Hi all, I'm new here and I'm not a fan of Android. In fact, if Google was suddenly sucked into a time warp and returned to being a simple search engine company with broadly targeted advertising I'd be very happy. I honestly can't find a good word to say about Google/Alphabet these days - well, there's lots of good words, but most of them aren't considered appropriate for polite company.

I've been wanting to try an alternative to iOS for ages - so I managed to source a useable Nexus 5 on eBay and fired up LineageOS then MaruOS and then Sailfish (which fell over) and they all feel horrifically similar to Google's spyware. Not to mention being very poorly laid out.

So hello UBPorts and finally a UI that doesn't steal my screen real estate OR my privacy.

I'm a little surprised how small the app ecosystem is for now. I honestly thought it would be somewhat bigger after several years - and it just shows how pervasive the other systems are. Kodi would be handy for me because I have a DNLA server for my music so I'm a bit stumped there. I could get by with the SAMBA shares but I guess no one has sorted that one yet. I hate being a simple user - I wish I'd kept up to date and maybe I could have ported some stuff myself. Oh well

Obviously there are other things I would like - games are not an issue.

I'm going to recommend this to my friend who hates smartphones because I believe it satisfies all of his needs - except the proverbial battery life. Oh, I miss those days.

@UKPhil I'm not that put off by Apple because it doesn't "pretend" to be our friend in the way Google does. You know when you buy an iPhone (and you DO buy an iPhone as we all know) that you're paying for the privilege of the best mobile OS there is - Android is particularly weak because it's so fragmented and now we have a bunch of alternative "Androids" too.

It's not that I trust Apple per se, but I trust someone who is rude to me up front rather than someone who cuddles me while he's picking my (digital) pocket. Google defines evil more to me than even Microsoft ever did... and I've been out of the business almost as long as I was a part of it. Google pretends to even be a friend of open source (Summer of Code for example) but it does nothing that doesn't directly benefit Google in the long term; and that includes letting employees develop their own products.

It's hard to list all the things that Google takes advantage of - I know of some via the FSF and others just by watching my network traffic.

It's no surprise that Ubuntu Touch never really got a foothold as it doesn't have a killer app. It's not just the app ecosystem - because let's be honest - 90%+ of those are either utterly banal or just copies of each other. Hard to imagine what the killer app could be - and that, in and of itself has to be a problem. Google (what them again!) is well known for pilfering other people's ideas: Android itself was pinched from Blackberry at first and later from Apple.

So, I'll be promoting Ubports proudly and laughing at those who thought I was crazy all those years ago.

I don't have any data (so to speak) on this phone, so it can't be that directly.

In the last 16 hours, it's generated 11,717 requests!

That's LOT of DNS traffic regardless of anything else. That sounds awfully like a bug. I know theses are a couple of packets but if this was using my mobile data that could add up.