Interestingly, Afinum is also a German based private equity firm which owned majority shares of Threema since 2020.

Kind of strange to see the company bouncing around between owners, but hopefully it can remain a good product and not become enshittified.

https://www.startupticker.ch/en/news/threema-transfers-ownership-the-second-time

This is a private equity firm? Was Threema doing financially bad?

I don’t think two separate forms are needed for GDPR consent and ATT. Apps I worked on took the result from ATT and used that as the user consenting to be tracked in the app for GDPR.

I guess companies want to make it cumbersome as possible so user gets fatigued and just clicked through it mindlessly like with cookies banners on every website.

How was there double consent required?

Without ATT companies use dark patterns, opt-out, and over burdensome Privacy Policies or Terms of Service to get what they claim is consent.

When users get a straightforward choice to allow tracking or not, like with ATT, most don’t allow it.

I actually only played the original Call of Duty and the sequel on PC when they released 🤣

It is a full blown Linux OS. You can switch out of the gaming specific mode/UI to a Linux desktop environment using KDE. There you can install your own software and use it like a normal computer.

The only limiting factor is that the root file system is read only by default (can be disabled). If you want to install system level packages, you can work around this by using something like distrobox.

I think most proprietary apps these days have frequent updates because they don’t actual have in house testing and use frequent updates to constantly roll out changes. They are also constantly changing the app with feature switches/AB testing to increase important business metrics.

This same strategy can be seen in the gaming industry with games being in an alpha/beta state for years, at least they are upfront here of the unfinished quality of the software.

None of this would be possible if software was still shipped on physical media. Companies would actually have to test and think through product functionality before releasing it.

One counter point is young people drive the technology trends. Look at how social media and the Internet in general took off in the early 2000-2010s, it was driven by younger generations using these technologies. Now everyone is on social media after the younger generations at the time pioneered it.

If younger generations do rejected apps, smart phones, and surveillance capitalism, maybe there could be change in the direction.

It is relatively easy to find an English speaking tech job in Germany. If you have a university degree, then you can get the EU Blue Card.

Another big problem not mentioned in the article is companies refusing to hire QA engineers to do actual testing before releasing.

The last two American companies I worked for had fired all the QA engineers or refused to hire any. Engineers were supposed to “own” their features and test them themselves before release. It’s obvious that this can’t provide the same level of testing and the software gets released full of bugs and only the happy path works.

What if there were only two car companies?

I think Apple is responsible by releasing new APIs that are only available on the specific iOS version. Rarely have they back ported functionality to older iOS versions. Apple draggles shinny new APIs in front of developers causing them to update the minimum version.

Yeah Apple rapidly dropping support with Intel Macs is really terrible. I have a 2018 Mac mini that is already obsolete, what a joke. That was the last Mac I buy.

The security updates for old iOS versions are a sleight of hand. Most companies only support the three latest versions of iOS, so soon that will be iOS 17 as the minimum. I had a device stuck on iOS 15, which was released in 2016, and banks and other major apps dropped support. So while the phone did get security updates, it can’t run the apps I needed.

You also need every company to develop for a third mobile platform, where two different ones are already a big ask.

Easy solution would be to run existing apps on Linux, probably would be Android.

Another solution would we move to PWAs to have apps in the browser.

Both these things already happened on desktop Linux with Windows games using Proton and most proprietary desktop apps switching to Electron.

N26 requires you to have their app installed to confirm the web logins.

I left the US in 2016 and moved to Germany.

If you have a university degree and work in an in demand field, such as IT, it is relatively easy to get a job and visa for Germany.

The hard part now is affordable housing in the big cities is almost non-existent, especially for someone moving here with no work or rental history in Germany.

The cost of living is less than in the US, so depending on your job/salary, affording the expensive housing may be less of an issue.

Overall the quality of life is much higher and the relationship to work and your life is way more balanced than in the US.

I can’t imagine going back to the US now.

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Even the non glass icons look terrible, they include some automatic blur being applied.

Yeah, but the issue is they didn’t buy a legal copy of the book. Once you own the book, you can read it as many times as you want. They didn’t legally own the books.

There‘s also the FSEvents database on the root of every disk which is a database of all the file events/operations that happened on that disk.

Supposedly you can disable it, but I haven’t got it to work. For example if you download a sensitive file, do something with it, and delete it. You can see this in the FSEvents database.

This is already a recall type feature at the file system level.