I don't know how I would live my life without access to mainstream mobile apps. I have to use an app to pay for the laundry machine in my apartment building. At school—I'm a teacher nowadays—we use an app to mark student attendance during fire drills.
Freedom of speech should not require living in the woods secluded from society. It is the responsibility of all of us—especially major institutions—to work to preserve that. I can't do it on my own.
Keep an old android phone in a drawer somewhere. Take it out when you do laundry.
> mark student attendance
If your workplace requires you to use an app then your workplace can issue you a phone that you keep at work. I don't use my personal devices for anything work-related and you shouldn't either.
On top of that, someone brings a lawsuit against your company? Well your personal phone that you used for work is now being impounded as evidence. Both inconvenient and invasive.
I can't practically carry around two different phones all day at work, especially given how big they are now. (It's not like I work at a desk, I'm constantly running between different classrooms and other spaces.) The "work" phone would end up being the one I had on my person most of the time.
...but frankly, I am such a geek that it doesn't really matter for me. I have a tiny 11-inch laptop that I usually keep somewhere nearby, or I can VNC into my home desktop computer from my phone.
The thing is that normal people shouldn't have to do this! I say this as someone who does believe that everyone should become more tech-literate and capable with computers. One of the subjects I teach is 5th grade computer science. I don't expect all or even most of my kids to become professional software engineers, but I want them to know enough that they'll be able to make computers work for them instead of the other way around. This is one of the reasons I became a teacher.
I don't expect all of my students to buy and carry around multiple phones in order to protect democracy.
If you expect people to take real-life inconvenience over an abstract perceived freedom you will be disappointed until the day you die. People buy computing devices to do things. If the device has freedom but can't do the things they want it's a really cool paperweight.
Streaming services which lock you into DRM won over the slightly inconvenient but free thing.
Your time will always better be spent getting government to make the convenient thing more free than trying to move a river by gathering people with buckets.
Oh, I don't expect people like them to take real-life inconvenience over freedom. I am just tired of them pretending they care about freedom, when all it takes for them to give up is having to use a "fiddly" operating system.
I've been running Linux on the desktop for 20 years. I'm happily running Linux on a tablet (a Microsoft tablet at that). I run a third-party Android build with root on my primary phone. I am the ideal user for a fiddly operating system.
I put PostmarketOS on a spare phone and spent a good bit of time playing with it. It would be painful to try to daily it at this time, and completely unusable for many of the common smartphone use cases.
Freedom of speech should not require living in the woods secluded from society. It is the responsibility of all of us—especially major institutions—to work to preserve that. I can't do it on my own.