@duncanhart Neither me. But ignoring it is not helpful either. I won't get rid of my business phone, but I will test drive alternatives on personal family devices. It is not so much a problem on a personal, but it is not a good development on societal level. The asymmetry of information is too big.

@FroehlichMarcel I’m waiting for my Librem 5. The loss of personal agency bugs me. If I have to make a Faustian pact to benefit from access and convenience I also want the option to temporarily go dark.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

@duncanhart
Looks good - love the physical switches. I discovered a bargain option and got a new Siemens phone with similar specs at amazon.de for about USD 140 = EUR 115, which is ready for /e/OS.

@FroehlichMarcel pls let me know how it goes, am interested to hear of your experience with /e/OS.

@duncanhart
I will have to wait 4 weeks to get it, then I have to put on the new ROM. Will be likely used by my daughter.
As soon as I have collected some experience, I will post it.

@duncanhart
It is installed. Not a task for people w/o expertise in everything Linux command line etc. Didn’t work immediately, as it required a specific version of the Android platform tools for Linux. But the result looks very promising. Probably the key step to escape tracking.

@muppeth Why dismiss the Android OSS part? I am quite happy with initiatives like /e/OS. There will be no scale without competitive commercial products.

@Marcel Fröhlich Because in my opinion it's not changing anything and only keeps the current status quo. Just like current situation in webbrowsers where pretty much all browsers run chromium which still gives Google full monopoly in browser market even if not everyone runs Chrome.
Current state of Android even running OSS ones means Google is the biggest stake holder. Not to mention it is hard even in the land of OSS Android to not "call home" to google (I believe lineageOS even does call home to google and it uses google's dns servers). As far as I know /e/ uses Gaps right? I do aproeciate the efforts of lineage and /e/ but to get trully independent we should not base our systems where tech giants are the biggest stakeholders.

@muppeth /e/ is completely plugged off from Google. It offers a viable alternative now, even for people who lack the skill to do stuff themselves. But I see your point and the value of your effort.

@muppeth It is not only browsers. To go really off-grid, the best option is to use Gemini space for personal stuff.

@muppeth what is microG?

@Marcel Fröhlich floss implementation of goole play services. But it is used to access google services just using floss imeplementation on your phone rather then closed source one.

@muppeth why should they access Google Play at all? they have replicated all infrastructure, e.cloud services including an app store.

@muppeth It is much more than an OS. It is a complete ecosystem. You can buy phones off the shelf running it.

@Marcel Fröhlich Sure, but the app ecosystem uses it. Push services, locations, in-app purchase and all that jazz. Sure it's nice they run also nextlcould, searx and email for their users, but there is more to it unfortunatelly and ton of app srequire access to google services. It's another reason why I think the entire ecosystem is wrong as it's relying on google infra. Sure it can be a daily driver. I myself run lineageos with only apps from fdroid until recently. But decided to switch to pinepohne even though it's very much alpha state and there is a long way to get it to stable state, but I do think just like with federated networks or FLOSS in general, the only way to get independent of big tech is building your own tools.