For the unwillingly people who don’t/can’t move to a more privacy friendly browser, Cromite (a fork of Bromite, both chromium based browsers) do allow bottom toolbar

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I used to use it, but the apps I was giving root privileges to were resetting every time I locked-unlocked the phone, so I got rid of it. Might give it a try later tho.

Another way to go is to freeze apps, so that launcher “uninstall” said app, but not quite, it just removes all permissions and denies app’s attempts to send and receive data from the Internet.

Easy way to achieve this (and the one I personally use) is Insular, it let’s me create and install apps on a work profile (so it doesn’t have access to main profile data) and it let’s you manage main profile apps too, although you need root for it (or Shizuku nonetheless)

mmm yes, the traffic is made out of traffic

OSMand has a feature where it can process other info as tiles on top of the base openstreetmap data it downloads, so what I did was pulling satellite and live traffic data from google and make them work as tiles and it works perfect (although it doesnt take traffic data into consideration when routing, it only shows it as a picture on top of the map, doesn’t bother me).

Well, first I would like to adress the elephant in the room. Samsung/Google Pixel is not in it’s entirety Android. There are lots of other brands out there, each and every one of them offers different things to different people who ask for different features.

About what you’re asking for, can’t actually help with group chats (the US has a culturally attachment to iMessage, which is locked down to iOS), but for iCloud well, you can have your stuff in google drive, or on a offline drive (most of modern android have otg capabilities), or even selfhosted if that’s your kind of thing.

Seriously, give it a try and see for yourself how mature now is the OS and ofc see if you’re staying ;)

This, in conjunction with OrganicMaps/Osmand is god.

Using IfL rn. Feels just as right as og Infinity (which I solely used during my time on Reddit), no unpolished experience as of UI, but I’m expecting to see some bugs and inconviences as usual (as of writing I’m using v0.0.8) but let’s be real guys, Rome wasn’t build in a day.

Feels absolutely on par with Liftoff (v0.10.10), and Jerboa (v0.0.42), which pretty much sets my happily permanently staying on Lemmy.

Another use you can give it is an offline, turn by turn navigation gps. OsmAnd is an excellent app that provides you with offline navigation. Install something else, like a modded Youtube Music/Spotify app or even AntennaPod if you’re into podcasts and you pretty much have a cheap, budget Android Auto unit. Sure, it will not be the best of all, but it’s pretty much free at that point, and it will get the job done.

I’m actually using an old Android I had laying around and collecting dust (Huawei P20 Lite), battery was pretty much flopping, but as a Linux user tried to give it a second life and made a sort-of Android TV box of it.

I installed a TV launcher and 2 main apps (SmartTubeNext and Cloudstream), then connected it to my main Linux laptop through cable and run a program called scrcpy which let’s me duplicate the image/audio to a separate window in my laptop. Cheap and dirty, but it works flawlessly.

I’m 24 and while I do use Linux, I’m nowhere close to an expert user, so idk what to tell you man, other than fuck spez and fuck Reddit I guess.

I mean, that’s what already happened with Lemmingrad.

I personally don’t care what their opinions are, but funny thing is that they can defederate from pretty much all instances where they feel attacked. As long as this doesn’t change in the future with the fediverse, I’m okay with that

How configurable and customizing can be achieved. Even if you like IOS GUI, you can perfectly install a launcher in android which looks like one and you’re done. Try to do that on an actual iphone device, good luck bucko.

btw, sideload is A MUST for today’s standards, and since we’re talking about open source and all, almost all of my apps are open source, so yeah.

Long live AOSP