My dad was trying to get a grooming appointment for his cat something that should take all of 5 minutes over the phone, checking a calendar and penciling it it, but no gotta do it through a web portal then an app, and make sure you put in your credit card number!
ofc my dad got more and more angry as even I was messing around with this crap going over fields over and over because I put in the wrong number, ugh. Bring back simple shit please.
You aren't permitted to not own an android or apple smartphone with an active number and internet access. You aren't visible as an individual to corporations or even many governments without one. I don't see this getting better any time soon either.
I assume I've only been able to get away with it because I'm disabled. Seems like they've been trying harder and harder to break me.
Pinephone FTW
The Pinephone probably does everything you actually want a smartphone to do (modulo crappy hardware), but not the things you are required to have a smartphone to do. Like depositing a check at your bank, or your work's 2FA that uses Duo Mobile rather than something standard like TOTP.
At this point, your best option is probably GrapheneOS, followed by LineageOS for MicroG plus all the hacks needed to get it to pass SafetyNet. The writing is on the wall for the latter at least, and the best option going forward will probably be a sacrificial phone you keep turned off 90% of the time and only use for those things.
from my experience tinkering with it years ago the OG pinephone has awful performance due to its very old SoC. No matter what distro or GUI i used it was unbearably stuttery and slow even just swiping through the home screens.
the pinephone pro theoretically should be a lot more modern and performant (its also more expensive), but i dont have one yet so i cant say too much on it
I daily drove the PinePhone for around 3 years, and only just a few days ago switched to de-googled android. It was really cool, and I had fun with it, but it wasn't exactly the most pleasant experience if you wanted to actually do anything besides texting or phone calls.
Which phone are you using rn? I was looking at a couple different options since my crappy Samsung is on its way out
I'm using a OnePlus 6T with DivestOS. I initially got it a while ago to run postmarketOS, a Linux distro, because it has some of the best Linux support of any android phone. I ran postmarketOS on it for a while, but the lack of camera support was annoying. I'm probably going to try to dualboot postmarketOS and DivestOS. It's like $100 on eBay, and you are going to need to install your own ROM because they dropped official support. The one I got was locked to T-Mobile, but it's easy to reflash it so it isn't anymore.
I would honestly suggest an older Pixel w/ GrapheneOS, it'll probably have better specs and GrapheneOS seems cool.