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I've used republic wireless for years now and have been quite happy with them.

If you want prepaid on AT&T's network the best deal I know of right now is AT&T prepaid.

My wife and mother are on their $25 a month plan. Unlimited Talk / Text + 8 GB of data. Unused data rolls over for a month. Works in the USA, Canada and Mexico. The only catch is that you have to prepay the year so it is $300 upfront + tax. That varies by state but it was $302 total for us. My wife just started a 2nd year and the doubled they data to 16 GB a month for renewing.

Before we switched to AT&T prepaid we were on Cricket for 4-5 years. No issues but it is $30 a month for only 2 GB of data. It also doesn't work in Mexico or Canada and you can't hotspot without paying $10 a month extra.

I’ve been happy with Pixel phones. They utilize both Sprint and T-mobile on Google Fi. They can work with any network. You can get a used one for ~$100.

https://i0.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-...ll1-scaled.jpg

Open-source rotary cellphone
ROB BESCHIZZA 5:13 AM TUE FEB 18, 2020

I've had Pixels back to the Nexus days - my first one was a Nexus S. They work well and Google supports them for 3 years which unfortunately is the best you can get in the Android world. Today I have a Pixel 1 which unfortunately has reached end-of-life.

A warning for people shopping cheap Pixels - The Pixel 2 and 2 XL will get their last security update December 2020

Right now the best value in cell phones is the Apple iPhone SE2. Apple supports their phones for 5 years so $400 / 5 = $80 per year. The Pixel 4a is a great phone for $350 but only gets 3 years of support so $350 / 3 = $117 per year. It also isn't waterproof which is a deal breaker for me.

I never cared for support (updates). It just means some of your apps break until they eventually fix them. Some of them never get fixed. I've got a $350 4k drone that will never work with iOS because the app isn't being developed for newer versions, which broke the older version of the app.

OS updates go both ways. Sometimes companies stop supporting a product and don't update the app for the new OS. Sometimes the app developer stops supporting old versions of an OS.

However, that isn't my primary concern with updates. I'm much more interested in security updates. I don't want to wake up one day with my bank accounts drained because I'm continued to use an old phone without updated security patches. Security updates are the equivalent of anti-virus software on a computer.

My primary issue with Google is that they support chromebooks for 7 years but phones for only 3.

Eh, we make a big deal out of security updates, but people don't get "hacked" because they were running an old version of software, but because they responded to phishing, or some other human level attack.

Republic Wireless Not so fast
 

FYI
Although I have switch to Republic wireless for the past 2-3 years. Coverage and data plans are not always up to the everyday use. hard data limit. Republic original selling points was different business model and ability to use Wi-Fi and switching to Wi-Fi instead of LTE data when you have access(reality is that rarely went as advertised). Currently Republic uses T-Mobile network they offer some saving on prepaid 6month/yearly(blocks) instead month to month.
Everything with Republic is online . Republic also require that you use their sanction cellphone. If you had a similar phone but not sanction is a no go.

I have been considering Mint Mobile which is online only as well. You have to get a initial setup plan of 3 months. The pricing is almost identical to Republic with just nice bonus of getting more data.

For sure AT&T is horrible

People get hacked and they get phished. I agree that the human is the weakest link in the security chain but that don't mean electronic hacking doesn't happen. If people didn't get hacked there would be no reason to do security updates.

Keeping phone up to date seems like cheap insurance to me.

Hacked , Security, personal data
 

FYI
TIK TOK and WECHAT are known China CCP parasitic personal data applications. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, and Apple sell personal data via "algorithm " . Estimated minimum over half of USA population personal data is known and tracked by China CCP. .Although Apple past advertised claim of "security" has dwindle and was weak at launch.

China CCP manipulation, bribery, and subjugation of much of Africa and Latin American cellphone markets. The reality of Huwaei is that market displacement aka they control towers, servers, and personal data mine from cellphones

I too like the Pixel phones. If I were in the market for a phone now, I'd probably opt for one of the "a" models, maybe a 3a if I could find a killer deal.

I had Republic Wireless for a while. Hard to beat $10 a month for unlimited talk and text. I switched over to Fi when I lived somewhere I couldn't get reasonable Sprint reception (and lived close to the Canadian border) and found what I paid extra every month ($30 and some change for ~1gb of data) to generally be worth the improved service. I recently switched again to Mint mobile. I have some problems with MMS which can probably be resolved, but otherwise feel pretty good about 3GB of data per month and unlimited talk + text for $15 / month on T-Mobile's network.

A lot of the "smaller companies" are just different brands of the big guys. You mentioned Cricket in your OP. Cricket is a fully owned subsidiary of AT&T.

Boost and Ting are owned by Dish Network (Boost used to be owned by Spring but was sold as part of the merger with T-Mobile)
MetroPCS is owned by T-Mobile
Spectrum is owned by Charter
Xfinity is owned by Comcast

Then there are the whole host of pre-paid companies owned by TracFone - which is owned by American Movil - which is owned by the multibillionaire Carlos Slim. Off the top of my head those are Pageplus, Net10, TracFone, Straight Talk, and Walmart's prepaid.

I've had to consider when/if a cell phone becomes unavoidable. My thinking was the Pinephone64. https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

However, I understand that the source for the hardware is Hong Kong. Which is now compromised. So until the supply chain is sorted, things like Bitcoin will have to wait.

Another alternative is to save as much money you can, then spend that on whatever charitable causes you want.

I automatically avoid businesses that donate to causes because that means they could have saved me money, allowing me to invest that money however I see fit.

"Green" causes are almost exclusively in vain because things like oil consumption (consumption in general) is nearly entirely locked to wealth. The way to get large numbers of people to be more green is just to make them less wealthy.

I don't necessarily disagree either, but I'm just trying to imagine how a paradigm shift occurs.

There's some small percent of people willing to sacrifice purely out of principle. Usually anything that is adopted by the larger population is because some personal benefit is derived. In my mind, regulation tends to be required in instances where there is no personal benefit. Catalytic converters come to mind here. If we had no mandates, would we even have catalytic converters in cars?

Regarding the oil/wealth link, they are currently inextricably linked. It makes sense because wealth is buying power, and most everything requires oil inputs.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-m...gy/image_print

sgtlethargic — I would go there and advocate for Fuller's Design Science Revolution.

His 'road to roadless, wired to wireless' anticipated cell phones.

So — What do you think about Linux phones?

You seem to do Okay in Aerodynamics.