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- Hacker News
- I wonder if it’s more intuitive that way.
Like what Apple does with stopwatch.
https://lukashermann.dev/writing/why-the-iphone-timer-displa...
by alberth - There is a way to switch the bars to actual numeric dBM: https://www.techbout.com/display-iphone-signal-strength-in-n...
(Probably a way to do it on Android, too)
A CSR showed me this while debugging network connectivity issues with my phone.
by Leftium - IIRC this really took off with the antennagate fiasco on the iphone 4. I was working for Verizon at the time and this was also the first one we were able to sell. I forget who it was that did it but I believe it was Apple in response to people "holding their phone wrong" so they bumped everything up a bar so you couldn't tell. There was a lot of competition at the time but also all the androids had better margins so they wanted us to sell those instead.by sanex
- Original commit that introduced the change: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+...
I don't know if I want my name on an open source project attached to a commit whose only purpose is to lie?
by OptionOfT - You know, I don't recall ever seeing 1 bar of signal strength on a smartphone. And once it's down to 2 bars, it barely works, if at all.
Human brains: wow, what a bunch of suckers. Damn.
By the way, is it legal to be deceptive in this way?
by metadat - Related: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lohttps://www....
"Tests carried out by research group PolicyTracker, and shared with BBC's Morning Live, found that nearly 40% of the time a phone displays the 5G symbol, it is actually using a 4G connection"
by gadders - A friend recently got a (carrier-supplied) phone and has been complaining about how it would often have no reception despite showing a good signal; taking mine to the same areas on the same carrier and doing a comparison, mine was indeed showing no bars on the signal indicator. The difference is, mine predates this stupidity, and I can also see the details in the MTK Engineer Mode app, which shows the actual signal strength --- it was around -140dBm when it was showing 0 bars.
The signal strength measurement is actually standardised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_signal#ASU
by userbinator - I implemented the same behavior in a different Google product.
I remember the PM working on this feature showing us their research on how iPhones rendered bars across different versions.
They had different spectrum ranges, one for each of maybe the last 3 iPhone versions at the time. And overlayed were lines that indicated the "breakpoints" where iPhones would show more bars.
And you could clearly see that on every release, iPhones were shifting the all the breakpoints more and more into the left, rendering more bars with less signal strength.
We tried to implement something that matched the most recent iPhone version.
by zabumafu