Exactly, modern banking is a permissionned network and its security is mainly based on access restriction.

Great ! Consider using an e-mail aliases service such as addy.io or SimpleLogin to keep your new inbox clear from spam and never give that real address unless you feel like it’s worth it.

I’m pretty sure Thunderbird mobile has some changes under the hood but maybe not

Tuta is a great german alternative with e-mail and calendar. For Drive there is many options but I don’t feel recommanding one now For VPN there is Mullvad, IVPN and NymVPN(beta) For Password Manager there is BitWarden or any popular KeePass clients but sync is mainly on you. For Documents there is CryptPad

I think switching from iOS to GrapheneOS doesn’t massively improve your privacy. However it improve your freedom and the control you have on your device. Privacy takes education if you install GrapheneOS and link it to your Google Account and use invasive apps that are not needed to be that so (like a calculator app that access your Pictures and geolocation) will not improve drastically over iOS but will a bit over Stock Android. But unlike iOS you can use you’re phone without accounts and that’s huge.

Where did you see that banking app only works on the main profile ? I personnaly use a seperated user profile for all banking related apps and it just works with the Play Services installed and not signed in getting apps through Aurora Store. Seperated user profile is not conveniante to use daily. If you want quick access to your banking apps you could use a Work Profile, setting it up with the FOSS app Shelter. You can installed the Play Services and the Play Store if needed to that profile and limits some of their permission (some are required for it work properly)

I do backup manually of what I feel is important so I won’t recommend you anything. However if I remember correctly WhatsApp let you do backup only on Google Drive if you’re on Android and iCloud if you’re on an iPhone.

I wouldn’t buy a 7A because of security updates ending in 2028 which is in 3 years already and the battery is worse than the newer models. While the 8 series is ending support in 2030 and 2031 for the 8A. Keep in mind that iPhone are premium devices while Pixel A are midrange, it’s a bit like the SE from Apple. Phone are getting expensive and if I were you I would wait to get lower price on the 8A or 8Pro.

Yeah Pixel Camera is amazing for photography, while lacking behind competition in Portrait Mode (used to be the best) and videos (iPhone are much better). But this is mainly thanks to the Google proprietary camera app. Phone photography is good only thanks to the algorithmes processing the images the hardware isn’t that great. You can still use the stock Secure Camera from Graphene and get good results in great lighting condition however installing Google Camera through AuroraStore or the PlayStore directly will give you better results. But it come with drawbacks as it only support Google Photos to open your previous shots from the camera app. It also asks for Play Services but someone told in the comment that is not the case so maybe it has changed since I did. There is an open source app that fakes the Play Services for Google Camera to work without asking questions. It’s called GCam Services Provider (Photos), you can also bypass the Google Photos limitation by using GCam Photos Preview but this one is a bit clunky to be honest, I hope it will get updated but doesn’t seems to. You can also install modded GCam to bypass all of this but this come with it’s own risk and is mainly focus on non-Pixel devices. But if you really want to try here is a trusted ressources.

This is a valid question and I hope we will be able to live our digital lives without being so dependant from Google or Apple. A great start is by switching to FOSS apps when possible, it’s not a magic solution and come with limitations but as of today it’s my goal even if I still use proprietary app for my bank for exemple.

Since you come from iOS I want to point out that there is Goodwy that’s maintaining amazing foss apps forked from SimpleMobileTools (now Fossify Tools) and applied an Apple inspired UI, you might feel more at home with his apps. Mention to Right Gallery, Right Contact, Right Dialer, Right Messages and Right Files. The apps are asking for internet permission but it’s for paying the premium fee to unlock all feature (you are not forced to pay to unlock them). I made a donation using Bitcoin to the dev because he’s doing great work and never allow the app to have internet permission thanks to GrapheneOS feature.

There is a fairly great ammount on ressources on AlternativeTo regarding Android apps I myself made a couple of list you might want to take a quick look :

• A clean Android setup with the best apps (mostly open source)
• Beautiful Open Source Apps for Android (nice & modern UI/UX) Some apps are not updated anymore!
• The ultimate F-Droid setup (300+ Apps) Need to be updated!
• My privacy & user friendly setup [Dec. 2022] Need to be updated!

Not from me

• GrapheneOS AppVerse
• FOSS Android Apps
• Android - Open-Source, Privacy, and convenience

Use a third party e-mail client

It is not

Then it’s not much better :D

Nostr guys (even though that you’ll also find right-wing werdos) are building great things. Open source client side algorithmes that you can choose, value4value and more. As of today it’s still clunky and people are not used to not having account and managing cryptographic keys so too early, the fediverse is a nice middleground in my opinion.

Bluesky is not much better than X despite it claiming to

I have not tested all of them myself and not sure it exactly correspond to your needs but here are a few options :

• Koel
• Navidrome
• Airsonic
• Polaris

GrapheneOS is a harden Android that gives you more control over your phone and its data. It’s not the only FOSS variant based on AOSP and works only on Google’s Pixel hardware as of today for security reasons. I’ve been running it for years now and I honestly like it very much.

The core of Android is open source and named AOSP for short, it is built on top of the Linux kernel which is also free and open source. However Google have made AOSP not usable by abandonning most of the free app in favor of their own proprietary apps such as Google Messenger, Goole Photos etc… That’s why community project like LineageOS builds their own apps to make them usable instead of the old deprecated ones. Brands like Samsung, OnePlus, etc… are not building from AOSP but rather paying a licence fee to Google so they can use the Google Services that are almost necessary to modern Android.

OP is running GrapheneOS which is a Free and Open Source Operating System based on AOSP.

Here is a comment I share on another post talking about this story, it was an answer to someone that implied that one of the key feature of blockchains was lack of oversight :

Blockchain is all about verification and transparency and that is the reason why people knew about the hack that quickly. Authorities, private companies and individuals are following the funds block after block. The hack concern an exchange, a central entity with lots of ether tokens, not a blockchain.

From my understanding and this is still under investigation, the main issue is that the compromised exchange didn’t suffer from any breach. Their multi-sig setup signed a transaction liked if the company was agreeing. Could have been all the required key stolen ? Maybe. All the employee having keys getting corrupted ? Unlikely. From what I’ve read about the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), in multi-sig (Safe or Gnosis safe as exemples) setups, users have no way to verify what they are signing on their harware wallets (signing devices).The whole Ethereum ecosystem have been used to blindly signed for years and today they might realize that’s a bad design choice. Lazarus could have hacked the centralized coordinator entity such as app.safe.global, but as I said this is still under investigation and I’m not a professionnal just a free software enthousiast.

This is an Ethereum, actually more of a EVM Turing Complete, design issue if I understood it correctly. You don’t have this problem that much the on Bitcoin multi-sig UTXOs ecosystem were it’s simpler and many great hardware wallet let you verify on their screen what you are signing (hww without a trusted screen are not designed to be signing devices) but none, 0% let you verify what you sign with an Ethereum smarcontract. It is possible you can do that on Ledger with 1Inch from what I’ve understand, but no one cared until today and so no one wanted to fund the creation of ledger app for this.

A feature of blockchains, actually it’s not blockchain in itself but rather the competitive PoW consensus mechanism (Ethereum forked to PoS) enforced by game theory is immuability and finality of the transactions. With Bitcoin you cannot rollback. Ethereum did a rollback in the early days creating a fork named Ethereum Classic which is the ledger that did not rollback. I don’t think Ethereum will rollback again, especially for such a small amount of ether and I think if they wanted and had the opportunity, it would have been already done. People screaming they will are delusional but maybe I’m wrong :)

Finality might seem a scary feature at first, in reality it enable you to create reversible transactions through escrow multi-sig setup. Actually you don’t even need to, the mempool is not immuable on Bitcoin you can do a RBF. You don’t create trust by simply having a shiny blockchain, people thinking it removes trust don’t understand money nor distributed ledger. Whatever, with this hard finality system you can create softness emulating what the banking system usually offers. So you get the soft system built on top of a hard system, unlike internationnal banking on which you can’t put a hard system on top of.

That’s post-state money, pre-state money existed far way before states even existed

The monopole of violence :D

I pay almost weekly using either Bitcoin’s Lightning Network or Monero. I mainly buy food, snacks, hardware and online services. I never used an online casino such as Binance or Kraken, therefore I don’t use them as crypto-bank nor do I do trading (never did), I often buy on centralized exchange but it goes straight to my wallet. As of today I never sold to cashout.

Take Nigeria, India, Peru or Vietnam as exemple, many people there don’t have bank accounts, however they have a smartphone connected to the internet. Those country have a high percent of people using crypto. Why ? Because thanks to that technology they are able to be there own bank simply by downloading an app. Some are not their own bank but have a banking experience. Most of them got the opportunity to own american dollar that way thanks to USDT and USDC stablecoin. It’s closer to what they know the USD in cash. However there is many people realizing that Bitcoin volatility isn’t bad because their local currency have worse volatility going down over the past 15 years where Bitcoin is going the opposite direction.

We started to see offchain system that don’t need an onchain transactions to transacts, it does not have the same level of security as the public ledger but what does that mean is that in the future we will probably not transact daily on the blockchain but on second layer that communicate to the base layer. Blockchain is inneficient by design but it allows us to have a decentralized immuable and neutral ledger, we will scale by other mean.

Money has no price, money as an ancient pre-historic technology is a way to build trust between people that don’t interact often together and thus need a language to express the labour of their work or the value of their properties. Bitcoin is not the money of the internet but rather the internet of money as stated by Andreas Antonopoulos.

If you want to learn more about money this article has nothing to do with crypto and explain fairly well how we don’t know how money came to existance (as it’s older than writing). It’s not the answer of what is money but a great explanation of how it was yeaaaaaars ago. https://medium.com/teatime-history/how-ancient-long-distance-trade-may-hold-the-secret-to-the-origin-of-money-22094482a475

If you don’t have Medium account consider using Freedium ;)

Thank you, I know FlorisBoard, tried it a few times but HeliBoard and FUTO Keyboard are much more mature in my opinion. It is listed in other lists of mine however I could consider mentioning it as honorable mention.

I’ll check Simple Time Tracker as I want to have a more complete Productivity category with other apps I have to test.

Anyway thanks for your feedback !

I personnaly don’t use OpenVibe as I tend to avoid proprietary software on personnal device but I like the idea of having multiple protocoles or services in one feed.

I think nostr has some amazing feature and it’s something really interesting to see evolving but the fediverse has a much bigger and diverse user-base which is important to me. Ditto is making the two bridgeable so I think it’s a bright future for distributed social networks (not social media :D)