Signal runs just fine without play services for me. It does drain quite a bit of battery without cloud messaging, but that is to be excepted since it needs to keep its own connection up in that case

I am outside of the US, and I do care. Biggest army and economy and so on. Even if not, I would not want to be associated with, idk, Australian wannabe tyrants either.

Mine told me to take a shower and put on a clean t-shirt. I cannot say he wasn’t right :)

But I get what you mean.

I would say that that is a legitimate concern of a parent who wants their child to have a “normal” life. Badly worded, of course.

This is funny, just yesterday I randomly found phones with built-in VHF/UHF radios on Aliexpress. To be fair, they look super clunky and are very expensive for off-brand Chinese phones ($800+), but they do exist. I wonder who buys them.