You can do NFC payments on degoogled Roms using an app called Curve.

/e/OS on Fairphone allows locking the bootloader.

I even installed it two years after purchase on my own phone, and relocked the bootloader, of course with the same caveat.

NFC payments are possible with Curve.

I use Arch, BTW.

So, I use a FP4 with /e/OS and I like it.

First things first: some things will break. Not many, and not often, but it happens. Mostly Google stuff, but on Android a lot of stuff is Google stuff.

Recently GMaps wasn’t working for a little longer than a week. I was still able to use HERE WeGo (my current favorite) and others even with Android Auto, so it was no problem for me, but still.

Banking apps and such almost always work, but there is a non-zero chance that one of those will break, even for a short while. I have three banking apps and they work flawlessly, plus itsme (Belgian gov app) and a German health insurance (this one refuses to login with fingerprint, but pass works).

Android Auto works, but I don’t think I ever managed to get Chromecast to do anything.

You do get something in exchange. The privacy improvements are there, and the OS-level adblocking as well.

But you have to accept that occasionally there will be a nonzero level of discomfort.

You could keep the old phone around for the apps that don’t behave, or you could use the old phone to test /e/OS before ordering.

The Google Maps issue is fixed. I always kept a judicious distance from Google Home and Pixel Watch, so I can’t comment on that.

Assuming the technical implementation is sound (I’m techy but that’s still way over my head), there is something missing from the explanations I’ve been seeing so far.

The state is of course the one who should be proving my identity, and the website has (usually) no business knowing who I am or holding a copy of my documents. The state however has no business knowing what I’m browsing, and a pinky promise is not enough.

I can’t understand whether this is something that the proposed system offers, or whether it’s a property of zero-proof systems in general.

Obviously something like this must necessarily be Free and Open Source if any trust at all must be put into it.

Well, kinda. You can have access tiers. For instance no access for age<13, limited access for 13<age<18, full access for age>18.

Needless to say, I think this is (in most circumstances) the wrong approach.

We are talking about products that are often deliberately harmful and hostile to all users, and then we expect to have a child-safe version of these. Shouldn’t we try to get an adult safe version too? It would be way easier to protect children then.

As a physicist, my favorite referee comment ever was [That my claim was wrong] “should be obvious to anyone who has ever sat through an elementary electromagnetism course.” He was wrong BTW, and the paper was finally published in a different journal.

I am from a decidedly different field, so I don’t know if I can vouch for you in any meaningful way.

This! If you have good hardware that works, it’s good to keep it if possible.

My smartwatch/activity tracker is indeed a Garmin Instinct 2s with Gadgetbridge. It really does most of what the proprietary app does, and gives you near absolute control over your data.

Can’t really anyone read? Poster above said Portugal or Poland cost 1/10th of the budget above.

And plainly no. In Poland you might get away with spending half.

Yes, that’s reasonable. That’s what e.g. mailbox.org does. And they publish periodic reports on how many requests they receive, how many they successfully reject, and how many they have to follow.

15000€/year gross? In Portugal that’s slightly above minimum wage. Might be okay in the middle of the countryside. There should be plenty of skilled programmers racing to live there, right?

The cost of living in cities is quite inflated by digital nomads and wealthy retirees and is starting to be unaffordable for Portuguese.

Edit: 15000 USD is 12800 EUR, that’s a few cents an hour above minimum wage. And Poland costs already more than that BTW.

Having read my share of early Soviet era sci-fi, I think you’re wrong.

It is also largely questionable.

/e/OS has MicroG, and that runs as a system service. You can disable most of it, and if you’re not using any App that needs Google services, I doubt it really does much.

It is possible to use Graphene without using any Google at all. However… Doing so will break almost every app out there. Anything that needs push notifications, AndroidAuto, a thousands more things. So you end up using Graphene with Sandboxed Google services.

And we get into the debate. Is it better to take the official Google Play Services, which we all consider malicious, and run it in a sandbox, or take an open source private, and trusted implementation (MicroG) and run it as a system service?

It is at the very least largely debatable.