knownunown

UEFI seems pretty prevalent with AArch64 in general -- pretty much all recent Qualcomm Android devices do UEFI boot.

The manufacturer usually modifies OpenWRT/QSDK to support their device. AFAIK, most of the time individual components from the device (CPU, Ethernet switch, wireless chip) are already supported in OpenWRT, it's just that the specific combo that the device contains just isn't there yet. This configuration is done with the device tree. On top of that, some manufacturers (Tp-Link, for example) don't use the standard OpenWRT sysupgrade image format, so the device rejects the new firmware that you try to flash.

It uses V8.

You're correct with iOS, but Android allows browsers to have their own rendering engine (see: Firefox with Gecko.) Microsoft just didn't want to invest in porting EdgeHTML to Android.

This sounds like whataboutism.

This article is a little sensationalist. If you don't want to trigger the Assistant, you can turn off the "OK, Google" keyword. If you don't want your voice data to be used for research/analysis, there's a checkbox for that too.

Well, this was my solution before this shorter way came along. A force of habit, really, since I noticed that it was Android's internal method of detecting captive portals. There's really no reason to use this over neverssl.com, other than the gstatic.com page returning an empty response (or redirecting you if you're actually behind a captive portal). Somewhat useful if you don't want to leave the new tab page.

I just use connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204. The URL is a bit long, but I have it bookmarked.