I hear what you're saying and I'm not trying to promote Whatsapp, but want to note that backups do offer encryption. They did not use to and I believe it is off by default, however.
I've used it for years and somehow had no clue they even had sms support. Doesn't really matter to me because SMS is wildly unreliable for the location I'm at anyway. I'd rather use the actual app if still given the choice. I can understand the move to drop support for it, to be honest.
I can infer what you mean by "particular things", but I've never really heard of that amongst anyone I know. Many people think that of whatsapp, too.
After 20+ years of working primarily with Debian, I was giving Alma a shot recently and honestly, have really liked it. Guess I'll be going back to the ole' tried and true Debian.
I'm not saying I think it would be a bad thing for support to continue. I just don't think it should be legally required. If a small company decided to develop and produce a device, knowing they'd have to perpetually support it, legally, makes it exponentially cumbersome to continue further development. Newer software may not be able to run on older hardware, meaning they'd have to develop and maintain multiple versions of any security fix. For Apple, it'd hardly be a problem (financially) to continue support.
On the other hand, I understand that this creates a situation where new phones keep being churned out that are hardly different hardware-wise. It'd be lame to stop supporting the older devices just to push people to buy another one (Apple). There's probably some middle ground to be found here.
While it is certainly nice to have continued support, I think I'd disagree that forcing companies to maintain software on legacy/outdated hardware is something that should be legislated. I think that would greatly stifle innovation in a lot of cases.
I'd be a supporter of something like @[email protected]'s suggestion, though. If they are no longer able to support security updates, then they should open it up to be able to maintain it yourself/community-maintainable. Expecting a company to maintain support through continued development on a 10 or 20 year old device that in some cases may not even be physically able to handle the updates is a big ask.
I imagine water resistance comes in handy quite often for many people. It has certainly saved me countless times. Not that I need to go swimming or deep sea diving with my phone, but I have dropped phones in water, been stuck in the rain, spilled a glass of water, etc. I ruined many phones before it became common.
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##O#O## OS: AlmaLinux 9.2 (Turquoise Kodkod) x86_64
####### Host: Alienware Aurora R11 1.0.7
########### Kernel: 5.14.0-284.11.1.el9_2.x86_64
############# Uptime: 27 mins
############### Packages: 2142 (rpm), 11 (flatpak)
################ Shell: bash 5.1.8
################# Resolution: 5120x1440
##################### DE: Plasma 5.27.4
##################### WM: KWin
################# Theme: Breeze [Plasma], Adwaita [GTK2], Raleigh [GTK3]
Icons: [Plasma], Breeze-Noir-Black-Blue [GTK2/3]
Terminal: terminator
CPU: Intel i9-10900KF (20) @ 5.300GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
Memory: 4831MiB / 31641MiB
Nothing too fancy here.
You do not need crypto to call with it. It is simply a payment mechanism. I don't see anything wrong with it. If anyone is uninterested, they can simply turn it off or not use it. Conversely, burning up fees to interact with smart contracts to message is what seems more silly to me. There'd be no opting out of that.