It's important to note that the infamous Dropbox comment was not just misguided. It was wrong.
The proof is that multiple competitor products have been launched since, and all of them have had sync issues at some point, with different degrees of severity ranging from sync delays, through data conflicts, up to loss of data in all synced devices. To this day, I still trust Dropbox more than its competition. This includes custom rsync scripts.
This is impossible by design. Decades ago there were some distributions that had this as a goal (e.g. Mandrake, Suse), they included an application similar to the Windows Control Panel to manage everything. But such applications can never reach into all the corners, unless the distribution is severely locked down. The example of this extreme is... macOS. And still, there are some cases where dropping into the command line is the better or even the only option.
Back on Linuxland, the userbase realized this about two decades ago, when Ubuntu launched. Having a nice default experience was considered better than having easy tweakability, because Ubuntu could also be configured to the fullest extent in the classic Linux way of reaching into the guts of the system and rearranging things to taste. Not that I would ever recommend tweaking Ubuntu too much, but it can be done.
What about the other end? Most people who like fiddling with Linux by reaching into its internals have settled on distributions such as Arch, where this way of managing the system is expected and thus the distribution works to ensure this experience is as easy and predictable as it can be, by providing a good happy path experience for common scenarios, and providing top-notch documentation for common and uncommon customization options, or minority hardware platforms and devices.
The control panel doesn't need to reach all corners.
Just enough corners to cover day-to-day usability so that new users would be able to help themselves if they get stumped.
That set of corners has been pretty much covered by Windows 95 when it comes to the GUI.
For tweakability, command-line interface isn't unfriendly — the commands are.
People love talking to ChatGPT. This tells you how friendly typing interface is.
I'm not saying that natural language processing should necessarily be a feature of the interface (although it could make a lot of things much smoother), but FFS, an interactive dialogue-based CLI is a much friendlier thing than "figure out the right incantation" paradigm.
> Each time the Leta application is restarted (due to an upgrade, or new version) server side, a new secret hash is generated, meaning that all previous search queries are no longer visible to Leta.
If I read this correctly, the cached data is per-instance, there would be no way to share cached data among instances if each one has its own secret hash and they are cycled on each start.
Biggest change seems to be that everything is round and purple now. It looks more playful and less professional.
Edit: I dislike their recent color picks. First that teal in Google Maps, now the purple. Why? Are they trying to copy the color paltette of the first Mecedes A-Class (aka "Listerine" colors [1][2])?
For everyday use, wireless headphones offer a superior experience simply due to the lack of a cable, and for the cases where an audio output is desired, it should be easy to connect the phone to an audio interface. Is any of this a problem in the Android ecosystem?
> For everyday use, wireless headphones offer a superior experience simply due to the lack of a cable
Surely this is offset by a) having to charge it and b) not being able to replace the battery when it dies
Not to mention a cable can be debugged easily; i don't even know which device my bluetooth headphones is connected to let alone why it's not working as expected.
So? Get the 10 Euro/Dollar Apple USB-C to stereo connector? Works with other phones as well and supposedly has an acceptable DAC. If you really want to charge at the same time and wireless charging is not acceptable, there are also some companies that make small connectors with USB-C power in and stereo out.
The reason the jack is gone is that the vast majority of people use wireless buds or headphones. It's the smartphone equivalent of complaining that MacBooks do not have DVD drives anymore.
(I like the stereo jack, but I have accepted that I'm a small minority.)
Nah, I've broken like three of those things and I just resent having another thing to carry around. I've just given up on using wired headphones for the most part with my phone. I just don't know why they thought it was desired to remove in the first place; I've had other waterproof headphones with a jack.
But, I also don't generally expect apple to make consumer-friendly decisions. The headphone jack invokes about 1/100th the rage that using the app store does.
Congratulations on the project! This is an impressive feat at any age. Personally, I love how you found your own balance between extreme minimalism and a useful set of features, arriving at a solution that is indeed below 2k lines of C code. That kind of thinking is not a quality every software developer has, and you could make a career out of it if you decide to work professionally in this field.
The proof is that multiple competitor products have been launched since, and all of them have had sync issues at some point, with different degrees of severity ranging from sync delays, through data conflicts, up to loss of data in all synced devices. To this day, I still trust Dropbox more than its competition. This includes custom rsync scripts.