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Comment by drnick1

9 hours ago

This is very true, and this is why we need freedom for our phones. Sadly, the best way of running free software on a modern and feature-complete phone at the moment is to buy a Pixel and flash Graphene.

The question is, do you want freedom or do you want market popularity? Because as you said you can get Pixel and use Graphene or Lineage and do whatever you want. But if you want market popularity then that is something that is not the case right now. The overwhelming majority of people do not download and install apps outside the main store fronts.

And how does that freedom help anyone? If your grandparent just uses their phone to make calls, texts and playing Candy Crush then how is software freedom making their experience better? Or are we just imprinting our priorities and desires onto others?

  • > And how does that freedom help anyone?

    For one, it prevents criminal companies like Google and Facebook from exfiltrating massive amounts of usage data from grandpa. This includes, but is not limited to, places the phone has been, what networks it interacts with, DNS lookups, phone numbers called, etc. That's on top of the tracking done by third-party apps like Whatsapp, that share with the mothership absolutely everything except perhaps the content of messages (they claim it's encrypted, but the client is almost certainly backdoored).