Yeah smartphones are unfortunate since with COVID now you have to have one to check in in my country, but the second test is reputation. I’ve not heard of apple or android bricking a phone like this but FB/Google account bans and limitations are common.

I guess we can’t be purist anymore but being pragmatic is still possible and you can divert funds away from FB this way to a company that cares about the headsets they sell and the user experience

You can use a smartphone without linking to a faang account. Though it still has a device ID which it uses to talk to some infra if you keep the stock firmware.

My smartphone cannot be remotely turned into an overpriced wheel chock by someone in a call center.

Apple at least can absolutely do this, that's what the purpose of reporting a device stolen is.

OK but that's a very different story, one is stolen and at the request of the owner, the other is for some ethereal vague hard to pin down rule that was broken with no way to resolve it. My use of my property that I own should not be contingent on some behavioral rule on some website that could change at any time. Don't give money to companies that can remotely brick your property without your explicit request.

Apple also has phone numbers you can call with a human at the other end who can help resolve stuff like this.

You can disable Google services on Android. There's literally a button to do that if you know where to look.