They could also buy a used Pixel to avoid giving money to Google. I suspect that's the reason for the no-Google-rule.
bobbytables
Never heard if him ¯\(ツ)/¯
They used to but stopped AFAIK. I am not completely sure but that's what I read when the Mozilla Foundation report came out. The other reply said to India so maybe my information is not completely accurate...
Mozilla Foundation did a deep dive into this. And the results where abysmal. The only brands not completely horrifying where Renault/Dacia because they are European and only serve the European market so they have to follow GDPR.
I used it. It was a nice idea but at least for me it got really weird over time. The pics I got were mostly blurred messes. Maybe it was an error on my side but it kind of spoiled the fun after a while.
It was in fact the mum who was good with computers. Bobby himself was never that interested in exploits.
The App "Nine - Mail & Calendar" used to be quite good for Exchange. I used it years ago and was quite happy. Currently it has only 3.5 stars on the Play Store so I don't know how good it still is.
Back when I used it I checked it for privacy and considered it save. No idea about the current status though. It is not FOSS.
Just external - I know it's not the best solution. My setup grew on a tight budget over the last 10 years and for me it was the easiest, most affordable, and extendable/replaceable way. I don't need super fast drives in my home and I don't need backups for most of the data stored on a media server. So it kind of is just a bunch of disks with a NUC.
The internal drive for the system is an SSD though. Came with the computer.
I have a very similar setup like you. A NUC is providing NAS functionality and is running 24/7. An AppleTV is connected to the projector and has all the apps I need for consuming media (Jellyfin, Netflix, etc.). The NAS is running OG Debian with SMB, Jellyfin and even NFS for easy access.
The NUC provides additional features like synching and a few other things.
Why the AppleTV? Because I had Raspis, FireTVs, PCs, and whatnot connected to the projector and the AppleTV is hands down the most convenient one. The UI is super reduced and simple. The remote works. You can get just about every app you might need. And maintainance is basically zero.
Mozilla Foundation did a deep dive into this. And the results where abysmal. The only brands not completely horrifying where Renault/Dacia because they are European and only serve the European market so they have to follow GDPR.