@Salvo
@aussie.zoneLet us analyse it critically;
I’m honesty surprised that it only tanked by 56%.
Also, pay attention, u/spez!
There are some local kids fixing the BMX track at the council “maintained” park near us. There are also some other locals who maintain the bench at the top of the park under the trees, with a wonderful view.
The two council-installed benches are out in the open; one has a view of a bunch of houses which face the park and the other has a view of a large tree-trunk.
Analogies are always terrible but here are some analogies for the options you are offering.
Most people live in cities and suburbs. Downtown and Suburbia are the safe places, heavily policed and everyone is expected to conform. There are also other parts of Cities that are not heavily policed by government enforcement; they are policed by Organised crime.
Then there are people who live in the country. Some are Farmers or other Primary Industry workers, some are Moneyed individuals who own hobby farms or ranches, some live in Cultural Communes or Religious Retreats/Compounds.
The Apple Ecosystem is for the city dwellers in comfortable environments. They won’t mind certain restrictions because they know that they benefit from the security of those restrictions. Google Pixels also fall into this community, but only because there is always that weird person at the dinner party who is a little bit different, but they are still safe to be around.
The Aftermarket Android market is that part of town that your parents told you to stay away from. You can go there if you like, you might even have a good time taking drugs or spending time with sex workers, but you run the risk of getting a horrible VD or bad fit cut with drain cleaner. Even if you are street-smart, there may be someone who is smarter than you who can get past your defences.
Out in the country, people aren’t as reliant on technology, they are too busy doing “real work”. They have a phone that makes phone calls (when they have reception), take photos and send text messages. These people have Dumb Phones.
In communes and religious communities that are very insular, there is usually one person (or group of people) in charge that dictates what everyone does. They can usually spend the time to tweak their systems to best suit their community members, while their community members are busy growing food, repairing shelters and doing the menial work it takes to make a small community successful. These are the Linux-on-Phone users.
I would love to be a Linux-on-Phone user, but since I work 8-5 every day, and if I want a management role, I would need to continue working from home after hours, I use an iPhone and UniFi home network. I’m not stupid enough to use an ISP supplied router, I don’t even have time to roll-my-own-Linux or BSD-based network using something like pfSense.
Not everyone has that luxury, even those who are technically capable of removing it.
I don’t want to get into an Apple/Google / Know-Your-Product debate, but how do you know you removed all the Google Crap?
You only way of knowing what is on your phone is if you start from scratch with something like Ubuntu Touch and compile from source; even then, how do you know the manufacturer doesn’t have an embedded “phone home” chip?
At some point you have to decide whether to avoid Crapware completely or go with just the crapware from someone you can trust.
The problem is that it becomes a race to the bottom. People who buy Rings and Echos and Fire Sticks and Google Homes and Android Phones either don’t care about their privacy, don’t know about their privacy or can’t afford privacy.
Then other brands try to compete with these products and it is a race to the bottom.
Privacy is a luxury, but even then, sometimes manufacturers will create a false luxury brands but still exploit customer data. Just look at the list of car manufacturers who were recently called out by Mozilla. Just look at Google Pixels vs iPhones.
He does not understand economics.
He is a “Property Developer”. In his “perfect world” of employees working 16 hour days and not getting paid, that also means that half of the rental homes do not have tenants, half of small businesses in shopping centres don’t have customers and half of all his “Developed Properties” are empty.
He is just a Fuckwit who was given a silver spoon and doesn’t actually comprehend how reality works.
He is a fucking Property Developer. That is the definition of someone who doesn’t actually do any real work.
This headline should be “Microsoft forces people to ditch Edge by using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google.”
In a non-local language.
This also provides a minimal level of security against robocall scams.