Yes. And what exactly does that have to do with my question?

Which flavor of liberal are we talking? We’ve come a really long way since the mere word had any decisive meaning.

There are other tools, but their developers aren’t publicly known. So I indeed trust into the one man show that is magisk, at least as a full time Google employee who gets his codebase reviewed in-house, there’s some more trust than to a random nobody. And he does publish the code and allows for user contributed fixes on github.

That’s only available for Pixel phones, and I don’t buy from Google.

No, I exactly mean rooting, and it is a hard requirement for me when choosing phones.

If you know what you’re doing, there is no security risk involved, since every app requesting for root access needs to be granted individually, and you can opt to do so for a limited time or permanently. Or not grant it at all, obviously.

Tools like AppOps (advanced permission management), Storage Isolation (prevent access to certain folders even if “file access” permission is granted to some app), Ice Box (keep certain apps in a permanent state of hibernation unless you explicitly launch them) are absolute core essentials.

Other apps that enable you to fully remove system apps, system level adblockers, VPN sharing etc. might be optional, and there are no-root workarounds, but they all come with serious limitations.

And people wonder why I keep rooting my Android phones.

Without advanced permission denial and file access restrictions, phones will spy on anything and anyone.

Hmm… Clockwork and fluorescent arms?

Drill a hole and get an analogue clockwork, done.

You could use LibreWolf on Linux, it’s a Firefox fork that removes all DRM, telemetry and other privacy-disrespecting crap from the og Firefox. All native addons/plugins are fully supported.

It’s also quite awkward requiring others to spell the country with letters that don’t exist in most alphabets, and therefore not on commonly used keyboards.

Sure you can make use of ü and others with some international layouts, but for laypeople it’s rather cumbersome.

Imagine China would suddenly require everyone spelling it as 中国， nobody would even be able pronounce it, let alone write.

Fennec, you can log in with your Mozilla sync account and access them from any other sync-enabled browser in their ecosystem.

Yeah old Firefox was the best. With a bookmark menu on the left where I could scroll forever and see it at a glance.

Those top bars are awful shit, and I cannot fathom how anybody uses them.

I can’t switch to Linux due to software requirements for work. On my personal computer I’m using Xubuntu for well over a decade, I didn’t like the unity window manager of Ubuntu. I heard they changed to something else by now, but I can’t be bothered to switch.

Chameleon add-on for Firefox, randomly rotates your browser, OS, screen size, timezone, device type, language, and other customizable parameters every x minutes.

I’ve set it to do so every 5 minutes, and to omit desktop & tablet as device types (else some websites display the respective page) and timezones (messed up 2FA).

I also disabled blackberry and windows phone from the manufacturer ID, that would have the opposite effect from obscuring me.

For the rest of it, it’s working great.

Swype enabled keyboards are awesome though. I loved my BB, but the screen real estate that a digital keyboard clears up is quite significant.

Chat is only available in the official client, the implementation is closed source. So yeah most likely that.

So you go back to your negative review, edit it, and insert a random space somewhere. Did just that.

Very good point, I didn’t really consider that. And now I feel bad for not replying more to your elaborate response, but there’s simply nothing else I could add.

Oh we did use third party tools, and there were 5-8 moderators depending on which sub. I just loved the mod queue on reddit sync to just approve/delete reports on the go. Since I’m in Asia I often got them before my US counterparts, so could clean up the queue early on.

As long as they are still publishing the apk to f-droid, as a user I hardly care where it’s hosted.