If the service is worth it and subscribing isn’t yet another opportunity to put me under surveillance - which is the main reason why, although I consume a lot of YouTube videos and I would genuinely pay Google for the service, I won’t - yes.

Hint: Facebook and Reddit aren’t worth it. If they want to exit the ad-supported business model and disappear behind a paywall, I won’t miss anything in my life.

F-Droid is also considering ads that contain no tracking, which removes that moral dillema, IMO:

You assume everybody is okay with ads.

I’m not. My brainspace has been highjacked since I was a little kid by stupid advertisers. To this day, I remember ads for products that have disappeared decades ago and that I never gave a shit about at any point in my life.

Why are advertisers allowed to force their shit into my head?

I hate ads. I’m utterly intolerant of advertising. I hate the tracking and the malware that come with ads, but I hate ads even more. There are no moral ads. The advertisement industry is a despicable leech that needs to die.

If F-Droid springs this shit on me, I swear to god I’m gonna start having murderous thoughts…

Paid apps: no problem. If it’s good, I’ll pay.

Subscription: maybe, if it’s worth it.

Ads: F-Droid can fuck right off. If they do that, they’d be a miserable bunch of sellouts.

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I’d rather have a camera with complete lines, not just the top.

There’s plenty of good reasons to transfer update ownership to the Play Store, too

Aside from self-hate or suicidal tendencies, I fail to see which.

What’s Play Store?

Oh yeah, that stuff I access with Aurora because it can’t run on my deGoogled cellphone…

I doubt it. It would be really obvious because of the extra data traffic. People who go bananas if they found out Google chews through their monthly plan to exfiltrate audio.

Although Google (and Apple, and all the others) are working hard to embed AI onto your cellphone, not for your own convenience but to implement client-side surveillance - i.e. digest what you see and do and distill the surveillance data on your device before it even hits the internet - so that the surveillance doesn’t attract undue attention.

But we’re not there quite yet, and I don’t believe even Google could get away with real, proper audio surveillance today.

That’s probably the reason why they want to create this bogus “note taking” service: to have a legitimate excuse to listen in on your audio.

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Newsflash: Big Data is above the law. Didn’t you know?

They’ll spin it as a “service” to the user and carve out an exemption that way. And 10 or 15 years down the line, you’ll hear your own words spat back at you by a fucking chatbot, but it’ll be too late by then.

Just what I always wanted: letting Google listen in on my phone calls.

Price is not the only factor for me: deGoogled is priority number one, and repairability is not far behind.

With that in mind, I’d pay a lot of money for a rather average phone because that’s exactly what I got: yesterday’s phone at today’s price. But I got what I wanted and I’m happy with it. So the price was right.

Totally agree! I can’t wait to put that granite-cased phone with wood-backed PCBs in my pocket.

It’s time to stop thinking phones are anything but commodity hardware with variable degrees of shittiness. There are no such things as premium phones, just premium prices.

Wow… If even Best Buy figured out those repair programs are designed to appease the regulators who ask for the right to repair but never actually be used, it should tell you how unappealing they are.

We have zero insight into the longevity of flash memory because it doesn’t matter: whatever it is, it’s a lot longer than the phone’s planned obscolescence.

That’s why you’ve never heard anybody complain about their saved data getting corrupted: their device has long since hit the landfill before that happens.

FairPhone 4 running CalyxOS. It’s not cheap but the repairability factor is important for me, it runs a deGoogled OS which is even more important, and I stocked up on spare parts to make it last as long as possible.

As long as it serves me, it’s the most exciting phone I can think of and I already own it :)

I’m as excited by cellphones as I’m excited by underwear at the supermarket: I need it, it needs to fit me, but I’d rather do something more interesting than shopping for new underwear. And just like underwear, no amount of gimmicks makes them more exciting: at the end of the day, it’s just a locked down computer loaded with spyware that you need to live a normal life.

You don’t have to:

Create a work profile managed by Shelter. then install the sketchy Microsoft app - along with all the other sketchy apps you don’t trust - in the work profile where they won’t have access to any of your important data or contacts, won’t have any permission you don’t want to give them, and where you can freeze them and neuter them completely when they’re not in use.

Here’s a good howto for Shelter and work profiles. Work profiles are great: they’re just as good as separate accounts to keep unstrustworthy apps from accessing data you don’t want them to get at and putting you under surveillance, but they’re a lot more flexible than separate accounts.

Work profiles are a standard Android feature that everybody who cares about privacy should use.