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People Are Keeping Their Phones Longer Because There's Not Much Reason To Upgrade, Study Finds (vice.com)
According to a recent study by Hyla Mobile as reported by the Wall Street Journal, a mobile-device trade-in company, the average age of an iPhone at trade-in is now 2.92 years. That's up from 2.38 years in 2016, and 2.59 in 2017, according to the company. From a report: Part of this, according to Biju Nair, chief executive of Hyla Mobile, is because phone plan carriers moved from a subsidized payment model for new phones, to payment plans, as smartphones got more expensive over the years. Now, if you purchase it from a big carrier like Verizon or T-Mobile as part of a plan package, your phone is basically on loan to you from the carrier, while you make smaller monthly payments until it's paid off and you own it outright.
It can take years to pay off a new smartphone (the iPhone XS Max costs almost $1,100), and once you've done it, there's not much incentive to give up that investment -- especially when the newest models aren't much different in terms of specs and performance than the one you already have. Add to this the efforts by right-to-repair groups to raise awareness about the fact that your phone actually doesn't need to go in the garbage every time you crack the screen, and you've got people keeping their phones longer. The way we view new technology has also changed in recent years.
It can take years to pay off a new smartphone (the iPhone XS Max costs almost $1,100), and once you've done it, there's not much incentive to give up that investment -- especially when the newest models aren't much different in terms of specs and performance than the one you already have. Add to this the efforts by right-to-repair groups to raise awareness about the fact that your phone actually doesn't need to go in the garbage every time you crack the screen, and you've got people keeping their phones longer. The way we view new technology has also changed in recent years.
I have a Sony Z525 I'd still be using if the network still supported it.
I'm sure then network will change again, making "legacy" phones
obsolete and forcing people to purchase another device.
Now, get off my lawn!
CAP === 'visibly'
I want my darn headphone jack. And I'm keeping it until my phone is unrepairable.
But the software, if you don't count the 2nd eink display of devices like the yotaphone3.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Most phones are just mobile web-browsers and SMS viewers anyway. The majority of people who play cutting-edge mobile games are still years away from having disposable income and the serious photographers (cameras are bizarrely the focus of most smartphone reviews these days) have actual cameras. As far as I can tell the only brand even trying to extend the functionality of smartphones is Caterpillar (the S61 has FLIR, a VOC sensor and laser ranging).
It's an absolutely welcome development as the amount of e-waste the humanity is producing is staggering. Now, let's increase the average duration of smartphone ownership to at least five years and make smartphones upgradable.
I don't think this is a new issue. I've always replaced my phones when they stop being useful rather than when a new phone/feature comes out. Generally this puts me on track to get a different phone once every four years, give or take a little. I can't imagine shelling out a grand for a phone that is almost identical to the one I had last year.
My old phone doesn't have a notch. I want a notch! I need a new phone!
seems to me the price has a lot to do with keeping the phones longer, especially since the the prices have gotten so high. I was replacing my phone every two years, now it will be three years because of financing through at$t
But you may run out of support on Apps for your old gear and find no ear for your complaints...
System is geared for consumption and profit from there. Using old gear is counterproductive to this philosophy - try to win against that, fat chance.
Long term effect of this, I leave it to your fantasy.
Underlying reason, same thing, maybe the fiddler crabs effect, he who has the biggest claws gets the female.....
The iPhone 6 generation, 7 generation, and 8 generation were nothing but larger and faster. TouchID was the generational change and Apple didn't offer another generational upgrade until FaceID. By then I had already moved to the Galaxy s8+ and while not nearly as refined as the iPhones, I think they offer better customization and features.
Now that nearly everyone has a Smart Phone to a point where we just call them normal phones.
And by phone there is a tiny chip that is connected to a radio broadcaster and receiver, and the rest is a computer crammed into as small of a form factor as possible.
But Unlike the Black Berry days or the first iPhone to around I would say the iPhone 4 or 5 where having the newest smart phone meant you had a lot of extra power in your pocket where you could do so much more then your peer with the older version or without a smart phone at all.
Today we all have these little rectangle glass front computers that we call a phone, while we may get emotional when someone uses a brand that we didn't choose, for the most part we really don't care anymore. Your Doctor may have an LG Smart Phone, while your garbage man may have an iPhone Xs Plus. It really doesn't matter that much anymore.
Sure there is difference between the $150 smart phone and the $1500 smart phone, but it isn't 10x better. You will be lucky if it twice as good. But still for most stuff you can do the same things with them. So why upgrading until you have too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
you mean taking away ports i've been using for year and adding a whole bunch of spyware and uninstallable nonsense i didn't want or ask for ISNT a reason to shell out 300+ dollars?!
My laptop (M6700) was released in 2012, my phone (Note 4) is from 2014 and my desktop (4770k) is from 2013. They're all sufficient, even in late 2018.
In the case of the Laptop I can't find never Laptops that perform as well or have as much room to expand for anywhere near the price I paid.
What I need from a phone:
1) Ability to make calls/SMS;
2) Being able to check my emails when out is convenient.
That's it.
No bloatware, no camera, no fingerprint reader, no goddamn hole in the screen- I'm sorry "notch", no foldable screen and for god's sake stop trying to make them so thin and "bevel less".
Got my first smartphone a little over a year ago, the only reason I'd upgrade for a new one is if this one gets destroyed in a freak accident or planned obsolescence kills it.
I have had this thing for 4 years. I traded in an old phone (to a radio shack, haha) and paid only $200 for the Note 4. This is the most I have ever paid for a phone.
The thing is a beast and still works great today.
It still plays just about anything I want to play.
It is still fairly speedy.
It is running Marshmallow (6.0.1), so not the newest version of Andriod, but so what, things still work just fine.
I can replace the battery and I have done so only 1 time so far.
It has an SD slot for additional storage.
It has a headphone jack.
It has Bluetooth.
It can screen-cast.
It has a stylus - which surprisingly I use on occasion.
I have absolutely ZERO interest in paying ~$1000 for a phone.
There is simply no reason to get a new phone. I do not want a new phone.
I upgraded this year from a 2012 Galaxy Note II LTE to a LG V20. The main incentives were h.265/HEVC video playback support, fingerprint sensor and a much more capable audio system. The biggest thing was the Note's inability to play HEVC as there is no workaround for that (I can just about tolerate a tiny micro USB DAC angling from the phone and face recognition for unlocking is not great but is OK). I expect and hope it's another few years until I again feel that the device is an obstacle. Naturally Nougat and Oreo are an improvement on KitKat such that I no longer need to root the device to make it work how I want, but the main thing is if the hardware supports the file types/protocols I want to use and the software gets security fixes then I prefer to spend my money elsewhere (my Note II still got security updates until May 2017 in UK on EE).
System is geared for consumption and profit from there
Not true for Apple. In this year's iPhone lineup announcement, they stated that they want people using iPhones longer which is why iOS 12 works on all the same devices iOS 11 did. Furthermore Apple is moving to try and end mining and use only reclaimed minerals from older Apple devices turned in when eventually you do need a new device...
Apple has for a long time been much better about updating old devices and so far the durability is excellent. Of all my old Apple devices I think maybe only my original iPhone is not really usable any longer, but the rest would be to one degree or another (and all still work just fine, including my original iPod).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My phone is due for an upgrade - HTC One M8. The battery only lasts for about 3-4 hours of web browsing now, and there's no new android upgrades, but otherwise there's not really anything wrong with it.
But since I plan on keeping my next phone for 4-5 years, I'm not going to upgrade to a new one until it supports the new L5 GPS standard that allows accuracy down to 30cm. People say "why do you care?" but the answer is for lane-level navigation with google maps. Sure it's not there yet, but it will be eventually, and it would be lame to buy a new phone now that doesn't have this feature, when I expect my next phone to last for 4-5 years.
https://www.theverge.com/circu...
So it's kind of funny that there is actually a reasonable hardware-based upgrade that manufacturers could be putting into their phones this year, to give people a reason to upgrade, but yet practically no-one has.
How ridiculous! If I am going to sink $600 - $1000 into a phone, I wan't the damn thing to last a DECADE at least.
This is one of the (many) reasons why I use a dumbphone (for which I paid 30 bucks).
Here is a concise documentary on the subject.
Any new technology goes through a ramp-up period where the next iteration is substantially better than the previous one. At some point, a new technology with a fixed set of purposes asymptotically produces fewer and fewer returns at each iteration, until the manufacturer struggles to provide enough newness to convince people to upgrade. And sometimes, in the process, even goes backwards in some areas. (going from 3d icons to flat icons, removing transparency from frames, etc.)
PCs went through this several years ago. Currently available hardware is way more capable than most people need, and operating systems have gotten as good as they're going to get for present use cases. As users, we're still looking for that Minority Report touch interface, but it doesn't look like we're ever going to get it. So PC and tablet markets stagnate.
Phones have reached the same stage. They're "good enough", and there's no longer any compelling reason to pay hundreds of bucks on the next tiny iteration.
What can move things forward is a "killer app", a new purpose for a particular class of device, that requires new hardware and software to support. (For tablets, this would be an interface that allows competent content creation -- again, see "minority report" -- but tablet manufacturers are only selling to content consumers, apparently.). Virtual gaming allowed phones to limp forward another cycle or two, but currently there's really no compelling feature that needs to be added or improved.
At least, no feature that the manufacturers *want* to add or improve. Battery life still sucks, and batteries tend to wear out and are getting harder and harder to replace. And manufacturers still want us to pay a high boutique premium for storage, at a time when flash is dirt cheap. Instead of providing phones that last a week on a charge, which would actually be useful, manufacturers seem to be convinced that we want credit card thinness as a feature. (I do not. Thin phones are hard to hold and more prone to breakage.)
And so, the industry stagnates, while manufacturers continue trying to whip the horse forward, not realizing it died some time ago.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Phones are getting bigger - want was called phablet size is now phone size. Even cheap $200 phones have at least a 5.5" screen. The manufacturers say it is because that's what people want, but I think it's the converse - they want people to buy new phones so they mass produce big ones. Anyhow, maybe people are holding on to their old phones cos they can actually carry them around.
They should use the edge-to-edge screens to reduce the size of phones, say a 5" screen in what used to be a case for a 4.5" screen.
Now that I know what today's smartphones really are for, which is the selling of my personal information, I feel there is no compelling reason to purchase a new one. My next cellular phone will be either a simple flip-phone with no "apps", or a smartphone which is a true PC in a small, "phone"-factor format that runs my choice of Linux OS which *I* can control. Anything other than that, and I'm not going to purchase one. I lived the first 30 years of my life without a cell phone, I'm sure I can live the remaining 30 years without one.
Does everything I need it to, still. Rough around the edges here and there, but not rough enough for me to spend $600 to $1,000.
My phone has a replaceable battery, microSD card, and a headphone jack. It runs just fine and does everything I need a cell phone to do.
I also got it used online for around $120.
Tell me again why I need to buy a new phone that doesn't have any of that and will cost me almost 10 times as much?
Shocking, I know, but I don't feel the need for a new phone. I still love the AMOLED display with its vibrant colours.
The fact that it has a headphone jack and replaceable batteries just reinforces my commitment to this "ancient" phone
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The same feature loss is happening on Android phones too. My Samsung Galaxy S5 has both MHL (HDMI) and an IR transmitter. I can both connect it to a TV and control the TV with it. Fantastic for traveling, especially being in the Navy. I can connect my phone with my movies to a TV in the mess, or in barracks rooms when attach posted to a different city, or just when at a friend's house.
In the S6 they dropped support for both, In the S6 they even dropped a MicroSD slot. Of course with that abortion that Android KitKat was where they took away normal user write privileges onto the sd card, the writing was on the wall that they were going to try that. That was an obvious ploy to go the Apple route and make you pay hundreds and hundreds extra.
So it's not just Apple that drops really nice features. Android phones are falling over themselves to drop features. In fact, I've noticed there is this life cycle for all goods. You have three stages. Phase 1 is the prototype, phase 2 is the feature phase, and then the phase 3 mass market stage. The prototype phase is where it's new technology, and still working out the bugs. The feature phase is where they throw every feature they can think of at it to encourage wide adoption and because they aren't really sure all the things people will want. Then you have the mass market phase, where they zoom in on the center of the bell curve and getting anything outside that basically requires getting an older model.
I love my phase 2 Galaxy S5. I'll keep it until the oLed degrades beyond recognition.
I refuse to buy these overpriced "flagship" phones, nor will I do any kind of cellphone contract, so I'm perfectly happy with a 2013-vintage
Nexus 5 on the Ting MVNO. My phone bill for my phone and my wifes phone for the month is usually around $40, and thats with my using nearly 2Gb of data for the month. When this Nexus 5 croaks, I'll likely move up to a Nexus 6...
Get OFF my lawn... :->
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
They can't suddenly become good, because Physics.
Rugged phones are a thing. Look into Moto Force or Galaxy Active.
Circumcision is child abuse.
People say "why do you care?" but the answer is for lane-level navigation with google maps.
Google Maps doesn't even really use GPS to figure out what road you're on (Interstate vs. frontage road). They still use some of the same clever tricks as this ancient navigation system that didn't even have GPS. Compass and momentum sensors are matched to the shape of the road. Turns are mostly detected the same way. Location is calibrated by GPS only occasionally, because it's a huge battery hog.
surprise surprise surprise...
there is a good reason for the update.
My last update was from Samsung Galaxy S3 to the S7. The reasons being much better camera and wanting to try the Samsung/Occolus VR googles.
And my two requirements are:
1. Headphone jack
2. Support for secondary SD-Card storage so that I can have 256GB+ storage for video, audio and pictures without extortionist prices (Internal storage for apps only)
So the way things are going now, it seems my S7 will have to last for a long, long time.
With a stupid notch and no headphone jack. I'll be sticking with the 6s for a while yet. I've just put Lineage on an S4 and it runs very nicely so I've got that as an alternative.
and better radios. That's the only thing that will get me to upgrade. And more speed is not what I want. I get 10 mbps when I get anything. I want a better signal that doesn't drop when I'm in a building or driving the 90 minutes to the next city over where my kid's in college.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
My phone is reasonably small, has two SIM-slots, an SD-card slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and is back to 100% battery charge in 5 seconds (by replacing the battery with my already charged second battery).
Every newer phone got worse in one to all of the above categories, so my money goes into other things.
When unit sales went south, I-phone prices went up. Inevitably, that means unit sales go even more south. That is almost the same as saying, I-phone loyalists keep their phones longer. Except I-phone loyalists are also defecting to mid-priced Android brands, or less costly Android flagships.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The study was done by the department of "well, duh..." I know it's a popular thing to do know to criticize obvious research but... this one was like, REALLY obvious. Like a study that finds chocolate is popular. Or beer. Like, well, uh, no-DUH!
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
1. Your phone costs as much as your first used car
2. When a piece breaks, you try your hardest to replace it
3. They are designed to fail in progressively shorter timeframes
Not like a car:
1. Car manufacturers send recall notices and pay the shop bill to correct critical product defects for the life of the vehicle.
Phones used to be "free" with your subscription - other than locking in for a other two year contract, there was no out-of-pocket difference between continuing to use your old phone or getting the latest & greatest. Now, getting a new phone means your monthly rate goes up $30 a month for the next two years until you pay it off - a bigger hurdle for many people.
Compass and momentum sensors are matched to the shape of the road. Turns are mostly detected the same way. Location is calibrated by GPS only occasionally, because it's a huge battery hog.
Eh, I don't really think that's true.
If it were, picking you phone up or throwing it around in the car would disrupt the navigation, making it think you were turning corners when you weren't etc. I've never gone out of my way to try and fool the system, but I've also never had it glitch out in the times that I have moved my phone around in the car.
Also if you look on google maps there is a blue radius that it draws to represent your approximate location, and that radius can shrink and grow as its GPS signal strength changes.
I'm still using it from 2015 that I got for free! :D
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Google Maps' location service usage totally mystifies me. I've had multiple times over the past few months when Google Maps and/or Waze both SWEAR that "GPS is not available" (or act like it's unavailable), yet ChartCross GPS Test Pro reports that I have more than a dozen GPS+Glonass satellites in view & can figure out where I am with sub-10m accuracy.
I've noticed in particular that both apps get really, REALLY confused if you're someplace that has poor/no internet connectivity (like I-75 across the Florida Everglades, especially the western half). It's like they get so distraught about being unable to contact Google, they completely FORGET that the phone is entirely capable of figuring out its location all by itself locally & don't even TRY.
In the case of the Laptop I can't find never Laptops that perform as well
In the case of the laptop I can't even find laptops that perform as well.
Apparently I had a stroke mid comment.
First off, it throws out obvious junk data. Secondly, that blue radius grows and shrinks more based on how recently it grabbed GPS data combined with its confidence with the algorithm rather than how strong the signal is. Google Maps also uses cell tower triangulation part of the time to keep up with position because it's cheaper battery-wise.
Anyway, just read Google's own patent application that explains how snapping to roads works and what the prior art is:
https://patents.google.com/pat...
Especially looking at where they use the accelerometer and gyroscope data.
It takes time to acquire and process signal. It's probably just saying "signal lost" rather than explain the details that no location data is available yet because it's still working on it. This is as opposed to the cell tower assisted GPS that's also used for E911.
They took away headphone jacks on most high end nerd / beast models.
They've added idiotic curved displays, I do NOT want one of these.
They took my damn home button away, and presumably the fantastic wonderful context / multi-task and back buttons being in CONSISTENT DEDICATED LOCATIONS (literally one of the primary reasons I switched Apple to Android 8 years ago)
I'm ok with the built in battery, not a fan but ok.
I'm fine with the sizes of the displays but those 3 things above (particularly 1 and 2) I will NOT purchase a new phone until I have to. They're saving me money.
(Oh and I'm not 'upgrading' my Note 5, semi-powerful, for a low level model with those features. I'm a nerd, I want my PREMIUM, POWERFUL handset to not be curved / have headphones)
I have my fingers crossed for the RED Hydrogen One. If it ends up being easily-rootable, I'll probably be getting one to replace my Nexus 6P (one of the best Android phones, ever... but its battery problems are really starting to annoy me, and unfortunately it's just not quite up to the task of running Daydream VR and ARCore (it has the raw specs "on paper", but literally can't take the heat).
No, this is on the same device that's running Google Maps & Waze, at the same TIME it's running Google Maps & Waze. Maps/Waze will complain that there's "no GPS", I'll switch to ChartCross GPS Test+, get a location fix within 10 meters within a second or two, kill & re-launch Maps or Waze, and they'll STILL complain that there's "no GPS".
From what I've read, it's partly because Maps & Waze don't view the phone's "GPS" as a particularly high-resolution source of data. Apparently, they don't even LOOK at the phone's "real" GPS/Glonass until they've completely given up on figuring out your location by tower-triangulation, wifi-sniffing, and using the gyro/accelerometer/magnetometer to detect turns and motion. If you're someplace like an arrow-straight highway with no turns, no traffic lights, no discernible nearby wifi, and unreliable wireless data service (like I-75 across the Florida Everglades), both Google Maps & Waze end up in a world of pain, because a strategy that works reasonably well in dense urban areas (with lots of wifi SSIDs mapped by Google) falls flat on its face out in the middle of the Everglades.
I'm sitting here watching the guy beside me trying to get his headphones to work with his "new" Iphone 7. It didn't come with a headphone jack, so he had to buy an adapter that looks stupid and will probably break easily. He has spent about 40 minutes trying to get it to work properly. Yes, he could buy a bunch of new devices like bluetooth headphones etc, but his existing headphones were decent enough. But hey, at least the phone is thinner (like that makes any difference) and it can load up Whatsapp a micro second faster. Whoopy doo! And those 'improvements' only cost a few hundred dollars! I think I'll be hanging on to my Xioami 4X a little longer. Sure there are phones with faster CPUs out there, but my apps open lightning fast and I have 64gb rom so no problem with storage space. It would take something particularly special to get me to buy a new phone now.
I think Xiaomi have kept the jack on their flagships. But either way, phones just aren't that interesting anymore. They've kind of reached their potential hardware- and operating system wise, and now it's up to app developers to make them more interesting. Unfortunately most app developers seem to be too interested in data mining, so your paying with your personal information.
I have lane level navigation on my phone here in the UK.really handly when I need to know which lane to be in. It's a Xiaomi Redmi 4x and lasts nearly two days on a charge. It cost me a fraction of the price of a Samsung (I had been using Samsung flagships before that) and is just as good.
Last year, one of our Motorola phones stopped holding charge all day, so I ordered the same, 3 year old model as a refurbished one for a fraction of the cost of a new one. It's good enough, pretty feature rich and . . . cheap.
Make love, not reality television.
They certainly fight GPS usage - just about everything uses less battery. Even some very convoluted stuff.
I bought my cell phone in April 2006 and it's still running strong. I've dropped it dozens of times and even lost it once in a NYC taxi. (The driver mailed it back.) I've replaced the battery twice but that's it.
When technology is new, the devices get noticeably better with each new generation -- for a while. Then, the new development turns to cheapening production costs and cosmetic changes. That's when people realize that what they already have is good enough, and there is no real benefit to spending money on a new gadget. It happened with PCs, and now it's happening with mobile phones.
These devices are super complex and cannot possibly be completely bug free the day they go on sale. By waiting a year, you get to see which devices are proven dependable and have been "tested" millions of times by a very large population. When you buy a proven model, you're less likely to feel like you got took.
Two reasons:
1) Much better price for "new old stock"
2) Issues have either been mitigated
For example, I'm using a PIXEL 2 XL that I bought about 2 months ago on Swappa.com
Previously, even though the NEXUS 5X had problems, the ones I bought had already been recalled and reworked by LG. My high-schooler is still using one and I have one on standby for that inevitable event of hearing "I cracked my phone screen", though I've noticed that Android phones, in a case, generally don't crack nearly as often as iPhones.
That was exactly what I wrote a bit ago in here.
There is simply no reason to upgrade phones anymore. They are a fraction better than the one before.
Basically today the software is being the only "reason" to upgrade, when Google and manufactures forcefully stop updating older phones after a year in a not very honorable attitude.
Then you root it and install the next rom.
Take a look at Purism Librem 5 Linux phone.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
I'm still waiting for OLD tech to reach my phones. My home router was high end costing 125$ 11 years ago. Wifi N (draft), with the 5ghz band. My first smartphone in 2011 cost double, but was single band. A poorly researched Bestbuy laptop a year later cost 850 but lacked both the 5ghz band and bluetooth. It's on the last legs of its second battery refresh and some hardware and functions are impacted / falling apart, but I can't replace it for a newer one, especially losing Windows seven in the process.
But I digress. The current cheap Android 7 phone 1 year ago cost as much as my router from a decade earlier but the Android mfrs still don't see fit to Support the second band. On the Samsungs and LGs that do, I see the 40mhz high speed modes are incompatible, so the commoditized chips are least-effort implementations. If I truly want to hold off just to get THAT crippled version of 5ghz tech that isn't anywhere near today's Wifi AC offerings, I'll have to hybernate a long while. And sadly, I am pining for the time when Wifi 6 and/or WPA3 drafts have obsoleted anything available today for security reasons.
I am hurting for a camera replacement, but hear even AC only comes with the multi-thousand dollar DSLRs, and a handful at that. Guess I'll never be able to retire my lousy, router 2.4ghz band at this rate...
As for GPS, I only care that it cold boots quickly and not jerk around too much. My cheap phone's implementation is failing at both, and it is a pipe dream for me to expect 0-year old tech that offers little more than higher precision for the old functionality to cascade to my needy hands faster than the more functional wifi flavors. I only get satisfaction if I go out there and pay top dollar, though... but diligent research can't be ignored or you end up with a moderate midrange purchase that you consider a sunk cost, like my semi-inadequate 2.4ghz band laptop.
Ok, thanks.
So do you think that the L5 GPS probably will take quite a few years to actually be used by Google Maps, then? I don't use GPS for any other purpose.
How, exactly, are Russia and China going to use GLONASS and BeiDou to track you? They're satellite constellations in space that basically broadcast highly-accurate timestamps that are used along with published ephemera data to determine location based upon the measured time of reception vs the received timestamp.
Yeah, 99% of phones fetch ephemera data over the internet... but that's just a convenience that allows them to grab it in a single gulp within a few milliseconds, instead of collecting it a few bits at a time over the span of ~10 minutes as it gets interleaved into the satellite broadcasts themselves. There's no insidious two-way data-transfer involved. If you want to be paranoid, you can use any of the systems in a completely 100% offline manner, just like GPS.
If anything, the slightly adversarial nature of US, Chinese, and Russian foreign policy means that the likelihood that even two out of the three would ever agree about anything long enough to intentionally degrade the accuracy of their satnav constellation services is approximately zero. A device can literally scoop up data from all three, compare it for accuracy with 2-out-of-three voting, and just throw away whichever one seems to be in disagreement. Even IF two out of the three managed to negotiate a period of mutual service degradation, by the time it actually happened their original motivation for doing it would almost certainly be moot. The fact that all three are adversaries helps to keep all three honest.
TL/DR: your personal use, or non-use, of GLONASS and BeiDou have absolutely zero impact upon the ability of either China or Russia to track you. Neither country cares at all whether or not you use their service, and intentionally refusing to use them achieves nothing besides diminishing the accuracy of your own satnav devices.