Correct, there is extremely scant evidence for it being a backdoor in the video

Yes, it starts with a C… oh, I remember!

Coincidence! /s

Let’s just see how long he waits before he ditches PHON, now they’ve served their purpose for him

I’ve been daily-driving it for several years. I think it’s very good, generally, and am happy to stick with it for the foreseeable future. Murena asks you to sign up for their cloud services on first boot, but if you say no, they’ll never bother you about it again. I don’t use them, so can’t comment on whether they’re any good.

I have found their App Lounge app (Google Play Store/FDroid alternatives rolled into one) to be spotty. Sometimes I’ve found I had to reboot the phone to get it to download/update apps. They have made updates recently that improve this a lot and I haven’t seen it presenting these kinds of issues over the last couple months, but I won’t say they’ve definitively fixed the issues. You can always fall back to Aurora store for Google Store apps and FDroid for FOSS apps if the App Lounge gives you big headaches.

I use FOSS apps where possible over Google apps. Organic Maps is excellent, often better than GMaps. Banking apps work fine for me. Haven’t tried NFC for payments, I don’t use it.

There’s no instances of Murena and related orgs doing anything shady about data collection or anything afaik, their big conceit is privacy and they’d be sunk if there were any scandals around that. If you have a threat model that requires an extremely high amount of security however, you may prefer to steer clear as /e/ freely admit they make trade-offs in hardening for convenience and ease of use. While they incorporate the latest security patches from LineageOS, GrapheneOS continually allege that /e/'s modifications can make their OS less secure than stock Android. How true that is, I don’t know. Assume your phone can be hacked at any time if it were specifically targeted.

If you’re in the market for a phone that’s just good for everyday use but doesn’t have all the Google tie-ins, I can recommend it.

even if distances are unrealistic

That’s the distinction I was trying to make. People are moaning about not being able to fly from planet A to planet B or walk from POI A to POI B at real scale and speed, prolonged treks across vast expanses of absolutely nothing

Yeah fr. I think there are some ideas about game design that are a lot more fun to talk about than to play. Everyone complaining about how you can’t fly from planet to planet or walk from POI to POI on a planet surface in Starfield, like who in their right mind would want to actually do either of those things? (yes I know they’re about to release an update to add supercruising). People are weird. People will like “big” features in game that are not there to be used, but simply to be there so… they can tell other people that you can fly from planet to planet. But not ever actually try it themselves.

If you were going to play Daggerfall without the fast travel you might as well play Desert Bus instead, at least that game would require you to be physically at the controller between destinations

It’s only gotten worse, far as I’m aware. Right wing grifters and crypto grifters.