I might have worded myself wrong because English isn’t my native language, but I’ve already said my intention wasn’t to mock his decision to guard his data by not explicitly giving them to Google but the meaninglessness of his way to do so.

Because by using an always connected Android phone with all other 3rd party spyware like Facebook etc. he’s already vulnerable, he’s using RCS for messaging, he’s being tracked on so many levels and already owned by corporations, at this point the manual contact sync has little to no sense especially it’s visibly harder for him to do it that way to the point he’s complaining about it.

By saying I use Google provided sync I’m not trying to one up him because I know it’s a trade-off between privacy and convenience, same with Google Pictures, I respect his choice to not use it’s built-in cloud pictures synchronisation but IMHO on a phone without an SD card support but I won’t be silent when he starts complaining after losing all his photos because he didn’t to back them up

Don’t get me wrong I’m all for privacy, but degoogling without an on premise private cloud or similar solution is kinda troublesome at least