I don't own one but I agree, it ist very good. But it's too expensive for what it is nowadays. A second hand one or maybe the next generation might be worth it again
I use an amazon fire tv 4k, I only use it to start jellyfin. It's perfect.
If you don't want it to phone home, put it behind a firewall, and block all but your domains
Even worse. Many apps have google signature instead of the developers. They upload their key and give it to google. Horrible practice. Nowadays, fdroid gravitates towards reproducible builds with the dev's own signature and google is going the other way round. Gravitating towards an unsafe "best practice" ...
If that's of your concern, you can't download the play store version either. It is the same app, has the same signature.
Thats not a random apk
Another intepretation: one uses data to distinguish between popular and crappy stores.
I always neglected it because of its name. I thought it's something for rust...
Important tool
Storage is cheap. You suggest combining the images and storing the difference.
You can't separate the images anymore. You have to store them in a container such that you have one common base image. You can then later on decide which image to look at.
You could also take a short video and only display one image.
Avif uses a video compression algorithm, meaning it's basically one frame of a video.
Btw, I wouldn't care about your problem. Storage is cheap. Try saving 10 4k videos and you'll laugh about your image library
Have you met nix?