I'm often surprised by the number of totally valid reasons apps need to connect to the interwebs where you'd think they have no business. Clocks need to sync with time servers, dialers want to get updated lists of spam callers.. not sure what "finder" is but seems plausible that a search operation would need an index to search and even more reasonable that it be server-side. Not to mention reporting telemetry, analytics, errors etc so devs can improve the product. Not saying everyone's a good actor, but just connecting to a server doesn't make them a bad one.

I would understand if the clock was connecting to a dedicated service to sync the time, but the clock app is just an interface where I can set alarms, use stopwatch etc. The system time is managed (and synced) at the Android OS level and so there is no need for apps to connect to the internet, nor for it to have updates.

For the finder app, the index should be local. There is no way I want my apps, documents and file metadata to be sent to some samsung server to be indexed so that I can do a local search -- that would provide no value and it's also features that I've never asked for as a user.

The calls from most of these apps (especially samsung apps) to facebook servers also serve no purpose other than to try and datamine. I understand there may be cases where telemetry is valuable, but it's unacceptable to have apps (in many cases that haven't been opened) to try and connect to a remote server behind the scenes, especially when you cannot remove them easily.

Your “time” example is unfortunately problematic. You need to sync time with something external to the device. If not over the Internet, you’d need to sync via the cell network or GPS or something similar. No getting around it. Component manufactuters have not solved clock drift yet.

The other examples are reasonable.

> The system time is managed (and synced) at the Android OS level and so there is no need for apps to connect to the internet, nor for it to have updates.

I don't understand how this is "problematic". I'm fine with Android being able to use NTP; I'm not fine with a clock app having internet access because it should just pull the time from the system.

Isn't cell network exactly how it used to be done? What is wrong with that?

I'm not surprised - every time I have Android devices (specifically Samsung) on my network, my pi-hole goes ballistic and the charts spike up noticeably. Those are all advertisement CDNs or telemetry. This does not happen with my hardware (all Linux or macOS/iOS).

Same with xiaomi using bloackada