>Meanwhile I'm about to purchase a Chinese replacement for my Samsung Note phone. The Note has lovely hardware, but Samsung recently caught the "our stuff only works if we can access your contacts, communications, images and GPS data" disease. Even the health app to count my daily steps now needs to see what I write to my wife or it can't work. Never mind that it was perfectly capable of counting steps for over a year before they discovered it needs all this stuff to work; you can fool all the people all the time so of course it needs access to all this stuff.

Big brother is now in your pocket...

>As the Chinese alternative comes with its own set of concerns, in time I expect a defiant alternative ecosystem will rise up as Linux once did for Windows. But not yet widely available- and meanwhile Apple's monopoly OS on its devices is still celebrated by most of its users.

I still use only my ten year old Nokia e5 for just calls, SMS, occasional photography and sound recording (notes to self, sometimes live music) and once in a blue moon I use the calculator or calendar. It's on Symbian. I bought it back then amidst the chaos of "M$ is taking over Nokia" and the concerns that they will become windows phones, so I grabbed one while I could.

Now I really am looking for some decent replacement for it, because its battery life is getting shorter (the factory battery lasted 7 years, now the next one I found needs recharging every third day) and because the little screen is scratched and sometimes unreadable and of course there's no replacement. But nobody here even thinks of selling Pine 4, they all love to have pocketed the Big Brother and consider any mention of privacy concerns as sheer conspirology, proof be damned. No phones natively running Lineage or any other flavor are offered, so my next choice was to offer the price of a spanking new Samsung or equivalent to anyone who brings me last year's one (or up to three years old) with Android rooted out and replaced with Linux. Amazingly, no takers.