I think that Gboard would still find a way to connect to the mothership.

Religion

I watched them for characters and their stories, and with time I became bored with marvel action scenes. If you think about it, these characters resolve almost all their problems with punching others. That "one shot" scene is excellent, badass, and for the first time in a long while - I enjoyed a Marvel action scene. Nevertheless, it's a great farewell for James Gunn. I enjoy immensely, and I'm not planning to watch MCU for a while. Maybe Loki season 2 will be an exception.

Google is chasing the "ease of use aspect". A mobile OS has to have a notes app, a mail app, a chat app (in Google's case abundance of chat apps) and a podcast app. Google can track your personal podcast preferences, listening habits, etc.

Personally, I would not choose to use any default Google app. There are lots of better alternatives.

You can remove them. Tap the sticker icon on the right side of the text entry field (bottom of the screen). Scroll the bottom stickers' bar to the right until you see the "+". Tap it, et voila - you can remove them.

It also had an official extended battery, which came along with a special backplate. It made the phone a bit bulkier, but I didn't care. Battery went from 2100mah to 3000mah and it was great. I miss these types of accessories. I don't care about glass back or waterproof phones.

I wouldn't be surprised if that would be exactly what they do.

I've read somewhere that once Gmail address is created, it is not reused - even when account is deleted.

2560x1440

I think the reason is lemmy.world's security problems that happened lately. I had the same behavior from both Liftoff and Jerboa.

Google "ADB Samsung debloat". You'll find a lot of tutorials. ADB is a part of android developer tools (it's free).

One of the first things I do on a new phone is I uninstall the Google app (ADB) but I do it only for my user (me). So it is unavailable to me, and it doesn't run in the background. I think I could uninstall it completely and nothing would break. Some things rely on it - the podcast app did (a while ago), google translate (when I try to translate a photo).

However, I am actively eliminating google from my life. No Drive, no Photos, Gmail is what I use when I want to subscribe to some crappy service (I moved to Tutanota, and I'm a paid user). I don't use Google search (I do a mix of DuckSuckGo and Brave search - which both use Bing ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ; I'm thinking of moving to one of paid search providers).