It is not about “bragging” or whatever. Nor is it about “bad” or “good”.

By funding or promoting the use of Google products, you would be funding litigation and influence such as lobbying to keep poor regulation as it is, if not worse. You would be funding their acquisitions of great tech and startups that might offer a more ethical and/or free technology. You would be funding their poaching of said engineers and valuable hardware intellectual property.

Simply put, it is a counterproductive and an unsustainable practice.

That being said, their amazing engineers, and technical value of their hardware are irrelevant to this community, post and comment. That simply doesn’t excuse their entire business model being built on breaches of privacy and other forms of curbing user freedoms.

Fairphone, Librem, PinePhone, f(x)tec, etc. are available alternatives, yes.

Even a OnePlus is better than directly funding and supporting the adversary organisation that is one of the biggest surveillance capitalism corporations on earth.

I keep seeing this idea everywhere. Buy a Google phone and install another OS.

It is completely absurd to fund the exact adversaries you are running away from, while consuming, without contributing a dime, merely a piece of free software. (It is only a small piece of freedom because none of the hardware is free, and some binary blobs [incl. potential backdoors] will still be present in the alternative OS no matter which one it is.)

This is unsustainable, terrible, damaging advice. Stop giving it.

“Let the votes decide the quality of the content” is capitalist rhetoric that was the start of reddit’s end. It is not an argument, it is not a principle to stand behind, and it most definitely is not a better alternative to guidelines the community can vote on.