would love to have an excuse to give even more ludicrous amounts of taxpayers dollars to military contractors

The idea that anyone would need an excuse to give military contractors infinite money in this country is the funniest thing I’ve heard all day.

Won’t work for things like neobanks (revolut, n26, trade republic, sumeria)

Ya know, fair enough there ngl, I forgot about those and it definitely makes a difference if you’re reliant on an app.

Also many banks have a disastrous web interface in my country, and card 2FA is sometimes only done on the app for internet payments

Yeah, not much can be done about bad web design. I found that me during a period abroad, it was a worthwhile compromise, but sometimes it can be brutal to deal with.

I know not having the app makes me unable to get Burger King offers, or use the Yuka app, both of which I really need

Gotcha, but in that case, it’s effectively them bribing privacy concessions from you. That’s part of the payment trade-off there.

I don’t really disagree with your points here; it highlights the importance of threat modelling. On a country-by-country basis, things may be far easier or harder. For example, when I was in Japan, I used fewer privacy-questionable apps due to less cultural and technological impetus than I have in the States. The differences you’re having issues with are likely heavily based on both infrastructure and value differences between much of the comm and you. I frankly make many privacy compromises compared to others here myself, but that is less do to the alternative being backwards but more so due to it being ever so slightly more inconvenient.

If you do install it, which you probably will unless you’re okay with living 10 years in the past and losing time, then you’re pretty much back to square one

Non-sandboxed play services have vastly more permissions and access to device information; it’s a step back from not having it, but utterly disengenuous to call it back to square one. It has far more privileged permission, and as you admit yourself, we don’t know what is in its code, so we don’t know what it is potentially doing with that permission.

where? Criticizing something specific inherently implies there is a better alternative, or you wouldn’t be focused specifically on apple. I’m saying android is not and AOSP is not viable due to being an outdated user experience and supporting much much less apps and features, as well as not really being used without play services

Your whole comment is hinging pretty hard on the AOSP point, as that’s almost definitely the alternative the user was referring to.

no bank apps? no google maps? no fast food or taxi app? no ‘mainstream’ social media? that’s your only phone?

The only ones there that are anywhere close to essential are banking and Google Maps. Maps has alternatives that I’ve seen people use as well, such as Organic Maps. More importantly is most of these can be done in a single app, a web browser.

I’ve done both app and phone browser banking, and they’re pretty interchangeable, just set up site shortcuts on your home screen instead. Similar to fast food, I don’t use taxis. Social media is the main offender here but most mainstream social media sucks dick.

Why do you need these things as apps?