I definitely agree with you on this. My pet theory is that phones have been getting uncomfortably big, at least from my perspective, since the average consumer is expecting it to serve as a computing and productivity platform, while all I want is a nice little digital Swiss army knife. I’m only logged into my messaging apps and personal email, and don’t expect to do any sort of “productivity” on my phone. When my friends and colleagues assume I’m logged in to this-or-that on my phone, all I can think about is how afraid I would be if I were logged in to so many things on my personal phone. It’s so much harder to inspect what’s going on in the background of mobile devices.

One of the compromises I’ve had to accept is the closed, yet exploitable nature of the baseband and firmware. Also how much more spying it could do compared to any PC if an exploit were to get through. Compiling Coreboot and neutering the Intel ME taught me a lot about who’s really in control - and how much control we all lose to smartphone manufacturers and telecom companies.

What do you do when you leave the house?

Hey, that’s the only safe way to let others control your buttplug.

Of course

• Accrescent: Store run (edit: advocated) by the GrapheneOS team for third-party apps
• Aegis: 2FA TOTP code generator
• AirGuard: Scans for persistent AirTags in the vicinity, notifies if I may be victim to AirTag tracking
• AntennaPod: Podcast manager, also supports importing local folders of podcasts
• AudioMonitor: Measure sound level
• Binary Eye: Support for many types of 1D and 2D barcodes
• ByeDPI: routes internet traffic through the DNS port to bypass certain types of filtering
• Canvass: doodle app, useful for mid-conversation diagrams and clarifying things visually in the absence of pen and paper
• ClassiCube: Minecraft Classic clone
• Conversations: XMPP client
• Editor: raw text editor
• Elementary: periodic table
• SimpleEmail: minimalist e-mail app that does not automatically fetch linked images. Refereshes in the background every 15 minutes and sends notifications without need for Play Services or equivalent
• FakeStandby: for edge cases when I want something to keep running in the foreground, but don’t want to keep the screen on
• Feeder: RSS client
• Fintunes: Jellyfin client optimized for music
• FlorisBoard: customizable keyboard
• Fruity Game: Suika but with MS-Paint art style
• Graph 89: Graphing calculator emulator
• Invizible: Tor and DNS client
• Kiwix: Offline Wikipedia (you can download just the parts useful to you, e.g. medical articles without storage-hungry media files)
• Lemuroid: GBA emulator
• LocalSend: instant P2P filesharing over WLAN
• Markor: notes app with markdown
• Material Files: files app with SMB share support and various handy features
• Molly: Alternative Signal client
• Fossify Messages: I use it over the default messages app since it is easy to block numbers by pattern
• Notally: notes app with nice checklists
• Open Camera: as easy to use as the regular camera, but with a bunch more features below the surface
• OpenContacts: saves contacts as individual .vcf files to a directory for easy backup and allows dropping unknown callers without bothering me with a notification
• Organic Maps to be replaced with CoMaps later
• OSS Document Scanner: best FOSS scanning app I’ve found so far. Includes auto-cropping (given enough contrast) and adjustable B&W filter to eliminate off-white background colors.
• phyphox: view output of sensors like the barometer, magnetometer, accelerometer, etc.
• PipePipe: NewPipe but better (except for the occasional memory leakage)
• QDict & QuickDic: offline dictionaries and bilingual wordbooks
• RadioDroid: IP radio client. Can tune in to international news, music, sports broadcasts
• RHVoice: TTS app
• RiMusic: NewPipe, but for Spotify, etc. YT Music
• SecScanQR: QR scanner and generator with history, useful to save QR addresses for later use since I don’t want to fill out forms or read documents on my phone
• SuperTuxKart: the only [edit: other] game on my phone
• Symphony: Music app with a slick UI
• Trail Sense: Compass with various goodies useful for outdoor activities
• Breezy Weather: weather app and homescreen widget with a slick UI
• MicroMathematics: Math engine, but I never learned how to use it

F-Droid is the way