Back when I used Samsung, the custom ROM scene offered stock ROMs with all the crapware removed - usually labeled as “debloated”. If you can find them, those should allow you to update with your S-Pen still working. You can also debloat Android yourself (sort of; without root it just disables packages rather than uninstalling them) using UAB.

You’d lose KNOX though, and a lot of modern apps deliberately break themselves if you’re not running pure stock (or spoofing it, which I can help with if you want to go this route).

@Toes@ani.social is right about Android 9 being horribly insecure. There are a bunch of unpatched CVEs that can allow an attacker full access to your phone, and since even browsers have dropped support for it, you’re going to be lacking protection against modern attack vectors.

If you only use your phone to browse a couple of websites, going into uBlock’s settings and disabling JavaScript will provide extra protection against malware. When you want to allow a site through, just click the uBlock icon and enable JavaScript for the site in the pop-up, then hit the padlock (to save it as a rule instead of being temporary) and refresh.

It’s like NoScript except it doesn’t require another add-on and it’s much easier to use. The downsides are that the control isn’t as fine-grained and it’s slightly less secure (as it’s a binary allow/block for everything on the site, whereas NoScript lets you block individual scripts and third-party domains) - I don’t think it’ll protect you from a trusted site that’s been infected with malware itself. If you’re comfortable with nearly every site being broken without manual intervention, go with NoScript instead for the extra security.

There are also anti-malware filter lists in uBlock’s settings. I can’t recall if they’re enabled by default, but it’s worth checking. They’re a simple change that provide excellent protection on their own.

The flying is pretty great. I liked what I played of it, but I’ve been holding off on a full playthrough until they fix the terrible user interface (which is luckily one of their top priorities).

The frustrating thing about that is how they didn’t even slow down with their bullshit after that scandal, and some of the most hated DRM in recent history have a direct lineage from Sony:

• SecuROM, a widely hated DRM that limited how many times you could install a game, required online check-ins or it’d lock you out of playing, and blocked common IT tools while running, was also developed by Sony.
• Denuvo, which obfuscates and encrypts the game executable after scattering DRM checks throughout, adding extra CPU overhead and lowering game performance, was later produced by the same (former, now independent) SecuROM team.

Admit it, you just like Soulmask because it lets you turn into Anubis (the Original Furry) on demand.

I’m onto you, Kolanaki!

Haven’t exploded their budget on a hiring spree

The big thing they did with the cash was start a publishing arm to help fund other indies. So far the biggest title to come from that is the pirate survival game Windrose.

Here’s hoping Pocketpair continue being as awesome as they’ve been up to this point.

I play co-op, and multiplayer has the unfortunate quirk that the game lets you pull base Pals you don’t own into your own Palbox and doesn’t show any indication of who the original owner was afterwards. Combine that with raid bosses, where you’re hurriedly swapping out Pals with fresh ones en masse as the boss defeats them, and I have no idea who owns half my Palbox. So I avoided condensing anything that wasn’t fresh out of the incubator.

Reading the changelog, you may have gotten what you asked for.

You hit the nail on the head. I’d describe Palworld as a shameless clone of ARK with Pokemon mechanics bolted on top, and a focus on automating your base vs ARK’s attitude of “do everything yourself”.

But the main thing Palworld gets right is copying all the good things about ARK that had people play it for thousands of hours, while reducing or eliminating all the bad things people hated about ARK (while still playing it for thousands of hours).

Mostly it improves the formula by reducing busywork and how long things take - in ARK, basic tasks could take hours and require the player’s constant attention that whole time, whereas in Palworld almost nothing takes more than a few minutes. Hatching eggs is the main exception, and that’s entirely passive outside of putting it in its preferred climate and coming back later to hatch it.

Things started going downhill when Lenovo wasn’t fined into oblivion in the 2010s for putting malicious spyware on the laptops they sold their customers. And I mean actual literal spyware, as in “installs a root certificate and decrypts and reads all your ‘secure’ internet traffic, ostensibly so it can place random ads in it”. While also leaving gaping holes for attackers to use, of course, but letting a random program written by someone with ties to Israeli intelligence install backdoors throughout their customer base earned Lenova slightly more money so it’s all good!

And that wasn’t even the first or last time Lenovo have done something like that. They just… got a free pass, and this type of thing gradually became the norm. It’s infuriating.

Since their current cash wouldn’t fit in a 32-bit integer that’d mean it’s at least 64-bit. An integer underflow would require a debt of over 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 units-of-currency before it rolled over to positives.

Man, this bubble is even bigger than I thought! /s

As for “Why tell me?” The theory is still that it is better for your life to know and that God’s law is better and more generous than man’s law.

The Golden Rule has popped up independently in cultures across the globe (including the Abrahamic religions), and I’d argue it’s a much better foundation for morality than anything that assumes/requires supernatural backing.

Yeah, boxes weren’t too bad with the filters (at least until late game when you had several hundred Pals - and 1.0 reducing the number of each Pal you need to catch for maximum experience from 12 down to 5 should go a long way towards fixing that box bloat), but the Palpedia was nearly unusable without search. You had to manually go down the entire list to know if you’d seen or caught a Pal before or wanted to check where it spawns.

Are you able to update it from this link? They have an annoying habit of dropping support for older versions of Android so you may be SOL.

Are you running a custom ROM? The webviews you can install on stock ROMs are restricted to specific publishers (usually Google and the phone vendor), but LineageOS adds a few extra accepted certificates for FOSS webviews and some ROMs disable the webview signature verification entirely. You may be able to find a modern version that’s installable on Android 9 with some searching.

Edit: the Bromite project is sadly long-dead, but they have an excellent writeup of how it all works here.

That is an absolutely insane changelog that includes nearly everything I wanted changed or fixed in the game, to the point that I’m actually kind of upset how many desperately needed quality-of-life fixes they held back for 1.0.

Stuff like searching the Pal boxes or Palpedia is something that should have been added the instant it was ready. Pal management was a pain in Early Access due to lacking such a basic feature.

Don’t worry. The title is just clickbait and Carmack is actually saying the complete opposite.

Try checking the Webview implementation setting in Android’s Developer Options. I had the same problem and it turned out there were two webviews installed and my system was using the extremely outdated one that came with the ROM instead of the modern one from the Play Store.

There has never been a more thematically correct choice.

Hey, thirty years ago this was true!

A small addendum: Jolt, the other new-ish free physics engine this would be competing against, is also deterministic (with some caveats that Box3D hopefully avoids) and more performant than contemporary commercial offerings (the benefit of being new and not held back by decades of accumulated cruft and early design decisions such as obsolete threading models).

What sets Box3D apart is that, like you said, many devs are already familiar with the 2d version of this engine and Box3D mimics its APIs aside from the added dimension. This makes it very easy to pick up for a large portion of the indie crowd.