Kaper Yeah, they were and should still be useful devices until greed ruined them. Just watch any smartphone ad, they only have tiktok users in them, that is the target audience who every single model is made for. Because of that there also is no effective way to minimize the downsides, its not like on PC where you can use any PC and just put Linux on it and call it a day, never connect it online or whatnot and still get 95% of all functionality without any of the downsides of using Windows and proprietary/cloud/spyware software.
Even if you use Graphene you're part of the problem, you still gave Google a ton of money to ruin Android further, you still have a crappy modern phone and because of that you will still have to fight people when they constantly bother you to download apps and scan QRs and so on, not saying it doesn't matter or that you shouldn't use it, you should but its still far less effective than just using FOSS software on a PC, that is again if you can even use a custom ROM to begin with, which like 95% of modern phones can't. If you're stuck on stock android or iOS you're completely out of luck at that point, any excuse that you're getting more use out of your phone than governments and corporations get out of you falls apart as you can't disable the always on surveillance, around two months ago they deployed "Android System Safety Core" for Google and whoever else to scan your SMS and photos on every phone with Play Services in the background, some governments pushed for this directly and want every messenger to do it, people only noticed bc it was draining half the battery.
Why does every new phone have NFC? Because they want to kill cash and force digital payments for everything, why does every phone need a front facing camera when im sure they have the stats that aside the tiktok users many others never actually use it, well how are you gonna conveniently scan your face for digital ID, age gates and all the rest of that cancer (Google has patents going over a decade back on analyzing your face while watching ads but thats not quite as evil as digital ID which is the more concerning current push)? These could've never been pushed through on PC. There is not a single phone manufactured within like the past 13 or so years that breaks this pattern, the features/hardware/software does is not decided based on actual user demand anymore but just to enable and promote acceptance of more control and surveillance, its like if every single PC was an exact clone of a Macbook and nothing else was allowed to exist.
Kaper I do pity the younger fellas growing up with them too, every embarrassing thing they do as a teen is online now and they can't escape any bullying as that continues online when they get home too. Must be awful to grow up now and the full consequences of this in the long-term are yet to be seen.
This is why I can consider myself anti-smartphone now (throw in most modern consumer technology while you're at it, smartphones, smart cars, whatever, if it uses the smartphone style constant surveillance top down control model, impossible to turn off its all the same trash to me), its a very serious issue, you can't convince me its acceptable for everyone to be at under constant surveillance at all times from the moment of their birth everything recorded in 4K with perfect metadata kept forever and freely shared to be abused by every company and government. You can not live normally while everyone has a backdoor into your brain, a functional society can not exist like this.
Google and Facebook for at least like 15 years has perfected their ad system by taking all your data, taking everyone elses data and running tons of simulations on them to see which ads are going to be the most effective, even if they don't have something on you, they make up hundreds if not thousands of variations of your profile to figure out how to best manipulate you, well now it just came out the UK is working on a system to be able to predict/guess whos going to commit a crime in the future. Younger people lost before they were even born and we signed on for our own enslavement long ago with "Why did Android 5 replace all the good AOSP apps with Google crap, oh well whatever, pages load 2 nanoseconds faster on this phone!"
