“We use our smartphones to keep our secrets, do our banking, interact with our governments, share our deepest thoughts with our friends and family, and a whole lot more. Having this invaluable tool the vast majority of us depend on tied entirely to Google and Apple is not just bad for the market, it’s also a downright threat to the national security of anyone not living in the US.”
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I know I may have an unpopular opinion, and as I don’t read OSNews for reasons, I partially agree with them on this statement.
I believe it is also a threat to those who are primarily in the US as well, specifically you HAVE to use either-or when it comes to a cheap smartphone. Apple is a HUGE walled garden fruit tree orchard in an inescapable fortress, so much so that they make it extremely impossible to run another OS on your phone/tablet, and possibly in the future, your desktops and laptops.
Furthermore, Poople is trying their darndest to make Android increasingly more proprietary, making it impossible to develop banking apps that use their own methods of Tap to Pay outside of Poople Pay. Without root and even with a locked bootloader, custom ROMs cannot process Tap to Pay payments for this very reason.
If possible, I will pre-order a Clicks Communicator and put your guys’s iodéOS on it. The ad-blocking is amazing on my Pixel 4 and I can’t wait to see when (or even if) you guys can successfully port it to the Communicatior with a locked bootloader.
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Also I hope iodé will NOT implement OS govt age verification…
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I had to laugh as apple are running ads here in the UK touting safari as THE privacy browser.
Serious though, I need a smart phone less and less these days, being retired, I will get a dumb phone if things get that bad and open my Linux laptop once a day to catch up with emails etc.
I just tap a credit card not my phone, no inconvenience there and Google don’t know where I’m shopping, or pay cash for small items.
It’s not just google though, today I can’t track an inbound delivery using our national postal service without accepting their ads and trackers. If delivery fails and they waste their time, I’ll collect it.
Don’t play their game if you can avoid it.
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Beside the EU Office alternative coming up those days , the Commission would be better backing initiatives like iode (FR based) to help rising a EU Android alternative.
How many EU MEPs are being spied upon by Israel/USA ? rhetoric question.
China has solved the “national security issue” with Huawei’s HarmonyOS
iode should seek support from the French Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) to be pushed in the French gov. related telecom world, as a start. @anton, any contact over there? 
NB I am not a French citizen
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Somebody had a rant over this on the XDA forums yesterday:
Some possibly relevant numbers popped up in a radio interview yesterday too (BBC, usually reliable):
75% of world compute is resident in USA; 15% in China; 5% in EU; then the rest of us …
Wow! So much inaccuracy, exaggeration and bitterness in that post and the first few replies. The poster really needs to move on and get a better sense of perspective.
Yes the custom ROM scene faces many challenges, but it self-evidently is not dead 
What specifically was inaccurate, exaggerated and bitter please?
I did describe it as a rant, and the thread was closed for the manner of its presentation, not the content.
Yesterday I looked again at some recent stuff from YT on privacy, spyware, &c. It occurred to me that there is a problem: if we manage to develop and maintain a free/libre/open system, where does the hardware come from? Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, can afford to order custom chips (or make their own) to lock in their own systems, and cause problems loading alternate ROMs. How long will the Pixel remain clean? Can Fairphone, Above Brax et al supply the whole European market? The rest of the world?
The whole article IMHO. Clickbait and manufactured outrage. The time I spent reading it was time wasted, and I won’t waste more time ‘discussing’ it or pretending that it contains anything worthy of discussion. You are of course free to disagree with that assessment and to spend your time however you like. But I have muted this thread and won’t participate further. Goodbye, and have fun 
This was a very good review, I like their deeper dive into the banking app and messaging discussions. “Don’t be afraid of microG” is a tagline maybe microG themselves should pick up
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people voluntarily give all their data to zuck et al anyways,
And often, yours and mine as well.
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