Do you really not have prepaid sim cards in the US? that you buy with 5 bucks and it lasts one year, and then you just top it up for another 5? Those carriers are really milking you good over there.

I am using /e/OS/ and their App Lounge does the updates automatically, unlike Aurora Store/Fdroid, so it seems possible

its terrible we are dependant to this point on one company

yeah this is terrible. what is curious to me is why those 90% of vendors do not come up with an alternative. they are the ones who make the playstore what it is, if they pull out, that store is finished. Huawei has their gallery, maybe it will start with fragmented stores and consolidate later. it would be nice to see some kind of open marketplace like fdroid to be developed also for non FOSS apps to be introduced as an alternative. i am sure whatever is better for all parties involved will eventually win.

I get the hate on Google. I use a degoogled phone and got rid of google everywhere else. But I am not a fan of this. Its their store. Imagine a goverment comes to your own grocery store that you built and tells you whose products to put where and how much to charge for them. Instead of trying to build an alternative to compete with Play Store we will give more power to goverments. Thats not good.

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The thing is that today you dont even need access to the coversation when you have metadata. Imagine, a woman calls a number of center for planned parenthood, is on the phone for 20 mins. Then she calls a number of her gyno doc for couple mins. Then her phone is located at that gyno doc a week later for 2 hours or whatever it takes. Do you need to decrypt the conversation? You already know what was discussed.

Nothing from Meta, Google, Microsoft is good. It might be encrypted, but the apps suck everyrhing they can from your device and connect it to your real identity you have on FB, IG, Gmail emails…