She was getting fed up with the direction all the tech companies were going and started researching how to take ownership of her shit. I only found out because she asked me about Graphene OS, which caught me totally off-guard because she was an apple person for so long. We talked about it at length, then she decided to ditch her iPhone for a used P9PXL, and asked me to install Graphene OS as soon as it arrived.

She is incredibly sharp and is more than happy to struggle with figuring out a whole new world of privacy and real ownership than deal with forced "upgrades" that do nothing except harvest even more data.

It's not easy to find though

Never used Briar myself, but I like how Delta is decentralized and resilient to outages even supporting multi-relay set ups, easy to use for the "normals," it's private and secure, low (no?) metadata. Among other things I'm sure, that's just off the top of my head.

The ease of use is one of the biggest, I couldn't send someone "normal" a link or QR code and expect them to navigate through setting up XMPP or Matrix accounts, but with Delta I've never had an issue, I've even gotten near tech-illiterate people like my mom to do it. Signal is easy too, but was out for other reasons (mostly phone number requirements.)

Yeah I do when available too, but if something I need isn't on F-Droid I'll use Aurora begrudgingly, just nice to have the option.

It works completely fine without any Google stuff. It will just kill your battery and you'll have to check and update it manually.

They do not need to be, as they can just use the AppStore/PlayStore release.