On Tue, Jul 14, 2026 at 8:35 AM Carlos Alvarez via VoiceOps <voiceops@voiceops.org> wrote:
When I dropped my phone in a lake, I picked one up on the way home!  Where do you live that it takes a week?

Back around 2008 you could drop by any cell phone store and buy a new cell phone.

You'd roll the dice and usually end up with some 3rd-party crapware installed.

The one that royally irked me was a Verizon phone that forced me to have some NFL app installed and no matter what I did, I would get random notifications of upcoming football games and scores.  There was no disabling it.

Or you could end up with "Bixby" forced on you.  Ugh.

I've had a personal policy for the last ~20 years to always buy my phone outright from Google so it's the stock Android experience.

I dropped it in the lake on a Friday evening.  Add in the weekend, and Google taking a few days to process and ship and it adds up to about a week.

-A