Fuck AI

I just switched to GrapheneOS myself -- and yeah I'm feeling the inconvenience. Having to do workarounds curretly to get RCS working (T-Mobile, AT&T), not having an option for tap-to-pay bc "Your operating system is insecure" 🙄) and Google/Apple/SamsungPay are your only options. Haven't tried adding any tickets or transit passes to see if they work with NFC yet.

In general I feel better finally having switched off stock android because in my friend group I'm the only digital privacy advocate and have been talking about doing it forever. However, as I continue to transfer to the new device, I notice more and more the number of apps that I use that are only available through the play store. Health and banking apps that are the only convenient way to use a service on mobile. Apps that are necessary if you travel a lot.

Basically it's incredibly hard to de-google if you're not in the apple ecosystem. I have one co-worker who has started "digital homesteading" (self-hosting) a lot of stuff for their family, and has discovered: it's an incredible amount of stuff we offload into the cloud. E-mail, photos, personal documents, calendar, health, finances, streaming media instead of owning it. Transitioning all of that remote convenience to an on-prem setup at home (or a cloud VPS I guess) is very possible with self-hosted alternatives. But, it requires a high level of technical knawledge and expertise AND now you're the IT person for all of that infrastructure.