Hey,
my phone plan (free plan) allows surfing the web for free but with very slow speeds between 32 kbps and 64 kbps. Safari would not load pages and just display website is not reachable due to a timeout. So, I came up with the idea to build a frugal text browser with some nice features that works with my phone plan.
I can disable loading images, media or web fonts. I can set an ad blocking DNS. I can even use LLMs with my slow connection. In settings you can set your own LLM base url and api key. In an emergency situation this is amazing!
I hope other people enjoy it as much as I do. It’s completely free.
The app is called Narrow32, search in App Store :)
Btw: The community guided me to !imadethis@lemmy.zip
There’s also Firsty free which is ad-supported. But now it’s limited to 300MB per day. And also the data speed and time per ad depend on the location. I think it’s 15 - 60 minutes per ad and 256kbps to 1Mbps. In Slovakia I get 30 minutes at 256kbps.
But it’s not fully reliable. For example, now I wasn’t able to watch an ad after running out of time. In the past Uber and Google Maps were usable even without watching ads. Maybe that’s still supposed to be the case, but DNS just crapped out. With the Google part there was a bit of a bug, everything Google worked. At full speed. Even 4K60fps YouTube videos, and back then they didn’t even have the 300MB limit.
Since they don’t seem to be huge, and the ads certainly don’t provide that much money I ended up reporting that and it has been fixed since.
Also, right now hotspot randomly works even without changing the TTL.
Right… and there’s one more problem. Device support, based on Play Store. I could only install it using aurora store when spoofing my phone as Google Pixel.
Speed test:
ad supported sounds like a nightmare. why can’t we have a free tier with low speeds or even 100mb limit. like Amazon’s old whispernet for the original kindles (insane how shitty are modern kindles compared to the old ones with keyboards).