That’s a pretty good description of what GrapheneOS does with the sandboxed Google services.

I have found that the only apps that don’t work well with Samdboxed Google services are ones that work hard to invasively probe their runtime environment.

Thwy usually fall into these three categories:

• Bank apps that do it “for my safety”. Nevermind that a website version exists for attackers to target without the same (dubious, invasive) “protections”.
• Streaming apps that do it “because this paid subscriber might be some kind of dark web pirate and we need to protect our content from being uploaded to the dark web one more time.”
• Apps whose developers are shitty at writing code for memory management. But GrapheneOS has good options to allow these to run, anyway.

That looks like exactly what I’m looking for in my next phone. Thanks.

Do you have access to credit unions?

The GrapheneOs team is quite particular about hardware.

I would gladly purchase a phone that came preloaded with LineageOS.

“Better than we have now.” often wins over waiting for perfection.

CoMaps is quite nice.

There are also still companies selling navigation devices that mount in a car windshield, assuming the car doesn’t already have one built in.

Pro tip - those navigation devices also often have an accident camera that records if it feels an impact - which is a good idea anyway.

GMS apps work fine. The only ones that don’t work are ones that act invasively enough to notice they are sandboxed and disable themselves.

Mostly bank apps. Which is irritating, since they all have mobile friendly websites that work fine without needing to know my location and everything else about my phone.

Google has made it extremely hard to degoogle.

Just remember that there are no nice reasons why they are working this hard to keep your phone captive.

We can argue about how bad it will get, but there’s only worse things coming from this effort.

It also could be they’re both liars and incompetent.

I text my friends. I assume that everyone else just thinks I died.

The move between seeing “your brother in law took the kids to the zoo” to “your brother in law liked this trash article” was such a jarring transition.

It was awful.

“Oh, look. He’s a little bit racist. Now I get to know that. Thanks Facebook.”

Exactly! If I’m not clutching the mute button for dear life, an I really having a relaxing movie night?

Yes. It’s been a few years since I countered a video game that didn’t have separate volume sliders for dialog, for music, and for all others sounds.

“Hospitality/ Nevada”

I see we’re still playing along with that euphemism. Haha.

Yes. I’m not sure what else has gone on, but NAFTA and the US China Relations Act sweaping all of the manufacturing out of the country could account for the whole change between the two maps.

While you can setup a second profile to put the Google services into, I don’t recommend it.

The version of Google Services on GrapheneOS thinks it has root, but it does not.

So there’s no dramatic need to setup a second profile, unless you want it for other reasons.

I personally think the second profile feature is one of the things people think they want/need from GrapheneOS, but really are happier without.

(Sure it’s safer, but GrapheneOS is already so much better than other mobile OSes - and I hate to see someone quit GrapheneOS just because they didn’t like the optional profiles.)

An exception I have seen is for apps mandated for a job. I’m happy to bury that stuff deep.

nobody just breaks out in song when they get dumped, for example.

You’re one of today’s lucky 10,000!

That amused me, too.

I think it plays fine for the intended audience, though.

For the folks looking into Anubis, that line plays well - because hosting costs are driven up by the kinds of spam bot visits that Anubis slows down.

The little squiggles are necessary to ensure election outcomes acceptable to the ultra rich.

I’m joking. (Mostly)

The squiggles are probably county line divisions, and probably simply the smallest existing land divisions with good population data available to make the map from.

I say “mostly joking” because existing county line divisions are already weird in some cases, to ensure election outcomes acceptable to the ultra rich. So there’s an unpleasant grain of truth in my joke.

the very fact that there is a big urban/rural cultural divide is one of the things killing America.

I agree wholeheartedly about the problem. But blind highest count vote on every topic is one of the big dividers between rural and urban folks.

Rural folks will simply never have the numbers to influence outcomes in a pure vote count scenario. They’re aware of this, and it leads to animosity.

Incidentally, I agree that financial decoupling would be ruinous for both, as well.

The real solution is represtational seats that give everyone a voice - no matter how the voting zone is divided.

I suspect that requires doing away with first-past-the-poll. The winner of that race will almost always be a city person, by raw numeric chance. That’s fine, city folks have some good ideas. The problem is when there’s no rural voice at the negotiation, at all.

And I think any sensible person realizes we also have to put a stop to all gerrymandering.

Also, we need to give seats to what remains of all of the first nations, while we’re at it.