I got tired of Google shoving AI down my throat in yet another place in my phone.
I’m surprised it even gave me the choice to “report and block”.
The other day, I asked Meta AI how to deactivate it from WhatsApp. It recommended me to use a third party WhatsApp client. I always thought this was not allowed, but if meta itself recommends me this I guess it’s OK.
Meanwhile I asked in my native language and it started typing out the way to do it, then edited the message to say something like “I can’t speak that language yet”.
Unfortunately after screenrecording and reading it back, the setting it speaks of does not exist.
Is this really what the non-FOSS android experience has become nowadays!? AI chatbots in your messages app? This seems absolutely miserable. I think I finally understand why there are so many iOS users out there.
Apple has so much bloat, crapware like AI GenMoji don’t even play dumb lol
I’m not even playing dumb lol, I really am just dumb. If you scroll down a bit you can see that I didn’t even think that apple intelligence was a real product before someone corrected me
I didn’t even think that apple intelligence was a real product
i’m not defending apple here, but do keep in mind most android users have Samsung’s or budget devices from Motorola, and they will also have all the bloat included with the carrier if theyre in the US as well. So they’ll have Googles bloat, OEM bloat, and carrier bloat. G/OEM usually gives them 2 suites of apps that do the same exact thing (Samsung Internet and Chrome is the biggest example), and then they also have to deal with the carrier preloading shit on phones as well (I believe Verizon has been preloading the NFL app since like 2014.)
yeah that’s exactly what I’m trying to get at with my lil meme. I used to get into a bunch of flame wars on the side of android because I would hear the apple people complain about fake made-up issues that I never experienced being a long-time android user. But seeing posts like OP’s makes me realize that those issues aren’t actually made up, they’re completely real and I just wasn’t seeing them because I am running a custom ROM. Like, in another thread some guy was concern-trolling about Google Services crashes being a “well-known issue” and everyone was upvoting him. Of course I would have no clue what he’s talking about, I don’t even have Google Services installed! So yeah, what I’m trying to say is that if you’ve never used an AOSP-based ROM and your entire experience of “android” are the slow buggy bloated ROMs that come installed by default on most phones, I’d understand why you’d choose to go with Apple instead.
Having been with android since it’s first mainstream phones (and not rooting), a lot of those were made up non issues over the years and I’ve consistently been at parity or better with ios, with one exception - God damn fucking Google recreating their own messaging apps to be separate and worse and then shutting them down when they fail! Now with every company’s nonsense AI push you have Google replacing assistant with Gemini, which does less and their LLM is clearly the worst (hence the Google search result memes), and this messaging thing. Modern Google is the worst thing to happen to android.
Convenient to leave out Apple it’s working on AI (Apple Intelligence) too. I don’t think any big company is safe from the hype train.
Is Apple Intelligence even real? I don’t have any apple product myself but my parents have iphones and sometimes I use their ipad and I’ve never seen it or heard anyone talk about it IRL. Pretty sure it was just a prank/marketing trick
It’s only on the latest iphone, I don’t remember which iPads, and only the m-series macs. So far from what I’ve seen it’s not as aggressively annoying as Gemini with the chat app messages.
You can also turn off every AI feature with a single toggle in Settings, and it lets you choose whether to enable it during device setup. For now, at least.
I believe they have shelved Apple Intelligence for now because they can’t get the quality up to their standards.
Kind of a kick in the nuts to people who bought iPhone 16s in preparation.
Ah I see, makes sense. Thanks!
Glad they didn’t have the usual “Maybe later” button and you have a means to block it out completely.
For now.
I hate how “Maybe later” has replaced “No. Don’t ask me again.”
Enshitification at its best.
My pet peeve is m$ changing “My computer” to “This computer”. It’s no longer yours lol.
Install Linux Mint and take it back
Thumbs up for reporting it as spam.
Sure would love if it respected the fact that I already opted out and disabled it in the app settings, but yeah its nice that you can still block it. Give it a week and they’ll change that just like Snapchat did with their stupid fucking AI chatbot thats now forcibly pinned to the top of my chats list with no way to remove it unless you pay a monthly subscription.
That Gemini chat in messages is also completely useless, as they didn’t implement a memory so the bot will lose context and give irrelevant responses immediately at the first reply.
I am so sick of that meta ai button that can’t be disabled in WhatsApp that I constantly paste the bee movie script just to let them pay hundreds of thousands of useless tokens. Hopefully one day they will block me or let me block that shit
Is there a better SMS app on android? I tried switching to a FOSS app but I was missing messages and group messages completely didn’t work, so I went back to Google’s app.
Signal used to be the best but they dropped SMS/MMS ages ago, and group texts are historically awful over SMS/MMS, especially when one or more users in that group have iMessage. I would either switch to Signal and get your friends to Switch, use Fossify Messages (very basic SMS/MMS client), or deal with the shithole that is the G app suite. I’m on signal personally, I only use SMS for verification codes at this point.
Just use fossify messages and move your group chats to Signal.
That’s something I’d like to find too. I’ve been using Textra Pro for years, but I have yet to find a FOSS alternative that rivals it
Yes, but you have also angered Roko’s Basilisk.
Oh hell yeah, doing it right now, too!
You can do that for other annoying "news"letter too. Simply search the sender, select a lot, report as spam
If this appears on my phone I’m going to have to decide whether to try to block it or keep it as a way to cuss at it when I’m in the mood to burn some of Google’s electricity bill
I did the same thing with Snapchats account. They won’t let me unfriend it but I could mute and rename it to “leave me the fuck alone”
That shit was permanently pinned at the top for me. I also named it “Dumb Bitch” and never interacted with it even once. Infuriating to say the least. What made me finally delete it and lose my thousands+ streaks was the ads. Rest in rip in actual piss Snapchat
Google forced my assistant to change to Gemini. The only thing that cursed machine has ever heard me say is “how do I switch back to the old Google Assistant?”
It is likely that they don’t already have a way to exclude certain numbers from the report and block feather yet, but will implement one if the number of people blocking it gets too high.
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Wow, this is a very insightful remark! Although I’m a little confused by your second point, would you mind expanding on that?
