Anon degoogles his Samsung

They referred to themselves as a Dane, which is somebody who lives in Denmark. So the country in question is likely Denmark.

use matrix with the whatsapp bridge

Easy choice. No such nasty crAPP (pun intended) will touch my innocent phone. If they wouldn't even install a safe(er) app for their kid, then that's already enough communication.

I just don't communicate with anyone that insists on using products that have user agreements I don't agree with. The amount of bullshit user agreements are getting overloaded with makes them dangerous legal contracts that can have serious implications on your rights. Just ask the family whose daughter died at a Disney theme park and when they tried to sue Disney tried to force them to arbitration because their son had tried Disney+

If they're serious about talking to you, they'll budge. Call their bluff.

They already shattered when they dropped.

Thanks to the companies you cannot love the phones without accepting the company's every whim. So I don't love phones.

Nobody, nothing stopping you from buying a dumb phone and a dumb tablet. You can do it right now.

I did this when I was in Japan. I didn't want to jump through all their ridiculous hoops to get tap to pay to work, so I just threw my NFC debit card into my case and called it a day. Worked 90% of the time.

Just get a case with a card holder on the back, tap away

Your payment processor and creditor are probably also selling your info btw. If you use a service like Google Pay or Samsung Pay there's a layer of anonymity between you and the merchant at a minimum. Google has an incentive to monetize your data, but they for sure don't sell it. Companies pay them to advertise to certain demographics and geozones, but parting with that info would make them obsolete in a heartbeat. That's the strategy nowadays at least. Hoard the data and tightly control access to it. Last time I checked(it's been a few years), only like 8 people at Google even had the ability to decrypt user data with master keys to comply with lawful orders given by courts, and even then they had a good track record of denying subpoenas due to an unreasonable request for mass amounts of user data outside of specific timelines or even data on people who were within a geofence at the time of a crime. It's why there moving your maps timeline away from their severs and onto the device. I'm all for giving companies some shit where they deserve it, but in my opinion this kind of stuff gets blown out of proportion and parroted everywhere without much explanation.

Did you read the greentext? Literally says they're unlocking the bootloader to root the phone.

Also, microG for that scenario.

> Next reboot, my carrier tries to get me to install their shit with a permanent notification

Is this some US thing? What do you mean? I've never seen this.

Making those harder and harder to find it seems. For me it was the extra charge to ship it.

Dang, can't do those 80s cosplays justice without a headphone jack

In the EU, I'm not headphones with jacks will be allowed to be sold (Arstechnica).

Laptops get until April 2026 to comply, but most other things—phones, tablets, handheld gaming devices, computer accessories, and wireless headphones—will have to be powered by USB-C to be sold inside the EU from now on.

I think it's only a matter of time until phones with dual or triple USB-C start emerging.

How? How? 7a costs $350.

I spent just over $100 on a second hand one.

There's zero need to buy the newest and fanciest phone unless you just want to brag about it; my Pixel 6 Pro cost me $200 refurbished and does everything you could ask for.

I see. In that case his push notifications will not work for apps that rely on Google play services for them. A few other things off the top of my head:

A-GPS SUPL must be changed Captive portal must be changed DNS, NTP servers must be changed Depending on how much you trust Chromium system webview should be avoided

It is not trivial to remove Google from Android, even AOSP

I still use PlayService but their native ads and tracker are blocked via Blocker apps through package manager mode.
For further more ads/tracker block i used adaway & adguard as main & sub with many custom filter that i add to it, so it can protect the whole phone even the sneakiest ads/tracker.

It has been forked and resuscitated.

It was hyperbole... but only just. Even most of my audio calls happen over Whatsapp these days. Certainly 100% of the texting.

I know this is very region-dependent, so mileage may vary, but I did find it funny that it was acknowledged here despite the deliberately convoluted deep scrubbing depicted on the rest of the post. It's... less funny now that you made me explain it, though.

I toyed with a Pinephone last year. Most of my complains were toward the hardware, although I didn't try every basic functionality either.
It took me a while to setup the OS because I wanted to try a few different distros and screwed up a few times here and there. Arch was the most stable of those I tried. It also comes with a built-in right to brag about using Arch, which is cool. I think that using a more recent and higher grade phone could make it usable in the day to day, as the pinephone is more of a development tool. Otherwise, give it a few more years.

My point is that you're buying a branded device specifically because it has ease of use features but then you're replacing them all with custom services that you now need to upkeep manually and tend like a garden. It's over complicating the purchase.