These applications are viruses. They eat all your resources, make connections to the network, and you can't get rid of them. I don't understand how some (most?) of humanity has accepted that it's acceptable for Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Huawei to make it mandatory to use their spyware. If i as an individual sold phones that are tied to crappy malware i would be in prison very quickly.

They control your phone, you don't. On some older Galaxy phones, you could at least unlock the bootloader and install LineageOS (which is much faster due to not running all this malware) but apparently it's not supported on S7. Samsung is slowly becoming the new Apple where you can't remove your battery without a screwdriver and there's a "Knox" security where if you lose your password (or somebody donates a phone without donating the password) the hardware will go straight to the (non-)recycling bin.

Is buying a PinePhone the only option to get decent hardware without lock-in for under 300€?

Can you give examples of the Apple spyware you're mentioning? I'm familiar with the on-device scanning for iCloud-backups-using phones, but for me that's it. How wrong am I?

I don't have examples on iOS because i've never used an iPhone, but on MacOS Apple was caught red-handed asking their central server authorization to run 3rd party programs whenever you start an application. It was only discovered because their server failed and programs failed to start:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959

I think we can agree this perfectly fits the definition of "spyware"? There's probably countless other examples i'm unaware of, and to be fair Apple is certainly not the only actor engaging in such outrageous behavior (Microsoft is another, perhaps more famous one).

EDIT: It appears there's studies of iOS data collection and it's really scary. Previous discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28741262

I can’t say for certain it literally spies on you, but the majority of pre installed apps on iPhone are still not removable (this has been gradually improving each year since like 2016).

It turns out a good phone with good customer service and reasonable repair options is worth more than 300€ yes.

Sadly we have been made believe that it could be much cheaper, but there are hidden human, privacy and environmental costs.

Hopefully we finally start paying the actual cost for our smartphones, and our planet, the kids and our privacy will be grateful for it.

Buy dirt cheap used, install better OS.

You can go to your settings, to the list of apps, and tap Disable.

That will also stop the updates, and it gives you an option to uninstall all updates when you disable it.

Also, since those apps are usually on the system partition, if you did have a way of removing them that space still isn't as useful as the rest of the space on your phone (not read/write except when updating/installing).