Re: Android keyboard: your choice.

Andrew,

3. However, notice that the fact that Helium Heliboard does not use
  the Internet is meaningless because Google uses the Internet.

As you said it yourself, "that's a terribly misleading sentence".

You might want to explain what, to you, that  "google" in the above sentence
is, and how it "uses the Internet" without given permission to - and
ofcourse how that that "google" gets hold of data generated by other apps*

Yes, I can make an (educated) guess or two to what you might mean there, but
I rather hear it from you.

* an OS sandboxing apps is a thing.  And on my phone an app can access files
it created itself, but not other apps files - simply by denying it
READ/WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions.

hint: not everyone thinks that his lifes enjoyment is directly dependant on
having something like "google play store" installed.

And again: be carefull when you post pertinent stuff like "Firebase App
Indexing (decidedly NOT cloud related)" as you do not really seem to
understand the issue yourself - as you mentioned it, you have no idea where
the "Firebase Indexing Service" is sending its data to, other than 'to
google'.

"Firebase cloud services" is definitily Google, though for some reason you
discarded it (without an explanation) as a possibility of being the target
if your phones uploading.  I still have no idea why.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser