Comment by backscratches
4 days ago
Most anti-google move: buy a second hand pixel, they receive no revenue on the device which is (assumed) already highly subsidized by google so that they can profit off users' data, then you use their subsidized hardware without running their spyware OS. Google only loses money in this scenario, it is a great protest.
Have you seen those prices? I don't think the devices need subsidising at all. How else could competitors, who aren't selling off your data, offer it for cheaper?
competitors also sell off your data, via uninstallable google spyware in most cases!
That depends on (1) which one you pick and (2) whether you keep the stock OS
Given that there exist vendors like Fairphone/Murena that sell lower-performant hardware at much lower price points, it seems to me that the expensive but decent hardware (like Google's flagship) might be priced appropriately as well
Other competitors (that do track you, like Samsung) have similar price points for their high-end hardware and are again much cheaper for slower hardware. If selling data is so essential, they wouldn't allow removing the tracking. (Samsung may be a bad example because they removed it last summer, but root popularity has been diminishing since early android days anyway so I can't imagine it's a big factor for them)