Ahhh I see what you did there. No, totally, it is either succumb to apples marketing or support Google ad monopoly. I did try to give them the HTC windows phones that I had in reserve but there was a limit to their understanding...

I'd call it a win if you get them into rooting and custom distros like Lineage (which might give them a better overall appreciation of how tech works, encourage them to tinker, etc.)

With big-tech algorithms working against that, weakening their minds so they just accept the easy, clean route of what is put in front of them /s ... good luck :-)

This is a fair comment, I agree in principal I think.

Yeah, I wish there were good Linux options for handheld touch devices. Though I'll have to say that Android rooting as well as Hackintosh experiments (among other things) definitely paved the way for me running Linux fulltime and going into the engineering field. Lineage and others still let you use the standard social apps so you can communicate, while providing a platform to experiment and debug when things go wrong.

The phones from an ad company let you use apps not made by the ad company with the same functionality. The phones from the luxury and ads company don't.

You can side-load any app you want onto your iPhone - you just create a provisioning profile.

Can you side-load an app that acts as the default maps link handler?

I don't know, I'm not your search engine - look it up.

The question was rhetorical. You cannot.

You realize Apple is turning these days rapidly into ad-too company. The money are too sweet and seemingly users don't care enough. And Apple's marketing is much stronger than Google's, just look a this whole thread...