Just because something is free doesn't mean it's not reliable if there are business subscriptions funding the product itself. To me, the amount of telemetry collected from modern crapware indicates a lack of trust in the product from even the developers themselves, which in turn proves to me that the product isn't very good on some level I might not be able to see. Businesses are much more wary if pirated software than consumers so Winrar manages to survive to this day.

These companies can exist the same way Winrar can exist: give people the tool for free, wait for them to want to use it at their business and sell the subscriptions there. Most Windows programs, both freeware and paid, are closed source, that's just the way that ecosystem functions. The same is true for most of macOS/iOS and large parts of the basic feature set found in Android. I can get behind that mindset, but if you're using Windows you've already given up your ability to introspect your system. The risk of using this is much higher than running proprietary ShutUp10, which is already non-zero since it's proprietary.

Though I have zero reason to distrust the Ameliorated folks, you generally never want to mess with software (especially OSes) downloaded from anyone other than the official vendor. If there was one single Lineage build for all phones, I'd feel much more comfortable with it. Not to Lineage, where every phone model has its own build and dev team, and each build gets used by maybe a few hundred or thousand people, and reviewed by practically nobody. The 'open-source means security because code gets vetted' argument only applies to big projects like Chromium, where hundreds of major corporations with world-class software engineers review, and contribute to the source code. Same exact reason people should strongly consider staying away from LineageOS builds and other such things, where the dev team of half a dozen non-vetted anonymous forum users is responsible for everything running on your phone. See XcodeGhost that got caught way after the fact. Generally, even the idea of using an OS downloaded from a random site (big Linux distributions excepted) is a security nightmare: you're trusting random, anonymous people not to put malware deep enough into the OS image where it won't easily be found. This reminds me of the old 'Windows XP Service Pack 4', or Windows 7 Minimalist ISOs that were going around.

Oo shutup