Several mobile banking apps have a feature to let an account holder deposit a cheque by photographing the front and back sides. As far as I can tell, cheque deposit is the only major feature of a mobile banking app that can't be done just as easily on the bank's website. So if you don't need this feature, you can just bank in Firefox.

Do GCHQ and G2 coordinate operations?

Women are a minority, yet there are plenty of women's health care products. I'm not sure what you meant. Are you claiming that people who don't want yet another phone bill deserve to do without hardware too?

Joined-up cursive writing in the Latin alphabet is very different from drawing each stroke of a Chinese character. I used to have a Newton MessagePad 2000 and it worked mostly because I stuck to manuscript (separate letters).

Is there a patent on putting a layer of resistive touch screen over a layer of capacitive touch screen? Resistive is what the Newton and Nintendo DS used; it just doesn't support multitouch.

Then how did Apple continue to sell iPod touch?

So where does that leave people who aren't willing to pay hundreds of dollars per year for a cellular data plan?

I agree. The proper target of bitching is not Google as much as hardware makers who intentionally make it hard to switch to CyanogenMod.

Yes. See Valve Finds Open Source Drivers To Be Great; Valve Developed an Open-Source Intel Vulkan GPU Driver For Linux; Valve Bootstrapped Source 2 Engine On an Open-Source Vulkan Driver.

To end the Google Play hegemony, you have to show demand for services outside Google Play. Try this:

1. Find a competing bank whose app is on Amazon Appstore. You'll need its name in a later step.
2. Pack a Fire Phone or one of the Kindle Fire models with a rear facing camera.
3. Visit a branch, and ask how to deposit a check. If they say no can do, find a polite way to ask "What can Barclays offer me that $other_bank can't?"

Probably because makers of I/O components, such as GPUs and radios, aren't exactly warm to the concept of a completely free operating system.

F-Droid excludes all non-free software. And by default, it hides apps with antifeatures such as advertisements and reliance on non-free add-ons or services. So how are the developers of an app on F-Droid supposed to keep a roof over their heads? And would your suggestion also work for games?

I agree about the beater. The step I don't understand is how someone on a first job between high school and college is supposed to come by the "few thousand dollars" in the first place.

So what if I want to use services that aren't Google's, but I also want to be able to write my own programs for the device without having to pay the $99/year certificate tax to the publisher of the device's operating system?

I was under the impression that in the market for 4 to 5 inch tablets, the iPod touch had "a sufficiently large market share". Can you name any serious competitors in that size range that aren't either A. iOS based or B. intended for use with a cellular network?

I don't know if it's still in force, but there was a time when a single manufacturer wasn't allowed to ship both AOSP devices and Google Play devices.