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Comment by Lucent | Hacker News Reader

Every family member whose midrange phone I have to update due to EOL software or additional carrier bands somehow loses every feature they actually value and they rightfully complain it's a downgrade.

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I feel like this even without replacing my hardware, the software alone updates itself and changes all the time. I feel like whenever I open the youtube app it looks slightly different. See that button? Now it's gone! A week later, it's there again! Few days later, it's gone again, turns out the previous week was just A/B testing.

I wanted to play music that was stored locally on my phone. But Play Music has been deprecated for YouTube Music, and so it only redirects to a download page. Which would mean figuring out new permissions for a new application, whether it can read local files at all, whether it can read local files that may be marked as accessible only by a different application, whether the new app will give notifications that need to be disabled, and so on.

Why is it being replaced? Because there's a new branding. Why is the old application being disabled? Because it would be insecure to keep it without security updates. Why does it need security updates? Because it accesses the internet. Why does a local music player need to access the internet? Because they merged the local music player and streaming music player.

So there's a ridiculous user experience and unnecessary deprecation, all because local functionality interacts with nonlocal functionality.

I know everyone’s sick of hearing about it, but they’ve permanently lost my interest in upgrading thanks to the aux jack removal. Some features are so important that across the board improvements elsewhere still don’t justify the loss.

Kind of like an escape key on a keyboard.

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