Smartphones
76 episodes
#6181: Shipping Private Android Apps to Your Family
Daniel wants to ship private Android apps to non-technical relatives. F-Droid repos, Basic Auth, and the Google verification cloud on the horizon.
#6163: Forking a Keyboard for One Voice Feature
Daniel built a Hebrew-English dictation engine. Now he wants to fuse it into someone else's keyboard — without inheriting its entire future.
#6138: Hebrish on iPhone: MLX, Core ML, or Wait?
Hebrish spells makolet right on Android. Getting that Hebrew-English dictation onto an iPhone means picking between MLX, Core ML, and sherpa-onnx.
#5939: Android Notifications: PWA vs Native, What You Actually Get
Push, channels, haptics, and the scheduling gap — what a PWA can and can't do that a native Android build can.
#5871: Why Your USB-C Charger Won't Talk to Cheap Devices
A pocket speaker charges on USB-A but flashes red on USB-C. The answer is two missing resistors and a handshake that never happened.
#5865: Four Pocket Players That Won't Sell You a Device Today
Mono, Fonix One, Sudo, and DuRoBo Krono all promise phone-free podcast listening — and not one of them is ready to ship today.
#5748: What's Actually Inside an eSIM Adapter
An eSIM adapter isn't a converter — it's a eUICC chip in a SIM shell. Here's the silicon, the certificates, and the open source tools underneath.
#5526: Can a Phone Bond Two Cellular Links?
Android can bond Wi-Fi and cellular — but two cellular data paths at once? That's where the hardware and the OS both say no.
#5525: Why Does an eSIM Adapter Need a Card Reader?
Your Android phone can already read and write an eSIM adapter card. So why does the company still sell a $15 USB reader?
#5490: Why Screen Protectors Bubble Every Time
One dust particle becomes a permanent tent pole under your screen protector. Here's the physics behind the bubbles.
#5464: Your Keyboard's Hidden Data Problem
Your keyboard knows your email address, your phrases, your habits — and you can't take any of it with you.
#5456: Parakeet vs Whisper: Picking a Phone ASR Model
Why Whisper loses on Android, why Parakeet v2 beat v3, and how to benchmark speech-to-text without any tooling.
#5422: Switching Android Keyboards Without the Tap Dance
One listener wants a one-tap jump between his Parakeet voice keyboard and his typing keyboard. Android says no — unless you know the trick.
#5420: How Keyboard Middleware Actually Works
A keyboard isn't one thing — it's a stack. Here's how input methods, composition buffers, and hooks really work on Linux, Android, and Windows.
#5417: Can You Version-Control Your Android Apps?
Android Developer Verification enforcement just started. Can you define your installed app list as code — and what breaks if you try?
#5415: Inside F-Droid: Repos, Front Ends, and Sideloading Safely
How F-Droid's repository model works, why it has five front ends, and what actually keeps sideloaded APKs safe.
#5388: Android's Split Keyboard and Voice Input Problem
Android separates keyboards from speech engines by design. Most apps weld them back together.
#5383: Android's Open Core, Closed Governance
Android's code is open, but its roadmap isn't. What happens when Google changes the core and developers just have to cope?
#5233: One Tap Beats Eight Links: Designing a Digital Business Card
Most digital cards fail in ten seconds. Here's the design that actually starts a conversation.
#5232: Zello, PTT Buttons, and the Kitchen Intercom Question
Why your Bluetooth speaker ignores Zello's push-to-talk — and what to buy instead for a hands-full, phone-off fallback.
#5166: Why Your Baby Tracker Can't Log Oxygen Saturation
Baby apps have templates for everything — except the metrics you actually need. The custom tracking framework exists. It just never shipped.
#5160: Bluetooth Peripherals on One Android Phone
How many Bluetooth devices can one Android phone juggle? The seven-device limit is a stack artifact — profiles matter more.
#5138: Who Are Taxi Drivers Really Talking To?
The earpiece isn't a fake call or a coordination tool. It's a lifeline against the profound isolation of the job.
#5070: HUD vs. Portable Screens: Solving Car Nav in the Heat
Daniel's tablet melts in the Israeli sun. True HUDs can't show maps, but portable CarPlay screens might be the real answer.