When my phone got back from repair it had come with an unasked for upgrade to Android 13. Well, OK. So the first things I do are run through and turn off the "double tap to go to lock screen when phone is turned off" feature, the "Assistant button on lock screen" feature, and the feature to show a popup when you copy something… I then find that the double tap on lock screen, assistant on lock, and popup on copy features were all still happening anyway. I didn't used to hate Google, but now I do.

Hey, question. I'm getting notifications from Google asking me to add my new (or effectively new, post-wipe) phone to the "Find My Device network". This is confusing to me because I can open up Google Find My Device and it can *see* the device, now, as is, and ping it and stuff. So what's this screen? Is this exclusively about the secondary network where it's tracking the locations of Bluetooth devices and other phones will tattle on my location when the cell modem is off? Cuz I don't want that

It is just *absolutely pulling teeth* to just get Google to *disclose* to you, when you use Android, which features are silently making use of network services and (when network services are in use) what kinds of data are being sent. I feel like that above screen is basically lying, I think a lot of people will agree to join the network thinking it's necessary to make the base Find My Device function work

More interesting/typical Android stuff: When I first turned on the phone it asked if I wanted to use RCS and asked me to agree to the TOS for their RCS provider. I declined the TOS at this time. One day later I get a popup saying that RCS is on now "by default". I check and RCS is on. No longer asking, I suppose.

It sucks that #RCS, even though being an open standard, has no FOSS implementation. It is only implemented in Google's proprietary Play Services on Android, and they have a whitelist for the apps that can use it, which currently is limited to Google's and Samsung's messaging apps. This really sucks, because RCS could have been a massive improvement for everyone if it was implemented in AOSP and could be used without proprietary apps.