback, my personal (but informed) opinion is that there is:

    • some licensing reasons for it to be more complicated than strictly necessary
    • lack of interest of supporting an app feature that doesn’t drive numbers immediately up (sure, I agree that a better offline experience would improve the product and help user retention, but it isn’t easy/quick to measure its impact), and
    • lack of ownership with many teams having to support a functionality (keep the app working offline) within all the various app features they own.

    So, just as a dog with multiple owners, it goes neglected and starves.


  • I’d say that they’re “cooking the books” as in: making it look like they’re in better shape than they are by cutting costs, but causing irreparable damage to themselves that will manifest in the long run.

    I’ve survived 3 layoffs at Spotify last year alone. Once I started working there It didn’t take long to be proud and feel happy about it. Now, although people still find it cool when I tell them and I still do the same job (no workload increase), I know it is just like any other greedy corpo and I feel compelled to care less and less.

    https://c.im/@matdevdug/111828583287417134