Great marketing in the leadup to Xmas. It worked on me, I wanted to get my wife an apple watch for the holiday and when I saw this news I pulled the trigger instantly.

Nice timing, Apple. You dicks.

Oh, that’s silly as hell, I love it.

Some skinny dude in a Guy Fawkes mask sneaks in through the dog door and turns up the heat while you’re at work

Also I have not been able to purchase any paid apps

It’s the same on my Pixel 6a with CalyxOS and the Aurora Store (anonymous access to Play Store). We simply cannot get a paid Play Store app to work without logging into Google. I can get my bank app, local transit app, firefox, bitwarden, etc from there as well as what I’ve settled on for driving nav, HereWeGo.

That’s TomTom’s free nav app and it appears to get it’s traffic info from the commercial solutions TomTom provides to truckers (paid service for them). It’s good enough, but I do miss Google Maps sometimes. I like it better than Apple Maps.

Most everything else is handled through FDroid and the apps are decent to great, no show stoppers. I don’t use it for much that would leak privacy on the app side besides banking, browsing and navigation though. It’s not for everyone.

The only way I can think of to use paid apps is to pay the developer directly and then sideload. I don’t even know if any devs do that.

As long as /e/os hangs tough my next phone will probably be a FairPhone, I really dig the philosophy and repairability.