Thanks! I assume you’re in Australia from your instance. I’m in the US. On top of using American companies just being a given here, let’s just say the coverage of Snowden in 2013 was inadequate in my circles at the time.

Funnily enough, I’ve thought of the cloud as “someone else’s computer” from the beginning and shun using it more than everyone else I know, but I was just getting into the space when Gmail and Chrome were the hot new things, each gradual step into the ecosystem didn’t feel like a big concession, and I was too young to know to question the convenience.

In case it wasn’t clear, reversing those two decades of inertia and tech debt is what I was referring to as the time-consuming bit. So far, what I’ve finished switching over is actually quite nice to use.

And yes, I dread the day even the fallback options start getting killed off. It’s always one bad law away.

Yeah, technology enshittification as a whole has definitely picked up the last few years, and I find myself compromising more and more as the field of reasonable options gets narrower.

Like you, I used to only go for phones with SD card and headphone jack support. Now, I’m on a (new but not bought from Google) Pixel 9 Fold with GrapheneOS using a DAC adapter to still have wired audio and a more deliberate storage management system to compensate for not having SD cards. (Unlike you, I need a big screen for spreadsheets and such.)

I purposely bought the newest phone I could within my budget, because I’m planning for Android to be completely unviable the next time I need to upgrade, and I want to give Linux phones as much time to mature as possible before I inevitably migrate.

It seems offline tech is going to be the last bastion of safety sooner rather than later, so I’m in various stages of migrating my digital life offline. Linux over Windows. Keepass, LibreOffice, Obsidian, etc. + Syncthing over cloud options. Keeping off-site backups with friends and family instead of in the cloud. Keeping local DRM-free media. It’s time-consuming but rewarding. I should have done it all way sooner.