"...if you want an airgapped phone, use it in airplane mode."Right, that's what I do. In fact this post comes from a smartphone sans SIM with airplane mode on, with a firewall against apps phoning home, no Google or Gmail account, all Google Gapps nuked including playstore - in fact all Gapps have been completely removed - not to mention that most replacement apps come via F-Droid.
Yes, technically it's not fully airgapped but it is against Google and that's my main aim.
Of course there's a penalty: I also carry around both a pocket router with WiFi and SIM to which the smartphone connects as well as the dumbest of dumb phones just for phone calls.
Yes, it's a little inconvenient in that the combined paraphernalia is about equivalent to two normal smartphones (both the router and dumb phone being somewhat smaller). Next step is to upgrade to a Fairphone or equivalent. (I've often wondered where I'd fit on a percentage scale of users who'd go to such lengths - somewhere between 0.1 and 0.001% I suspect.)
You may well ask why I've gone to such lenghts. It's more principle than privacy really. It's because governments around the world completely abrogated their responsibility when they deregulated the once-private telephone networks in the 1980s, when they did they let the Wild West take over. This 'vacuum' then led to a depreciation in the value of privacy on telephone networks. The ultimate insult came when the vacuum was filled by the likes of Google and others who usurped the last vestiges of our telephone privacy for good - and these damn governments just stood by and let it happen without so much as whimper. Remember, we telephone users were never first consulted about our privacy - governments just let Google and Apple et al take over the whole damn caboodle without question. (In the future after all the world has finally woken up to the disaster then we'll have dozens of historians trying to figure out what the hell happened and why. When realization finally dawns everyone will be flabbergasted.)
Now, long after the horses have bolted and without so much as an apology, governments are trying to reign in the likes of Google and Facebook. Right, our governance is a fucking farce - it has to be when governments simply allow Big Tech to not only effectively overrule longstanding law but also to go on and do whatever they damned well feel like with impunity.