Yarr, this be objectionable, but inconsequential.
There has been very limited improvements from a general user perspective in either phones, PCs etc over the last decade. It’s been incremental cosmetic only for many. An iPhone 4 or old Nexus phone does most of what current phones do. Graphics has improved for gaming, but games are often less fun and more grinding and cosmetics. It’s infuriating.
See I find this trend kind of interesting. Performance in desktop PC's plateaued long ago, and soon after laptops, then phones were a little way behind but now they're at the same point. There really isn't that much benefit to getting a new phone, so long as your current phone still works (and the main thing there is battery life).
Phones definitely need to be more open. However, I believe that state actors have got their fingers far too deep in the pie - no open source hardware has ever managed to find its way to market, because doing so would deny low level access to the device, perhaps via the black box "security chips" that encryption is often offloaded to. But these are the most personal of devices - they're the ones we carry with us everywhere we go. They're the ones we should have the greatest level of privacy with, and instead they have the lowest fundamental security for the user. Even in hackable phones, you often have to "ask permission" from the manufacturer to unlock the bootloader.
Granted, I don't think low level exploitation is something that most people need to worry about. It seems like whatever backdoors may be in there are kept very well guarded and seldom exploited - rather, they'll exploit the apps you use first. But apps have so many security holes it's almost comical.
The NSO's Pegasus toolkit infiltrated Android phones by sending a WhatsApp call. Through this, they were able to gain full access to the phone in a zero-click exploit. I'm sure there was a bit more nuance to it, but ultimately they expoited privilege WhatsApp had that it really, really shouldn't have had. WhatsApp patched the exploit, not Android (although I suspect maybe it had something to do with hidden Facebook system apps that manufacturers bundle, outside the Google Play Store).
TL;DR Don't run any apps unless you have to, or you particularly feel like you can trust them. FOSS is a good start, in particular popular FOSS apps where you can be reasonably sure that someone else is checking the code for their own benefit.
Here's a screenshot:
Just shut the fucking business down already. It's clear that they cannot meet their debt (accrued through a leveraged buyout, the same practice that killed Toys R Us), and in the meantime they're accumulating lawsuits knowing full well that they will never have to pay out because they'll fall under long before the lawsuits are heard, let alone resolved. Meanwhile, anything they do get away with in the meantime becomes something of an established precedent for future bad actors.
It's like saying "no pun intended" on an online post that you very clearly reviewed, at least enough to add in the "no pun intended" part.
The real trick is finding that one thing that does the job you want it to.
For years I'd been looking for an app to tune my guitar with. All the ones I could find would just play a fixed set of 6 notes, then you have to tune it by ear. Half the screen was taken up by ads.
Then some random thread pointed me towards an app called Tuner on FDroid. This uses your phone's microphone to listen to any note you play, then it shows the note on a musical stave, and the bottom half of the screen is actually a frequency chart which shows the bounds of the note and where the microphone hears it. You can actually see the bending of the note from when you pluck the string and raise the pitch slightly to where it rings on its own, and decide where to tune to fit as you like. You can also tune to any sort of alternate tuning that your heart desires. An in-line tuner is probably still better (in particular against background noise) but this was the kind of thing that should have been widely available from the start in phones.
But such apps are not advertised, you have to stumble across them, and there's no easy way to sift through all the shit to find them.
The real problem is in how everything is monetised. Most of these apps and services are very cheaply and easily made, and as such there are people who want to make them, purely on a whim. But the good ones get drowned out by the money-grabbing ventures that don't actually fulfill objectives. Somewhere around the 00's the ethos of software development changed from being focused on the user experience to being focused on how the publisher could extract revenue from users, and that is a monumentous shame.
We can have devices in our pockets that give directions without Apple, Facebook or Google. OSMAnd maps does that very well, hell it has far more details than even Google Maps. I can spot where individual park benches are and all sorts of meaningless yet somehow joyfully pointless landmarks.
I've run an Android phone without Google Play Services for several years now, and haven't missed out on anything much more than Google Pay (which I really question the need most people claim towards).
FYI, contactless card purchases are treated as "cardholder not present", which is akin to an old telephone catalogue purchase. As far as the bank is concerned, when you transact this way the seller accepts default responsibility for a faulty purchase. If you use Google/Apple Pay, or Chip & PIN, then the buyer takes responsibility via their PIN or their phone password. So using these services actually puts you on the back foot when it comes to exercising your consumer rights.
Antidisestablishmentarianism. That word contains neith Apple, Facebook nor Google.
Plus I'm pretty sure most other words don't contain those brand names, either.
Blue roll is king.
My guess is they're referring to the fact that Nolan's statement here is ultimately nothing more than marketing meant to increase sales. I'm sure Nolan will still get paid for it being on streaming services, regardless of how often it's watched, even if all the actors he employed will only get paid per watch on said services.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with Nolan trying to make more money. Nothing at all.
Nor does it have anything to do with Nolan overseeing a project that had dodgy royalties contracts that have since been banned by the unions.
Plenty of places provide free lunches. They're still paid for, but they're free at the point of service. Eg homeless shelters, Wikipedia.