That’s exclusive to iOS/iPad OS. There aren’t any such restrictions on macOS.

That’s a shame. I wouldn’t bet on Google Pay ever working on GrapheneOS.

Google Wallet didn’t work last time I checked, but contactless payments worked perfectly well by setting my banking app as the payment app.

Not all banking apps work due to the system integrity checks they do. Support for your banking app can probably be confirmed here.

I’m not going to claim that this year is the year, or that any will be. In regards to gaming though, two years ago the number of games which worked through Proton was quite a bit lower, and the number of anti-cheats which worked was effectively zero.

Anti-cheat support is still far from 100%, but it is significantly higher than it was even six months ago. It looks like it will only get better from here.

That doesn’t account for the fact that a picture is equal to 1000 words.

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

DayZ and ARMA 3 both work. ARMA 2 does not though.

While I agree with most of what you said (about Google and Samsung), Apple is pretty clearly encouraging the stigma when it comes to iMessage. They wouldn’t outright tell people to bully, but they are doing as much in an underhanded way.

• Tim Cook says the solution[1] to the issues is to have the people you are talking to change to an iPhone. Hard to see this as anything other than encouraging, or at least accepting bullying.
• Messages in iMessage used to be green, but when the blue messages were introduced, they changed the green ones to make them less readable and break their own guidelines[2]. There is no good reason to do this other than to encourage upset at green messages.
• The Epic vs Apple lawsuit made information public[3] that Apple purposefully doesn’t make iMessage cross-platform in order to lock users in.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/07/tim-cook-explains-why-apple-refuses-to-adopt-rcs-buy-your-mom-an-iphone/

[2] https://medium.com/@krvoller/how-iphone-violates-apples-accessibility-guidelines-6785172eb343

[3] https://www.thurrott.com/apple/248931/apple-didnt-bring-imessage-to-android-because-of-its-lock-in-strategy

The state of Western Australia is 3.6 times larger than Texas, making it larger than Alaska.

In fact, Australia has five states/territories larger than Texas, and only has two states that are smaller. It is just a large country with relatively few divisions of its land.