P2p is the way the web naturally flowed, protocols like bittorrent wore able to distribute content better than giant streaming companies without relying on giant infrastructure.

Now sharing is frowed upon, hosting your own server at home is frowed upon, the web used to be more made by users, now to do anything you need to go through a big company.

The difficulties you face on piracy is just a reflection of how capitalism is fucking the web.

Not exactly a piracy tool, but syncthing is quite useful to keep pc and other devices in parity if you don’t plan to leave one on all the time.

You didn’t mention gaming, but if you plan to use your tablet for emulators, you can sync save files with it if the emulators are compatible cross pc and android like ppsspp.

To be fair, nowadays malware behavior is more likely to come from the companies than the cracks.

Curators are a good way too, some blogs or podcasts do a lot of heavy lifting in discovering new shows, some communities with similar tastes are also good to find content, way better than algos and ads.

Doesn’t have offline support, but it’s easy to setup, ytmusic vanced on mobile with ytmusic with ublock origin on desktop.

As a single person, most of it comes down to what you support, avoid consuming things that rely on cruelty and slavery to be produced, study to be more aware of what is actually happening, and don’t panic, there’s very little a person alone can do.

Joining groups with similar minds can help you make more, but groups can be very hard, people have different views on things, and radicalism can make some good willed people do pretty terrible things.

Marketing, and the fact that phones are now super boring, everything is web based, there’s no more cool apps, everything is just a frontend for some web service, or a damn webview.

The historical feature gap between Androids and iPhones is mostly gone, and since the tech doesn’t matter anymore, marketing can go a long way.

The article is also very us centric, in places where cost matters more, the iPhone is seen as a status symbol, just like every other thing that costs a lot for no reason.

I dont really like android. Symbian and even windows phones performed better on inferior hardware. Their weird lifecycle seems to me wasteful and blurs the line between what’s running or not. It only became stable once hardware got way better. It’s a shame that every other option failed. because the only thing worse than android is an apple controlled environment.

Nobody should trust companies with their privacy, especially when they always get away with lying and their tools are in no way auditable.