New Smartphone

[BigEasy]

Uhhhh... I'm not even sure how to respond to this. Should I just kind of laugh instead? Why would you want to own a smartphone in the first place?

Really I have no idea. Next time I'll ask you first.

[AZgl1800]

I always manually turn data on/off and something else depending of situation. Yes, manually. For example, before going to bed I turn airplane mode leaving just clock alarm at morning 06:30. My ASUS phone working 8-9 days without charge. Who need 24/7 full functionality?

Uhhhh... I'm not even sure how to respond to this. Should I just kind of laugh instead? Why would you want to own a smartphone in the first place?

I am not going to allow some nitwit self enthused Android developer make my smartphone Call home to momma every 15 seconds just so he can see what I am doing??

Lol... Paranoid much?

Paranoid? no, that background crap uses up the battery, and that to me, is a NO NO....
I have been retired for 10 years, there is nothing out there in Internet Land that I need to be notified about Right Now!

well, maybe, I should have some advance notice that someone is dropping a Nuclear Missile in my backyard....
but, even that don't matter, I won't be around to worry about it.

[webwrx]

Paranoid? no, that background crap uses up the battery, and that to me, is a NO NO....
I have been retired for 10 years, there is nothing out there in Internet Land that I need to be notified about Right Now!

I agree and think it's sensible. In the first few years of smartphone growth it was all 'cool' have a phone that did all this stuff, but now a lot of it is just a big drain and the tech companies just want more and more, and this has an impact of battery life, data usage, and the overall performance of the phone.

For example, I recently downloaded GNOME MAPS onto my old laptop. It was showing my current location as being an old address where I used to live. This was strange, how did it know this? Why does GNOME MAPS think I'm at my old address? Well... turns out GNOME MAPS uses Mozilla Location services. Mozilla Location services gets location data in the background of people who run Firefox on Android devices, and scans available WiFi signals and associates them with a current location and reports back. So... people had been driving past my house with their Android devices using Firefox, this was picking up my WiFi router from the street, and therefore MLS knew the location of my router. MLS did not know (yet) I had moved that router to a new address... and therefore GNOME MAPS believes I'm at my old address because it's connected to my WiFi router.

There are several companies collecting location data of WiFi routers... mostly thanks to people driving around with smartphones that are doing all this background processing and data collection. See the table of providers on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system and check out some of the links to the coverage maps - its staggering the number of data points being recorded.

This is a small example of services running in the background on smartphones that use processor, memory, data and battery. Yes we opt into these things in the fine print, but who reads the fine print? Likewise on iOS devices deep inside the Privacy / Location Services are options that allow the phones to send back information to assist with mapping and traffic information, and I'm sure Android devices are also contributing to traffic data shown on Google maps. Just how much data and battery is all this crap draining from us? So I've turned a lot of this background crap off and it's surprising how much better my phone is now running. For example - why do I need "push" mail when there is no instance whatsoever I need to be instantly notified of a new email. I'm quite happy to manually retrieve mail myself. Just simply turning off push mail saves battery and data.

Thanks again for all the advice. It's a subjective topic (a bit like asking "what's a good Linux distro...") as one of the original responders pointed out... lots of good stuff brought up that I hadn't considered so it will definitely all help with my decision... but my main thing is at least the ability to turn off a lot of these background processes which always seem to be "opt in" by default.