I jumped through hoops with the Samsung. ADB-ed the hexk out of it and broke functionality in so many ways.

If I can save you the effort - DON'T even bother trying. There is just too much interconnectedness to undo without breakage.

I moved to a hunch of Pixels running Graphene and have lived happily ever after.

With the added Israeli spyware coming to Samsung, I cannot think of any reason to put any effort into it.

Additional info: Skip the Pixel 6 and 7. Its better to spend a little more in the Pixel 8. I got mine used and its brilliant. I also liked how the Pixels 4 and 5 were as well. Very good devices.

Get your Pixel secondhand. That way you are not contributing to their profit margins and have more flexibility on the Pixel version you want without having to break the bank.

And I also agree with the comment that Pixels are not the most robust phones. They are good, but not the most robust thing you could own. Power but to issue across Pixel devices is a real thing. I had two of the power buttons on separate phones fall out. Good thing is that you can get them online cheaply and manually replace them yourself.

BUT Pixels are gorgeous phones and a real delight to use as well. Lovely screens, decent battery, good camera and is buttery smooth with Graphene.

I am on these Pixels because if Graphene.

The hardware shortcomings I can live with and work around. I mostly have great experiences with Pixels with the occasional hardware issue to slove.

I use the on-screen Accessibility Menu shortcut to adjust audio volume, screen brightness and un/locking the phone.

This is old news, from 2022!!

You seddit right!!

They are the caricature of organised religions.

Google is paying copius sums of money to in AdBlock Plus (asuming this is the extension you are speaking about), makes sense to avoid it completely and run uBlock Origin.

https://www.insider.com/why-google-has-to-build-its-own-adblocker-2017-4

Agreed. We dont hear enough for the US to confess to its war crimes, many of which are still going on today.

Signal desktop is designed to be a stand alone app that uses the phone phone to first verify the connection via QR but after that relays messages, calls, erc direct from and to the server, inrependently of the phone app.

Opening para from a NYT article on the Waldorf School in Silicon Valley:

"The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home."

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html

Unless you want to run communities there I wont bother with it. I feel everything from setting up accounts (anonymously) to getting people to join, works better in SimpleX and Session. I'd even be happy using SimpleX as my everyday messenger. Matrix is a little clunky and the fact that all conversations get duplicated on the primary Matrix servers is cause for concern.

With Signal and SimpleX, servers are used only for relaying messages beteeen users - messages which are encrypted on the device.

In the end you are going to be sacrificing something, and the last thing you'd want to sacrifice is privacy and security.

If I was pushed to list my go to, it'll be Signal for chats with people I know: because its open source, battle-tested against adversities, and can be set up by anyone who understands how ro use Whastsapp / Telegram.

For communitties (and even as a daily text solution beteeen collaborators or anyone you dont want to exchange numbers with), I'd use SimpleX as it has a lot of in-built anonymity and decent privacy (so far - its a fairly new project).

Theres just too much fuzziness round Matrix for anyone to trust it.

Telegram is neither private nor secure. Its not encrypted bu default. Normal texts as well as group chat is stored unencrypted on its servers.

For everyday use with friends, family and work (assuming these folks already have your number), Signal may be the best thing out there as its open source both on server and app levels. Signal is also end to end encrypted (E2EE) with decryption keys stored on device.

For anonymous communications Session and SimpleX may be better as they are both E2EE and doesnt requie a phone number as an identifier.

Just chuck out Whatsapp, Telegram and all the other closed sourced garbage apps.

Out of curiosity, why Matrix and not these other options:

• Jabber/XMPP - has a creat client called Conversations (decentralised)
• SimpleX - by far the most anonymous and potentially decent privacy (centralised server)
• Session - a Signal fork without requiring phone number

• all of the above are listed on F-Droid