Oooooor have a secondary cheap absolute trash phone that is ONLY for those shitty government auth tools. Not ideal but gives you some control again

What trash-ass country requires you to maintain a proprietary operating system and device to access government services?

I still haven't found a way to make my parents use Signal, so either I stop communicating with them (which is tempting sometimes) or have this compromise

I love phones, just hate the companies running it.

Same with most tech, the tech isn't evil, its just how its being used, and who's steering its future.

The current state of phones is WILD. Two bad options yet most everyone (including me) still use them. I actually like to use it as evidence that most people would be fine if plopped in front of Ubuntu or Debian+Gnome/KDE

That's why my current phone is a Pixel running GrapheneOS. I still hate Android, but at least I don't have to run Play services on my main profile. I do run it on a separate profile though for a couple services that need it.

I really just want Linux with decent support for phone features (MMS/calls/data on any carrier, with full wake from sleep reliability), decent battery life, and decent audio quality. Unfortunately, PinePhone doesn't seem to handle those things properly (maybe it does MMS now?), so I stick w/ my GrapheneOS phone, which at least cuts out most of the crap from Android.

Honestly I wish we just had dumb phones and went back to Palm Pilots. But there's so much stuff that makes a phone mandatory nowadays.

put your credit card in the back of the case hah

best bet is get a phone with default android and delete default apps with ADB

Pay with a credit card, you can tap those, and then you're not inviting one of the tech giants to monitor your purchases for no reason.

I think NFC payments work in Graphene