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Google photos on ios is literally a hostage situation. Remove key functionalities like copying an image or editing an image unless you give them full unrestricted access to your entire photo library. (The holy grail of surveillance capitalism data). Data extortion masquerading as a service.
If Fairphone and Pine both don’t meet your needs, then you can install a new OS on basically any android, though pixels work best. Even just getting root access to the phone opens up a ton of options for customization. There are communities on Lemmy that are all about this exact issue, though I don’t know them off the top of my head.
The pinephone isn’t a realistic option. Great in theory but in practice it doesn’t really work in the real world where I unfortunately need WhatsApp to talk to a bunch of people.
Fairphone (or giving google my money to then install graphene) have the same problem — I either give up banking apps and contactless payments; or I have to give into the data hoard that is play services to gain access to those things.
I’m not saying apple is the hero here. I’m saying in a world where people actually need a smartphone to do a lot of things, it’s a better starting off point if you want to get some privacy (not storing photos in iCloud, etc) while retaining normal functionality.
I can see infer the telemetry my phone is sending (monitoring dns requests in pihole) and it’s miles better than any android (non degoogled) that comes in the house.
I also am in the real world. I don’t need banking apps on my phone. WhatsApp is a terrible choice, so inwouldn’t use it. You don’t need these things you want these things.
How many people have you converted over to signal? I’ve done a whole 6. And before you say SMS, only if you live in a country where RCS is a thing, since group chats are a thing. I can do a lot, but it’s irrelevant if other people around me don’t.
Some have gone with signal, a group of people decided to do video chats with jisti. My family is all over the world so I understand why SMS is not an option.
But again, I don’t care. Whatsapl is not an option. If people don’t do it, well that is their problem. I never will need to communicate with someone badly enough to use WhatsApp.
Not that hard.