Ulrich

Strava is an absolute nightmare to use. My feed is absolutely chock full of ads and dog-walkers. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy they're taking a 0.2 mile walk around their block and logging their progress, but I don't need to see it. Nike, TrainerRoad, Zwift, Peloton all have giant ads every time their users upload an activity. And I don't understand it because it's not an ad-supported network. Like I would happily pay to have all this shit hidden. It would be extremely simple for Strava to fix this, which would just be to provide me with a simple filter for what type of activities I'd like to see. The fact that they haven't done so, a long time ago, leads me to believe that they simply don't want to, for whatever reason. Plus they've already begun to enshittify by breaking integrations with third parties.

Are there any good options for this?

E: to be clear, I'm asking about the social aspect of Strava.

Steam revenue estimated 2024: $10.8B

Google Play Store gaming revenue 2024: ~$31B

Why doesn't Valve want a part of that? I mean they already have an Android app. Several, actually. I realize there's some amount of investment but surely the payoff is worth it, and they have the necessary funds and skills? I mean if F-Droid can do it with nothing but volunteers and grants...?

Certainly plenty of games won't lend themselves well to the mobile experience but also plenty of them do.

From a personal perspective: I don't really care a whole lot for mobile games but I do like Balatro and want to play it on my phone, but if I want to do that I have to buy another license, which I can't even do because I don't run Google Play Services.

Epic got in on this already. Where's Valve?

Edit: my reflections on this conversation:

Valve could distribute their own app like Epic but they'd also probably have to remove it from the Play Store because now a cross-platform game would give them an Android version, thus breaking Google's ToS. So would doing such a thing outweigh lost sales from the Google version, and would it impact customer satisfaction? I wonder how many people are actually purchasing PC games in the Steam Android app...?

A few days ago I noticed a marketing email sent to my Zima alias. Apparently lots of other people also noticed this and were not happy. Attached is the IceWhale response.

Android has a greatly overhauled desktop mode on the way to replace the current primitive proof of concept in developer options. 6th gen Pixels added hardware-based virtualization support and 8th gen Pixels added USB-C DisplayPort alternate mode. It will all come together soon.

Overhauled desktop mode is already partially shipped as a disabled-by-default feature. Android enables some of it for the Pixel Tablet already but not Pixel phones. We plan to enable the same feature flags for phones too. Either way, it's an experimental developer option for now.

Playtron has made some waves in Linux gaming. They have lots of big names in Linux working on the project. Recently they were featured by Framework today in their presentation. However, I think it's abundantly clear that anyone who cares about FOSS should stay far away from this.

I was intrigued by this as well some months ago. I even ignored when they blatantly lied about Valve/Steam locking down their OS to only play Steam games. So I gave it a try and installed it. On setup they wanted me to agree to a EULA. That was red flag #2. Never seen that before. Then they wanted me to agree to their privacy policy. It is a very typical corporate user-hostile privacy policy. Some highlights

• Like many website operators, we collect information that your browser sends whenever you visit our Website. This includes Log Data, such as your computer’s IP address, browser type, browser version, the pages of our Website that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages and other statistics, and whether you reached our page via a social media or email campaign. This information may be collected via several technologies, including cookies, web beacons, clear GIFs, canvas fingerprinting and other means, such as Google Remarketing and Facebook Pixel.
• If you access our Sites through third parties (e.g., Facebook or Google), or if you share content from our Sites to a third-party social media service, the third-party service will send us certain information about you if the third-party service and your account settings allow such sharing.
• "Professional, employment, or education information, such as your industry and job level, for news personalization, or copies of your resume or CV and any other information required to verify your qualifications, for recruitment purposes"
• "Commercial information, such as a record of purchased products or subscriptionsInferences about your consumer preferences or characteristics."

How we use personal information:

• To market our products and/or services to you
• With respect to website cookies, to share with third-party marketing partners to provide tailored advertising on our Website and other websites that you may visit

We share your information with our third-party service providers and any subcontractors as required to offer you our products and services. The service providers we use help us to:

• run email and mobile messaging campaigns;
• perform marketing analytics;
• provide measurement services and target ads (you can opt out of these services at websites such as http://www.aboutads.info/choices and http://www.youronlinechoices.eu/)

They even admit to not respecting "Do Not Track" signals.