Is this that Honeywell REDLink stuff? When I got my heat pump installed, they put that crap in. It was ill behaved on my network. It needs the Internet so… you can manage the thermostats from the Honeywell all on your phone? I think?
You have a lot of options for thermostats. I think it does want some kind of external temperature to know when it’s too cold to run the heat pump. I ended up re-installing the Ecobee thermostats that I used to have; these are probably not any better from a privacy perspective. But I had a long conversation with my installer, and he distrusted them because they got their external temperature from “the internet”, which he felt was risky. “What if your network goes down? What if the temperature at your house is different than at the airport, or wherever they measure the temperature?”
In reality, the external thermostat was also risky the way they set it up, because “what if the sun is shining directly on it and you get an inaccurate reading?”
I was getting the itch to buy a new phone to replace my Pixel 7a a few months ago. At about 10pm I got my USB cable and followed the instructions. By 10:30, I think I was booting into GrapheneOS for the first time. It’s been working great ever since. The battery life is not quite as good as before, but I also switched some stuff around – I’m running Owntracks instead of Life360 for example. So who knows how much worse it really is. If at all.
Biggest thing I’m losing out on is Google Pay. But that was almost always a novelty anyway. I never found my phone could 100% replace the need to have a credit card on me, so nothing much has changed in my day-to-day life.
But I’m now installing apps from F-Droid instead of the Play Store, so there’s that!