Android

Would you actively call up murderous thieves and criminals and con-men to tell them everything about you and your friends, let them in on your every conversation, even tell them your exact location and even your innermost unuttered thoughts, constantly?

I don't see why it's more sane to do it passively, letting the corporation and their spook friends conveniently do that for you.

I used to work in advertising [before Bill Hicks saved me, just as I got into TV adverts]. I was "just doing my job", to the best of my ability, to serve my client, maximally manipulating minds, perverting perceptions, preferences and purchases. This was years before smart phones. My meagre team of two still managed to shape public perception, changed the culture. The things I would have done had I had the data available via the spyware so normalised today. The things I would have done had I had the millions of resources the corporations and governments have. I avoid such because I'm effectively a whistle blower for the advertising industry, and reformed abuser of peoples minds. And I'm of sufficient ethical and moral fiber to have got out. The ruthless psychopaths who are happily still doing it, are not going to hold back. Hijacking peoples minds, their perceptions, their preferences, and not just their purchases, but their purpose, is frighteningly easier than you (have been conditioned to) think. It's much harder to de-program people back into a cognitively-competent free-thinking de-hypnotised state. It's easy to subliminally suggest associations, drip-fed over time, without them realising. "90% of advertising is wasted" we used to say, before it was targeted. And that was fine. That was still sufficient efficiency. The other 90% wasn't for you, it was for other people. None of it was really wasted, if it was done well. Would you actively tell an advertiser, a mind-manipulator, a con-man striving to serve their master who wants to extract all wealth from you and exact total control over you, everything about you? If so, the hour may be later than you've been led to think.

The fear of what other people think is a powerful induction to get people even more easily manipulated into group-think. Then advertising/psyop costs drop dramatically. People succumb to mass-formation, where they police each others thoughts for the advertiser/psyop-agency. This is the psychology of totalitarianism, not just so duped to be so suggestible, but in a runaway state of delusion where any and all atrocities are seen as necessary virtues in service of "the one true way", with the limbic reactive portions at the back of the brain responsible for fear reflex have completely taken over from the forebrain where more reasonable responsible creative and critical thinking can happen. And a mobile phone can easily be used to actively emit inaudible frequencies to tweak these brainwaves, much the same as sound therapy works, but when it's also able to actively read the feedback from all the biometrics, it's like a cold-reading conman with thousands of times more information and insight into what your inner experience is than the most competent and ruthless mentalist. Able to play you better than Vanessa Mae plays the fiddle. A little nudge here, and there, a script to respond to this or that thought had with this or that association... and all the billions of resources to deploy it...

No I don't have a mobile phone. I know what I would have done with it when it was still "just my job" to maximally manipulate people with it. I know (just some of) what potential is probably being used. Heck, just look at the groupthink and silly notions like fearing emancipatory-potentialled open-web technology such as the fediverse as if it's the big scary deep dark-web... Cui Bono? Ever had the experience of receiving an advert for something you've been speaking about? Or how about just thinking about? But that's fine. Nothing to worry about. Maybe the corporation cares. And maybe somehoe the psychopathic structure, and the psychopathic self-selecting, somehow did not happen for the bits that reach you, and everything's fine.

If everybody else around went and jumped off a cliff, would you follow?

Better jump. Wouldn't want them to think you're insane for not jumping with them.

They’re afraid to go full bore advertising it as a minimalist alternative. If they weren’t, they would have offered more thoughtful features beyond the (admittedly great) notifications-only home screen. But that’s secretly who this phone is for. I am sure they’re just afraid to pigeonhole it. Calling it a second phone is silly and will sell it to about 50 people but it leaves any other potential buyer to interpret what it is and why they might want it for themselves. It’s a…whatever strategy.

I do think there is also just an aspect of the people running this company living in a bit of a tech bubble where they are constantly changing their phones and carrying around multiple at the same time. The "second phone" thing gets pushed constantly by tech YouTubers like Michael Fisher (who is behind Clicks), so much so that the term "daily driver" has become normal lexicon for these people. No one in the real world talks about their phone like this, it's just our phone. We don't have another one, unless it's an older model sitting in a drawer somewhere. I'm not sure YouTubers understand this, though.

I think the home screen is just Niagra launcher

Jeez, even $10 is pricy. I think I paid $5 for nova, and that took some thought. I have only bought a handful of apps in the last like... 17 years? Most expensive was fairemail (I actually bought it twice, one from the website, one from the play store) at like, $7? But that has a feature set that nobody can touch, it's better than Thunderbird on the desktop imo. So $10 for a launcher is absolutely wild.

E: and $45 is more than what I pay for most AAA games lol