Pretty much unfortunately. The good thing is its trivially easy to change launchers on the NVIDIA Shield or Google TV devices, plus you can even go a step forward and debloat them entirely with ADB. Amazon’s really the only manufacturer I’d say that forces home screen ads with no choice around it, since they actively prevent changing launchers and such. But Apple is probably the only one out of the box with no advertising.
If you have the money, I’d go for an NVIDIA Shield, or maybe an Apple TV. Well worth the money.
Otherwise, for budget, you could get a Chromecast, which gives you more control over it and has generally less garbage than the Fire TVs do for instance, since you can easily change its launcher and debloat with ADB.
I agree with you. Stock Android OSes include so much proprietary bloatware, spyware, and other garbage from OEMs and Google themselves, that its a pretty horrible experience. They don’t take privacy and security seriously at all, not even good from a usability perspective either most of the time imo, as it also leads to worse performance and battery life, etc. I would much rather use iOS over like any Stock version of Android, even despite the many problems of iOS.
Only way to make Stock Android somewhat usable is through removing what you can through ADB, but even that is far from ideal and won’t solve all of the issues.
Overall though, by far best option is to just use an alternate Android OS like Graphene, beats iOS or Stock Android any day. Though between iOS and Stock Android, if I had to pick, I’d easily choose iOS.
Yep, they’re horrible. I always disable internet on them, uninstall any apps I can, and generally do what I can to avoid using the built-in smart TV, but I shouldn’t have to do this, its unfortunate and sucks to deal with. They just take advantage of consumers who don’t know better, wish the TV market wasn’t like this. :/
I generally avoid Cloudflare where possible personally because at the the end of the day, they’re a giant big tech company based in the US, with pretty much unprecedented control over the internet.
With that said, last time I looked into their privacy policy, I thought it was acceptable, but that’s been a while ago, so not entirely sure nowadays. Either way I’m not a huge fan.
On Windows, just use the built-in Windows Defender. On Linux, I recommend ClamAV + ClamTK. On Android, Hypatia.
If you think you have malware, this is a pretty good guide to remove it.
I’d also strongly recommend using and configuring a content blocker like uBlock Origin in your browser, as well as using a DNS level blocker like NextDNS.
If you have a multilayered setup like this, then I think you’re pretty good and it’ll be not impossible, but much harder to get malware or be infected. Just use common sense as always.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but to my understanding of how RCS works, the messages would still go through Google and their servers. With that said, this would probably be more privacy friendly than straight up using the Google Messages app, since it’d have less Google telemetry and data collection, but still not ideal or truly private since it’d still be Google’s platform you’re using to message at the end of the day.
Yeah, Chromecasts are much better than Fire TV’s, due to the more control you have over them and how easy it is change the launcher vs. Amazon actively preventing it. Basically same price and budget as well. Plus Google running a newer version of Android in general vs. Amazon’s, etc. Chromecasts are probably lesser of the two evils imo.