nope, they'll vote on it again in the few weeks. if it passes, e2ee messengers will be required to scan images on device before sending them. you will be able to not agree to that, but then you won't be able to send or receive media and links, only text.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

other than basic text chat, what else does WA offer these days?

group chats, reactions, sending files, voice messages, voice and video calls

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.bnyro.recorder/

if the software is good and works to your benefit, why not use it?

sometimes people just don't feel comfortable using work of someone who opposes their rights. even just using the product gives the creator more exposure, recognition, possible funding in the future if it gets big enough, and so on. so, if the creator is openly transphobic, for example, trans folks won't want to use the product, and doubly so when the community around the product is toxic, too. they're voting with their feet.

yeah, and the UI is absolutely atrocious.

Gadgetbridge is apparently going to support some of their devices in upcoming versions https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/wearables/garmin/

probably because they currently don't get stuffed a bucketload of crackly juice* in 60 seconds

*I don't, in fact, know how electricity really works

...and explode them in the next 60

so it's rebranded Windows with some stuff ripped out, maintained by an unknown entity?

Consent-O-Matic https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/

FYI, for stuff like this you can just use Catima

I tried it and really wanted to like it, but the Android client's UI is just unusable for me. as much as I prefer going FOSS whenever I can, I tried Obsidian and stuck with it. it's electron on desktop and definitely not native UI on mobile, but feels much more polished.