I'm going to paste here the comment I wrote on another post about this same issue:

Organic Maps and OsmAnd are not adding ads during navigation. Nor "promoted pins". Nor ads when browsing the map. Nor tracking your every move.

Seriously, give them a try. And remember that, if the maps are lacking information, you are free (and encouraged) to improve them on OpenStreetMap.

Even @[email protected] gives it backlash despite being a moderator of Lemmy's biggest privacy community. A quote here: "grapheneOS trolls are downvoting every single post and comment of mine, and committing vote manipulation on Lemmy. They are using 5-6 accounts." That was in response to downvotes on a comment posted in the c/WorldNews community, which is entirely unrelated to technology.

It seems to me that you might be confusing things: You say that people hate the OS but share a comment complaining about the community of users/fans, not about the OS.

I have never used GrapheneOS and cannot comment on the OS, but I have seen some users in different communities commenting that GrapheneOS is the only valid alternative OS and discrediting any other OS. It becomes tiring pretty fast.

Heliboard https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard

Thanks, I know about reproducible builds, but I still don't see how the GitHub release is more secure than the F-Droid build. In both cases you need to trust whoever built the apk.

It is known that F-Droid uses the published source code, reviews it for anti-features, and they build hundreds of apps used by thousands of people. If they did any tampering or had a security hole we would learn about it pretty fast (we just need one user of one of their built apps to report).

On the other hand using a GitHub release we need to trust the developer of the app: trust that the source code has no malicious code in it (or review the code ourselves, does anybody do that?), there's no third party reviewing it, and trust that the apk they release uses exactly the published code. The user base of an individual app's GitHub release is way smaller than that of all apps built by F-Droid, so by chance it would take way longer for users to detect any security problem.

So, as I see it, it boils down to either trusting a big community with a long story of building and providing FOSS apps, a good reputation, and offering reproducible builds on all apps that managed to achieve them; or trusting dozens of different developers, most of whom we know nothing of.

Simple games don't need internet access. Can't you block network connection for that app?

A better option even is getting something like what [email protected] suggested, or this other one https://f-droid.org/packages/org.moire.opensudoku/ or this other one https://f-droid.org/packages/org.secuso.privacyfriendlysudoku/

Well, the community is called "Europe" and the post title is a clickbaity "Govt is selling land". There are many countries and governments in Europe and post titles should be informative.

It looks like it's time to ditch whatever podcast app you're using.

Look for a FOSS alternative, I'd recommend AntennaPod (https://antennapod.org/), but there are other alternatives out there: not bloated, no ads, no tracking, just what you choose to subscribe to.

Yes, I feel like all these Big Tech companies changed the parent company name (Facebook -> Meta, Google -> Alphabet) to confuse end users when they read news about how they harvest our data don't respect our privacy: the news talk about a big company spying on users, users know a few app names and most don't link both together

I love Organic Maps, it is clean, simple, and works for 95% of my needs. The rest of the times I resort to OsmAnd, which is heavier and more complicated but has many more options.

The house number search can be tricky with OpenStreetMap based apps, unfortunatey, but still better than using Google, in my opinion.

I used Magic Earth in the past, but it has some wrong information in my city (an important road is marked as closed and it calculates long detours) which is not coming from OpenStreetMap, so I personally don't trust it.

I saw a couple of Delvoye's Cloacas in a museum years ago (he has built several models, the first using a washing machine as "stomach", if I recall correctly).

I recall reading that the purpose of the work was to show how one can put a lot of effort into something (he really worked on making it as close as possible to physiological human digestion) but in the end the result can be shit.

It doesn't have to be. This could be how YouTube dies.

Websites are nothing without users. We have the power to stop using websites that pull this shit and promote new websites that don't.

Link to the scientific article which the news article is based on: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w