Phone Curious

[peristaltor]

Okay, I'm looking for advice from you folks who have experience: I need a new cell phone.

Here's the thing: I really, really can't stand to have advertising on it. If I search for something, if I download something, it can't come with any ads. Because of this, I have not used my "smart" phone (Galaxy Core Prime) for "surfing" or, really, much at all, simply because I could not figure out how to do so without adverts.

So: are there any ad-free options out there? Anything?

TIA,

—Perry

Comments

[garote]

Depends on what you need to do with it!

Ideas: https://garote.dreamwidth.org/276376.html

[autopope]

In general Apple prioritizes customer privacy compared to Android (which, remember, is a product of Google, aka DoubleClick, the world's largest advertising company). They're not perfect but you get fine-grained control over tracking and monitoring by apps and can switch them off. Having said that, if you let Facebook (and their other products such as Instagram), Twitter, or Google anywhere near your phone the battle against ads is lost. There are also ad-blocker apps in the iOS app store: it's rather harder to find them in the Google Play store for some reason ...

If you're willing to go outside the Android/iOS duopoly, there is weird stuff in the Linux smartphone sector, for example Pinephone. This may be a bit too security-through-obscurity though.