If you’re worried about data collection your first step needs to be to get on either ios or graphene. You are already moving towards graphene so that’s good.

The problem you’re gonna run into with tws earbuds is the app. Each earbud has a whole ass little dsp in it which it needs because the sound is beamed to it as data and translated into analog audio before being sent to an amp and then to the little speaker in the earbud which excites your eardrum.

But in order to keep the timing right if you happen to have both in, they need to also communicate what frame of the mpeg audio stream they’re on and synchronize their output so you don’t have a very disorienting experience.

Now when you have the kind of muscle that lets you decode and synchronize playback between two speakers in real time you also have the computing power to apply the kind of “not just an eq” needed to get really quite nice sound quality out of a package the size of half a pinky finger.

Which is a huge deal because things the size of an earbud sounded like garbage 30 years ago for reasons of the laws of physics. The two ways to resolve that problem are using much more expensive designs and materials or throwing the equivalent of a pentium 4 at it. Take a wild guess which avenue the designers of the sort of tws earbuds you and I can afford went down.

If the maintainer of your phones os is the same as the manufacturer of the earbuds, they probably work great together and you probably don’t need any special software. If they’re not the same then the bespoke set of transforms applied to make the earbuds sound acceptable (or do noise cancelling, voice isolation, room tone compensation and a whole host of other stuff that headphones just fucking do nowadays) won’t be present unless you install the manufacturers special app.

Used to be you only had to worry about how much data your phones os is sending off, now you gotta worry about the middleware that makes your headphones work right too.

The problem with just not using the apps is everything is gonna sound like shit and you’re no longer able to trust what you see in reviews or other people’s experiences on the non review parts of the internet because they’re all using the app. So you can’t even trust other people when they say that some brand/product is good across whatever parameters define goodness for you and them.

You just gotta see what works for you and what can sound okay on graphene without some proprietary app and despite what probably everyone itt is saying, no one can help you make that choice in the slightest. If the shitty $20 Walmart ones work fine without the app and sound okay to you then accept a huge win and stop worrying about it.