I am greatly displeased at the smartphone industry. I think it’s time for a heavy handed crackdown about all the spying they’re doing. The smartphone industry and in particular the company qualcomm I find an intolerable company in their practice, I believe they should be smashed, their equiment liquidated and their intellectual property destroyed.
The smartphone industry is a festering cancer on general computing, a persistent and pernicious assault on human rights. An invasion of our private spaces. A colonization of our lives.
I think it is past the point of reform, not that there are any regulator with to intelligence figure out what is wrong let alone the wherewithal to do anything about.
For those reasons, I think global thermonuclear war is our only realistic option for setting back the clock on this travesty.
I am willing to hear your alternative, I don’t believe anything short of that has a snowball’s chance in hell to change anything about this.
I bought a used Pixel 6 (for about $120 on Swappa) and installed GrapheneOS. I understand the irony of deGoogling and using a Pixel phone. From what I understand, the core reason GrapheneOS relies on Pixel phones is because they offer hardware security features (like the Titan M chip), an unlockable and re-lockable bootloader, and guaranteed long-term updates.
My favorite part of my phone (besides the ultimate security and privacy) is that my only “app store” (besides the GrapheneOS store) is Obtainium. There is nothing on F-Droid or Google Play that I can’t find (that I use/need) with Obtainium and IronFox. If I absolutely need to access something that requires proprietary or unwanted applications, I use IronFox to browse the website (my bank for instance). I have complete control over what my phone does and I only have FOSS software installed. It is a lot more work than I think most people would be willing to do, but it is important to me, and I think it is the only way (for me, this is subjective) to be truly free of Google or Apple and still use a smart phone.
Other “privacy” ROMS still communicate with Google in some way. The other ROMS are moving in the right direction, though. /e/OS, for instance, switched to AOSP instead of LineageOS, but it uses microG. By its very nature, microG communicates with Google, so that is not something I am interested in using. Some of the GNU/Linux mobile projects are showing promise (check out postmarketOS ), but they are a ways away from actually being reasonably usable on a newer everyday main device.
In conclusion, yes, just end it all. The best I can come up with is to deGoogle and reject all big-tech.