Also, I hate how smartphones are a necessity in todays world, you usually need them for verification, paying bills, etc.
There are definitely lots of things you need a smartphone for today, but fortunately few enough that it's practical to not have a smartphone with you most of the time, even if you own one.
Hopefully if enough people go phoneless, society will adapt to require smartphones less often.
Actually Apple seems decent with storing personal information on-device, or at least giving the user options to control it. As shown in my pi-hole, my Apple devices send way less requests to tracking and data harvesting domains compared to Microsoft and Google/Android products.
Isnt that just the APIs retrying when blocked?