1. I think that I have a right to participate in the digital commons without selling my soul to my choice of two possible corporate masters (Apple or Google).
1A. Corollary, the digital commons necessarily includes the ability to interact with the Internet in a mobile way.
2. There are mobile applications that have such a marked and clear positive impact on my life that doing without them is not merely an issue of convenience, but an issue of capability.
2A. These applications, through market forces, are only available on mobile devices running common mobile OSes.
3. My means of income requires me to fit as much as possible a societal mold that includes availability during reasonable hours via a mobile device.
3A. My employer is not one of the corporate masters, and they have no right to interject themselves in my relationship with my employer that I entered into voluntarily.
When put together, these leave you only one viable option which is running secured hardware with a de-Googled version of Android. I don't see why /this/ device is any better than a Pixel + GrapheneOS done yourself, but the above explains why someone would want a Pixel + GrapheneOS.
You are welcome to disagree with my reasoning, but it is sound.
I agree with this answer, but I'm not sure how to express the question. I mean something different when I say "practical."
It's like a person who buys a gun because he wants to exercise his second amendment rights versus a hunter who buys a gun to hunt or a cop who buys a gun for law enforcement.
I think I understand your point, but I'm not sure how anyone could formulate an answer to satisfy it. The split is fundamentally philosophical, because there's no new capability gained by regaining your privacy vs simply accepting the status quo of letting Google interject itself into every aspect of your life. The absence of something cannot add any new capabilities.
On the flip side, I think the mere existence of people who are successfully living a 'normal' life in the current era while regaining some reasonable measure of privacy is enough evidence to support the use case, beyond merely theoretical philosophical ideals.
I was thinking there could be use cases like plausible deniability when doing illegal stuff or maybe these phones are useful for the same reason in espionage? Maybe these phones are required in the defense industry for secret or top secret clearance? Stuff like that was what I was guessing maybe these phones are useful for.
I'm sure those use cases do exist. I know that there are already special secured handsets made by defense contractors like that for use by top officials, generally in partnership with other companies. I believe Halliburton supplied specially modified Blackberries for years to the White House and Department of State, and the last I heard was that a different org was modifying Samsung handsets for similar purposes. Given that shift to Android, it would not surprise me if there was a market here for government officials working on confidential work to need secured handsets running Android where their government could lock the device to only a whitelisted set of apps. The US government for instance already has published STIGs for Android handsets.
The reality is that for me, at least, government use cases don't interest me for a number of reasons, and I don't necessarily think they align with your clarification to the questions either. I think drawing the parallel to firearms is fuzzy, but if we go with that, there are obvious use cases a government has for firearms that don't support an argument in favor of civilian ownership, but there /are/ arguments that support civilian ownership. Perhaps nothing else makes me more anxious than that thought of a world where privacy and crypto are considered to be something only allowed for elites and government officials, where all of us normies have to be surveilled 24/7. This is already a reality in some parts of the world and fast becoming a reality in the West. Hence, I am not really concerned with how useful this may be to government, I am /only/ concerned with how useful this is to normal every-day people who just don't want to be spied on. Most of the modern surveillance isn't even done for a reason, it's just dragnet surveillance on everyone "because they can", which is the worst type.
1. I think that I have a right to participate in the digital commons without selling my soul to my choice of two possible corporate masters (Apple or Google).
1A. Corollary, the digital commons necessarily includes the ability to interact with the Internet in a mobile way.
2. There are mobile applications that have such a marked and clear positive impact on my life that doing without them is not merely an issue of convenience, but an issue of capability.
2A. These applications, through market forces, are only available on mobile devices running common mobile OSes.
3. My means of income requires me to fit as much as possible a societal mold that includes availability during reasonable hours via a mobile device.
3A. My employer is not one of the corporate masters, and they have no right to interject themselves in my relationship with my employer that I entered into voluntarily.
When put together, these leave you only one viable option which is running secured hardware with a de-Googled version of Android. I don't see why /this/ device is any better than a Pixel + GrapheneOS done yourself, but the above explains why someone would want a Pixel + GrapheneOS.
You are welcome to disagree with my reasoning, but it is sound.