This week YouTube hosted Brandcast 2025 in which it revealed how marketers could make better use of the platform to connect with customers.
A few new so-called innovations were announced at the event but one has caught the attention of the internet – Peak Points. This new product makes use of Gemini to detect “the most meaningful, or ‘peak’, moments within YouTube’s popular content to place your brand where audiences are the most engaged”.
Essentially, YouTube will use Gemini and probably the heatmap generated on YouTube videos by people skipping to popular points, to determine where to place advertising. Anybody who has grown up watching terrestrial television where adverts arrive as a way to build suspense will understand how annoying Peak Points could become.
Gemini also being forced on me more and more in Android. Seriously considering a linux phone next.
I’ve been hoping for one for some time, but it wouldn’t be a smooth sailing even if everything was perfect. Get a pixel, install grapheneos and see if you can cope with it. I’ve been running it for a year now - lack of decent map app is my biggest issue that’s left. Waze is great for driving, but useless for everything else; it’s also owned by google. Most other apps are just reskinned google maps and don’t even load without gapps.
And I’m a sysadmin. My degoogling journey began in 2018-2019 with running my own nextcloud for files, photo backup, contact and calendar sync, as well as my own email server. All that to say that I’ve had it fairly easy to ditch play store on a phone, but that’s not what most will experience.
In the beginning I used OsmAnd for maps, its a bit wonky sometimes but the maps are high quality. Magic Earth fixed the the wonky ness but uses osm maps, is pretty great visually pleasing and can do all sorts of settings like speed assistance, lane assistance. I haven’t used it much but Organic Map looks good too, seems to have a focus on public transportation.
What do you do for calendar sync? I found I had to use an extension like DAVx⁵ to synchronize them to my phone, did you find another way?
I’ll give Magic Earth a go, but osmand is just missing a bunch of stuff I got used to having I guess. The actual map part is fine.
I use DAVx⁵ myself. It’s not ideal aesthetically, but honestly not a thing I worry about.
If it’s anything like Linux desktop the apps you really need (for me, WhatsApp) are going to be available in 10 years. After that it’s a short slide to “if you don’t have Linux (why not?) by the way here’s how to install on android/iOS if you must.”
At least that’s my experience as an early Linux on desktop adopter. Yes Linux is a niche thing in mobile at the moment but the truth is the developers are the ones who make it happen and they are already there.