Changing your workflow is work, but those apps, and Paypal, Stripe, Plaid, and bank account linking services all really exist to harvest all your personal transaction data under the guise of making your life “easier”. There are banking regulations governing (somewhat) how older style payment methods can be tracked. These apps circumvent those regs. Those services are best used with throwaway money accounts not bound to your normal accounts, and at the end of a very long pole, but mostly not at all.

However, even credit card companies like MasterCard and American Express are in on it as well, further limiting options. AmEx is an interesting one, as they marketed themselves as a more premium card, housing most services in-house, and keeping transaction data in-house…only to turn around and profit off of it just the same.

Might as well go back to cash and paper checks at this point. Although a realistic lesser perspective is just to minimize which of these services one uses, and be sure that when paying on a web site to not check the “remember you for next time” checkbox that gathers further information to cross-link your purchases. Can’t block it all, but starve them of what one can.

The one good thing about AI video. No reason to pay “influencers” when that content can just be (crappily) generated.

Why spend all that money when you can spend less for a device by Withings that you piss on?

Palm Pre did it first. Apple copied.

You’re under-thinking it.

In pseudo-correct but probably not order:

• Step 1: Collect underpants
• Step 2: Keep receiving Google security updates but stop updating Google mainline
• Step 3: Start replacing the underbelly to just raw Linux (or BSD or whatever) and slowly shift the “Android” portion to a VM/container
• Step 4: RIL and other stuff (probably should happen first) have to be packaged up and become their new entity on the modem side (also probably the biggest challenge, but manufacturers and ODMs provide dev kits)
• Step 5: ???
• Step 6: Once the Android side is safely firewalled away from the core OS, start embracing something like PostmarketOS
• Step 7: GUI/graphics are built out with the Android pieces still running in a container
• Step 8: Start writing applications that replace the Android applications, go one by one, remove dependence on each Android application as you go while still maintaining compatibility (I mean the core OS ones that make the device at least basically functional, the F/OSS devs will have to each rewrite/change their apps, or some other magic can be inserted here that isn’t really magic.)
• Step 9: Once the OS itself is beefed up enough, retain Android container for the needs of some for some uncomfortably long frustrating time to maintain, but not too long
• Step 10: Have Obtainium/F-Droid/etc. all simultaneously pivot and start providing apps for the native OS as well as maintaining backwards compatibility with the Android apps in the container
• Step 11: Once some magic point, forced or otherwise happens, sunset the Android portion of the app stores. Keep the containerized Android around a little longer
• Step 12: Sunset the Android container, at this point the phone should be running 100% “native” OS and apps and store
• Step 14: Profit!

There are industry blueprints for this. Apple is probably the best example of how to implement these shifts, from OS 9 (co-op MT proprietary OS)->OS X (BSD-NextStep-based Unix OS), 68k->PPC, Replacing Unix underpinnings with Apple Frameworks, PPC->Intel, OS X->iOS, Mac from Intel->ARM, etc. etc. They frequently used containerization to keep the old running while the new was built up around it and replaced. It is a solid proven design pattern.

And edit72: I’m not just saying “hey magic people do this” - I’ve done this shit. I’m down to help, and I will. But the project owners need to step up for some actual work instead of just putting potpourri on something someone else built. Annoying side-story, I figured out how to cross-compile/rebuild/fix dependencies on a CPAP app called Oscar so it would be ARM-native on ARM Macs. Couldn’t figure out how to contact the devs after much digging to let them know, so. I have 1 of 1 copy of that app running ARM-MacOS native. Would be neat to help them replicate it though.

Graphene would be better off cutting themselves off from Google’s OS future entirely and pivot the fork as quickly as possible to remove all dependencies. Probably too arrogant to consider it, though. Also becomes much more work.

Qualcomm isn’t exactly the best vendor to choose either. They’re US-based, closely-aligned with the US government as a military contractor, and the baseband/processor are heavily integrated on many chipsets, even sharing memory. That means a compromised carrier network could twiddle bits that the operating system sees, if they so wanted. Among many other issues.

There’s something about a Samsung Exynos designed to spec by Google that is actually more desirable even with the lack of compute performance. More fingers in the pot, less chance of some sneakiness working its way in.

That’s a good point. Although living in the now, what did old Series 40 or Series 60 do behind the scenes? Probably not much because the extra power to mine user data wasn’t there yet. Also HMD could have made the “+” telemetry. Not to diss it though. I’d much rather risk their software than any other right now.

Yeah, the hardware realm is the real difficult piece, and even if one can manufacture a device with off-the-shelf parts and manage to find chips with enough support for bands/modes for usability on carriers, getting carrier certification is a PITA.

Good luck with that too, with carriers sunsetting legacy networks, old dedicated dumbphones will no longer work in most cases. KaiOS is sometimes used on dumbphones, but most these days just run a fork of Android designed for dumbphones.

Maybe Meshtastic with an SMS API gateway is the way to go. Or cans and string.

That is an amazing dedicated ride. Kudos to your ingenuity!

Y’all, we need to get multiple break-away plans from everything big tech before it gets even more difficult.

And zero SIM in America so they can force their controlling narrative rather than consumer choice.

Google hasn’t released Pixel 10 binary blobs with Android 16 AOSP, so unless they can be reverse-extracted out of Google Android and backported, Pixel 9 series will be the last to run Graphene.

They are already gone. About the only dumbphones left either run a stripped down version of Android, or pseudo-custom OSes that still have some basic telemetry, and all have GPS/etc for “e911” requirements.

Yes, although generally they have less band support than “smart” phones, and with smaller batteries the hotspot tends to kill the phone pretty fast. It might end up being a case of using a basic smartphone with no software installed and as much stuff disabled as possible as a tether source.

Guess we are going back to the days when only nerds that knew how to flash better roms will be using Android.

Google is closing those gates as well. Pixel 10 drivers aren’t in the new AOSP build. Graphene has been updated to the Android 16 core, but as Google tightens the leash, it will be more difficult. Google’s plan to combine ChromeOS and Android into a MegaBloat will further make it so AOSP is useless.

Every time Google releases a new app for the core OS, they stop supporting the open-source flavor of it, which is why apps like the AOSP messaging app can’t do RCS. Eventually all that will be left of AOSP is a mostly useless husk.

Google’s intended use case for AOSP going forward is for vendors to be able to test pre-release things, primarily in an emulator environment.

Couple that with things like Samsung’s Qualcomm phones can’t be bootloader unlocked, and less and less phones in general can be bootloader unlocked, it is going to be an uphill battle for alt OSes.

Hopefully, this will drive enough dev time towards getting a proper Linux-based mobile device in the works, but even that will be problematic as most modems/chips available for that kind of project are inferior, slow, do not support all the bands/modes of modern carrier networks, and even after all of that, the carrier can still reject to certify the device for the network.

It isn’t hopeless, but everyone is going to have to get creative and driven if we have any intention of retaining free and open mobile devices.

The ability to create them will become increasingly challenging. Carriers will increasingly not approve them.

Hopefully chip manufacturers like Qualcomm that will continue to lose revenue from Apple see the need for more generic, open hardware.

And they still have to use Apple’s rendering engine. Which makes it pointless.

Custom ROMs will no longer exist. Google is no longer sharing drivers for Pixel hardware on AOSP and they only release it public very late now. Samsung phones blow a fuse if you unlock them. Not many android brands left. Reverse-engineering and swiping of drivers will work for a time on older models, but it will become increasingly impossible.