Thank you for the links, I had found a few of these but some are new. The basic idea is there, I’ll see if any of these can work for us. I’m growing more convinced though that hosting a whole app for this super simple use case might not be worth it, I think we might pivot to just hosting a really basic static page for it.

This is way too overkill for what we need. I’m sorry, I’ve been intentionally vague about the context for this but I guess it’s too unclear. We’re an activist group planning a protest. We might have to get this set up literally tomorrow and every penny comes out of (mostly my) pocket. We’re also all paranoid about opsec and anonymity, which is why the requirement about avoiding corporate services is there. Perhaps I should have posted this in a privacy focused comm instead, I apologize.

It’s pretty overkill for what we need, and it would still fall under “corporate” for us. At that point I could just go for the static Notion page which I can get live in 5m for free.

We can set up all of those but again, that’s kinda expensive for us rn. What’s the benefit of using a CMS like Joomla versus wishthis, or even a basic Caddy/Nginx webserver with a static page?

I believe you need root to access those, plus a file manager that supports it (I use Mixplorer which does). Otherwise, as someone else suggested, you can access them from a computer over ADB or MTP.

I had high hopes when I tried it out but frankly it’s been almost unusable for me. Terrible performance, laggy UI, plenty of bugs, long loading times for songs…

I don’t know if something in my mobile environment was messing with it but I use quite a few indie FOSS apps still in beta and none of them worked as badly as Spotube did. I’d love to go back to it if it improves, but for now it’s just not worth the UX pain.

Edit: forgot to mention. The idea of sourcing tracks from YouTube is cool but causes loads od trouble in practice. I’ve found remixed versions streamed as the original, tracks with the intro from the music video, tracks with sound effects from the music video, and tracks that just cannot be streamed cause they aren’t on YouTube. I know there’s a feature to pick which version to stream, but it’s quite a bit of UX friction and it didn’t work often enough to be a showstopper.

I thought I heard they were rolling out some material you theming in beta a while ago. Did they revert it?

I don’t have the same phone and it’s in general pretty difficult to fix a brick without being able to tinker with it. I can give you some pointers though…

First off, this guide is for a model A525F, but your title says your phone is an A526B. If that’s correct there’s a chance the files you tried to flash were for a different model number and that’s what went wrong. Make sure you download the right files for your exact model number rather than trusting the ones your guide provides.

Secondly, to be honest, this guide does not seem very trustworthy. When doing this kind of thing every little step matters, a single misplaced reboot might screw up the whole process. Also, you’re downloading and installing on your phone some files from some random website, that’s a big risk. The thing is: you don’t need a shitty guide for your exact model. For future reference, you’re better off with a good, detailed guide for your general vendor (Samsung). XDA forums are usually the place to look. Always find the files you need by yourself, don’t just flash whatever some random website makes you download. Go to the official download pages for Samsung stock OS or TWRP and get the files from there, making sure they match your exact model number.

If you’re 100% sure that the firmware you’re trying to flash is the correct one for your model, you can try avoiding Odin and use adb flash directly. There’s plenty of guides on how to do that going around. You might not need TWRP either at that point. Getting familiar with adb is always useful.

Backed by who?

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with a recent history of questionable investments…

I’m aware they’re not using a generic model, but that’s not much better. Current custom-made models still fuck up significantly more than humans, and in less predictable ways.

Even if their custom model is slightly incorrect 1% of the time, that’s still a major problem in critical systems like those.

Legacy COBOL code is largely used in critical systems like those of banks and airlines. What could go wrong with having that code rewritten by stochastic parrots who get programming answers wrong half of the time?