I like your spirit, but I don’t think a Chinese equivalent to Google Play Services would be more desirable

I find the Jellyfin webapp a pretty bad experience on mobile, compared to FinDroid.

I really like the webapp on my LG webOS TV (especially good with the Magic Remote) though.

So I guess it kind of depends on the platform.

I actually use both apps, I find Organic Maps a lot nicer for looking at a map and navigating by foot or bike, and Magic Earth seems to pick more sensible car routes some times. Also the live traffic data makes it more fitting for car navigation (Organic Maps doesn’t have traffic data).

Jellyfin did some work on integrating the Skip Intros plugin a lot better, AFAIK you just have to enable it once on your server and then once in the settings of all Jellyfin web players.

As for apps, there are some good native third party apps which I mentioned here.

Was this with the first party Jellyfin app or with Swiftfin?

If it was with the first party app, I’d definitely recommend giving Swiftfin a try.

Jellyfin has native apps for Android, Android TV and iOS.

Does Plex offer native apps (that aren’t just stripped down browsers) for more platforms?

I can highly recommend Magic Earth as a Google Maps alternative (also available for Android). It uses OSM data and has some traffic info. It’s not as good as Google, but it’s the closest I’ve found so far.

AFAIK you can enable the snapcast server and then use an app like SnapCast to stream to your mobile devices.

I also use Posteo, one thing to note though is that Posteo doesn’t (and probably won’t any time soon) support custom domains. If that doesn’t bother you, it’s a great choice.

The other alternative I found during my research, which doesn’t have that limitation, is mailbox.org.

Adding to what others here have already said, I’d definitely download Signal and see if you can get any people to move from WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever to Signal.

I don’t know much about iOS apps, but you could look into more privacy focused YouTube clients, and possibly 2FA clients too (although that’s a bit of a controversial topic on iOS AFAIK).

I saw you mention in another comment that you use Amazon Alexa for smart home appliances. Depending on interest in selfhosting / time / motivation to move away from Amazon, you could look into using Home Assistant instead. It even has a Lemmy community: [email protected].

Yep my mistake, I confused ShadowSocks with Cloak.

I’m afraid your best bet here will be using WhatsApp.

Edit:
FindMy (for Android) might also be usable for that, but honestly if you just want it to work I’d still vouch for WhatsApp.

Signal supports a single momentary position, but not live location.

i use miracast where I can (my TV and Samsung phone support it natively), as it pretty much just works and is a decent protocol. Sadly every phone manufacturer that isn’t Samsung seems to have abandoned it right now, but it is still widely supported in TVs. On Linux, there is the app gnome-network-displays (yes it also works on KDE) to cast your screen over miracast.

Miracast is an actual local streaming protocol (closely related to WiFi Direct). For content streaming the only FOSS standard I am aware of is FCast, but sofar it only is implemented in the GrayJay Android app.

Edit: There is also Deskreen for casting a PC screen.

For casting mobile to PC there is also scrcpy.

This isn’t really casting, but I often find that an HDMI cable (often paired with a USB-C to HDMI dongle) is the simplest and most reliable way to display a phone screen on another monitor (as long as the phone supports DP altmode).

What worked for me at my old school was using a ShadowSocks proxy. Basically what this does, is it takes all your traffic and just makes it look like random https traffic (AFAIK). ShadowSocks is just a proxy. The description fits the Cloak module, mentioned below.

I believe multiple VPNs support this, for me with PIA VPN it’s in the settings under the name “Multi-Hop” (PIA only supports this on the Desktop App, not on mobile).

This technique is pretty much impossible to block, unless you ban every single VPN ShadowSocks Proxy IP. If that is the case for you (chances are practically 0), you could also selfhost ShadowSocks in combination with the Cloak module, however this method is a lot more complicated.

If the main battery isn’t “meant to be replaced”, it will often act as the CMOS battery (e.g. MacBooks have been doing this since roughly 2008).

Quite a few cars also still have a SIM card hidden somewhere, which can be removed. The location of it varies widely though and they’re usually pretty hard to find.

That’s incorrect, Graphene OS has Android Auto support.

I was very disappointed with the (default) Camera after switching to Graphene, luckily you can just download the Pixel Camera (including all the Pixel optimizations) from Play Store on Graphene OS or download it as an APK bundle from some other sites (downloading the normal APK won’t work, it has to be the bundle).

Yesss fcast looks incredibly promising. Sadly the only app implementing it seems to be GrayJay, I really hope it will catch on more.