• The location functionality has significantly improved recently since it no longer relies solely on GPS, but yeah, it could still be improved.
• Generally, I’ve found the apps that tend to have problems with exploit protection are games, VPNs, and banking apps (which is probably the sort of app you’d most want exploit protection on…). I’m not sure if I’ve ever had an actual problem with other apps honestly.
• While NFC works, Google Pay does not. Google needs to basically certify the OS for it to work, and they refuse to do so (monopoly gonna monopoly). Basically, this means if you’re in the US or some other country where Google Pay is pretty much the only payment option on Android, NFC payments don’t work. Some places in Europe at least have NFC payments available through banking apps though, so if you happen to reside in one of those countries and your bank has one of those apps with payment support, you should be fine.

Shopping online locally or just finding certain items? It’s not great locally because it doesn’t seem to use your location for searches (which is good IMO), but it’s usually been fine for me if I’m just looking for something I want to buy. Note that you need to tune the results for them to be good (you can adjust site rankings for yourself).

I feel like Kagi, after tuning, provides the best results at the moment (even including Google sometimes). You definitely need to tune it though since the default results are not that great. Agree about their CEO. TBH, at this point, I also wish they weren’t based in the US.

It’s been a few years since I last tried Searx, but I remember the results being pretty bad. Has it gotten better?

I looked into this a while back and came to the conclusion that the dev didn’t seem trustworthy. Also, just looking on the homepage, the images it showed me were a dildo with “4get” stuck on it using a sticky note and a modified manga panel about beating women. Not sure I’d want to use something like that in public.