Hardwired software or functionality imposed by companies or authorities

[ryo]

I am planning ways to make the pinephone nearly as private and anonymous as the paperback book mentioned upthread.  Beyond the hopes for POCSAG(yes these messages are sent in the clear but that is nearly as un-private as the reception of a phone call or sms, there are encryption options though the receiver ID is always open) incoming-only regional pager service.  Simply having your navigation map tiles for the region saved for offline use you can avoid coming online to use data, the Kiwix app or browser plugin lets you access much reference data by having a local Wikipedia cache on a SD card or USB drive, while it is more work to use an offline dictionary like Stardict and local dictionary files can be almost as useful as online translation like Google or Microsoft translation services, I am interested what scaling would look like and what we could do with a critical mass of users using LoRa radio add-ons for messaging combine that with local bluetooth and wifi mesh and some sort of person-to-person sneakernet-->fidonet message routing to bypass state controlled telephony and data companies.

For now and probably always we will be a tiny minority who cannot expect to have nearby pinephone users with hyper-capable and hyper-configurable handheld devices to rely on but there are things like Briar messaging protocol which include a user-to-user hard encrypted message forwarding  protocol which for now is primarily for android devices, maybe a pinephone IM system needs to include a Briar Android install APK and instructions to help android users sideload install for use in a regional emergency with communication blackout.

I am encouraging everyone reading this thread to be creative in how we can put as much off-line functionality into the Pinephone experience, how can we plan for service blackouts caused by nature or oppression and plan ways to route around that blockage.

Sounds like nice ideas, although from what I understood about Briar so far is that it only works offline if you're near another Briar user.
So quite useless if most of your friends live spread out over the entire country, plus a few overseas (both as nearby as Korea, and as far away as Germany).

The other problem is battery life, while I know the new Linux kernel by Sunxi has fixed it by a whole lot, it doesn't seem to be available for Mobian yet.
And now that summer is really kicking in, my Pinephone gets so hot after just a while being outside, you can probably use it as a portable BBQ.

These tools are needed by oppressed minorities,

Not really sure what you mean by "oppressed minorities"?

refugees of war trying to cross borders unnoticed,

There are some wars on UN's schedule, so definitely something to keep an eye on.
Although unless it's a war at the scale of America + EU vs Russia + China + Iran, it shouldn't be a concern to most countries.

people living in corrupt dictatorships trying to contact family members,

Every country is technically a corrupt dictatorship, just some governments make it more obvious than others
China and Singapore for example aren't even hiding it, and now that Canada and USA are grabbing more and more power at warp speed, they too are starting to make it more obvious.
The EU is still using their "freedom, democracy, and privacy" blanket to hide the fact.

people even in liberal democracies who still are under the surveillance as individuals or the of the whole population of domestic or foreign police or intelligence agencies by legally or illegally exploiting commercial voice/data carriers, and journalists investigating large companies who can afford expensive private investigators or like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google who literally pass tens of percent of all data worldwide through their own data centers.

Yes, which is why moving away from the tech oligarchs is necessary in order to achieve real freedom.
Staying with them means you consent to them, meaning you're their data slave.

PinePhone and Librem 5 (once the latter finally starts actually shipping rather than delaying its shipping date endlessly) are steps towards the right direction, but that alone won't solve all the problems (like, using a PinePhone to check Fakebook, make Tweets, watch YouTube videos, read emails on Gmail, buy on Amazon etc).
Every big tech product/service has an open source, self hosted (in case of services) alternative, and now that big tech is destroying itself while open source is becoming more superior by the day/week/month (depending on development pase), it's definitely a good time to look into them if you haven't yet.