New phone who dis

[oblomov@sociale.network]

New phone who dis

[oblomov@sociale.network]

Anyway, the experience with setting up the new phone has really amplified my deep hatred for Android.

First of all, it's basically impossible to make an actual backup of the system on stock Android, to be restored on the same or another phone at a later stage.

Android will allow you to migrate data and apps, but only if they were “official” ones. Anything that was side loaded or installed from a different store is out.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

In addition to that, backwards compatibility is limited. Newer versions of Android complain very loudly if you try to install apps written for older versions, and in some cases refuse to proceed altogether. This is obviously compounded by potential binary incompatibility due to varying hardware architecture for programs that include a native component, but for the most part it's at the OS level.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

As a consequence of this, I have lost executable access to a nontrivial amount of games that I purchased via Humble Bundles. For some of them I could maybe get in touch with the developers IF they are still in business and see if they can offer access to the Google Store version for owners of the Humble version, but that's a lot of authors to get in touch with, some of which have either stopped developing for Android altogether, or have stopped working on that particular game/piece of software.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

People like to complain about Linux' lack of support for backwards compatibility, and I have been bitten by that myself, but this is even more frustrating, because: (1) this is stuff I paid for and (2) since it's not open source, I can't even try to hack my way around it. It's ridiculous that in 2026 the still only operating system that seems to have gotten backwards compatibility right is frigging Microsoft Windows.