If by ‘Experience’ you mean the UI, I really like LibreTube. As you already said, personalized recommendations will only work with the ‘proper’ YouTube app. In that case I’d suggest looking into ReVanced. Afaik it doesn’t improve privacy, but it does revert some of the stupid changes YouTube has made over the years.

Same! I’m lowkey tempted to get a fancy one now, but deep down I know it just isn’t worth it.

Damn even though you explained the abbreviation I still read it as Wife Approval Factor for a second and was very confused

If you care to minimize Standby power “comfortably”, usually libraries or power companies will let you borrow an AC Power Meter free of charge.

You can use that to inspect your various devices Standby Power. For example I have an amplifier that pulls nearly 15W in standby, since finding out it lives on a smart plug.

However my TV pulls less than 1W, and at that point I prefer the convenience of just being able to use the remote to turn it on.

(Also keep in mind with the smart plug solution that the plug itself will pull a little bit of power too, this will pretty much always be <1W though.)

If your hate only goes towards touchscreens and not having physical buttons, Mazda is (or at least was) very anti-touchscreen. I haven’t done any research on their current stance or if they have good EVs, but a neighbor of mine was really happy with his Mazda ICE car for having a button for everything.

It’s not a full car or even entertainment system, but comma.ai is an opensource autonomous driving software. Last time I looked into this was a few years ago, but basically for most newer cars you can rip out the adaptive cruise control, and effevtively replace it with autonomous driving. Either powered by certain supported phones or dedicated hardware.

You could try getting a Raspberry Pi Zero together with some kind of SPDIF output card, but that will probably go over $30.

I have no idea what pricing is like, but you could possibly try getting a used Logitech Squeezebox player.

If you’re desperate to stay on the cheap and don’t mind BT quality, you could also install Snapcast on an old phone, enable the Snapcast player provider and then use the phone to connect to your speakers over Bluetooth.

I’d recommend the Sony Xperia lineup, but it seems as though the IV and V devices aren’t supported by LineageOS (maybe just not yet?).

The Sony Xperia 1 III or 5 III might be fitting for you though.

I really enjoyed Tetris (2023). The story was super riveting and I also really liked the soundtrack (mostly just “modernized” Tetris music).

I use Magic Earth for driving directions and Organic Maps for looking around on a map, as imo Magic Earth sucks for inspecting a map.

I occasionally pair them with Transportr for public transit.

I do also still keep Google Maps around, as it just still is the best app for navigation. Sometimes I will check which rough route Google Maps prefers, and then use Magic Earth for the actual navigation.

If you want to fully ditch the Google Maps app without losing Google Maps completely, you could also try GMaps WV, a WebView wrapper for the Google Maps website.

I think Organic Maps can do that, possibly with the help of RHVoice.

While I do mostly agree with your statement, it’s incredibly annoying when I type in a local IP for my router or server and it automatically gets turned into https.

I have bots on and it’s mostly ever these two.

There are still reddit repost bots, but they are all on reddit repost instances. As I have those like two or three instances blocked, I don’t see any of them.

There’s a lemmy profile setting whether to show bots, you probably have that turned off.

I can relate, with every update I’m like “Wow this is going to optimize my setup so much” and then I just don’t change anything lol

Soumds like revolt might be interesting to you.

Streaming, especially video, is quite challenging and expensive. The fact that discord’s video streaming was so cheap was always somewhat suspicious.

That’s an interesting point I hadn’t considered, some quick searching however shows that (at least some) German banking apps are on APKMirror. I can’t speak for other countries though.

I believe WhatsApp needs the mobile app to connect to WhatsApp’s servers at least once every two weeks.

I think your best bet would be getting the cheapest phone you can find that will run a recent WhatsApp version, and then just leaving that at home connected to the internet. You could then use any WhatsApp web client (the website, some app, a matrix bridge, …) to actually use WhatsApp on the go.

This comment about the app signature should apply to your situation too, you can’t mess with an APK and then sign it with the Google Play keys.

APKMirror is the most trustworthy website there is for APKs out there, if you do some research you will see that the community consensus is it being pretty safe.

I do however understand your concern, especially when talking about banking apps. Honestly now that I think about it, for a banking app I’d rather make a burner Google Account as well. For less sensitive apps however, APKMirror is the best non Google way to get their APKs.

About the app, I have no idea, I only ever used the website (with uBlock).

Obviously it sucks that you need a Google account to access all these apps “properly” through the Play Store, for free apps they should really just let you download them without an account.