Older MacOS versions had stuff like the chess game preinstalled for no reason, though I don’t know how current versions look like.
I also don’t know how easy it is to remove preinstalled apps nowadays. Back in the day, you could disable System Integrity Protection, remove whatever you want, and re-enable Protection afterwards.
But please tell your contacts that you’re using bridges, if you haven’t already.
You are effectively giving away encryption keys to a third party, since those messages need to be decrypted and re-encrypted mid-transit.
Everyone who is part of the chats you use bridges with deserves to know about that fact, at least.
It’s always difficult with digital matters, since there isn’t anything tangible and concrete to show.
Like, there’s no shady person following them with a notebook and reporting back to their boss all day, but that is kinda what’s happening, just invisible to the user.
My pihole is pretty good at showing family how many connections their apps make are completely unnecessary to their actual functions. That’s a good illustration to start with.
I mean, it was kinda expected and inevitable that one big service was going to reign supreme. Lots of things make push notification a real hassle, like you describe. Speaking for Android as I don’t know much about iOS, Firebase works incredibly well, it’s a super elegant solution, and if Google wasn’t such a shitshow, I’d love it.
But it is a shitshow, in so many ways. So some services encrypt the contents, some don’t send them over those servers in the first place, but the remaining metadata is still shockingly useful for surveillance purposes.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this comment, but as an EU resident, I’d just like to see alternative systems getting more attention.
Idk, it’s just that so many people hear news like this and go: „It is what it is, can’t change it“
But when the time comes and the kid needs to write some assignments for school, you can be like Your Steam Deck can do that too, have a look at what this dock does
Imagine if handheld gaming is all they’ve ever used it and known it for, and all of a sudden you show them than it can be a full desktop experience, too