My old phone’s battery has given up the ghost. Can someone recommend a current generation smartphone, preferably Android, that strikes a good balance between usability and privacy? I’m also fine with an Android phone that’s not that great with privacy out of the box, but has good support for third party ROMs like Lineage or Copperhead. Even better if the phone’s chassis and battery can just unscrew so I can replace it myself.
I’ve looked into the Pinephone and other Linux-only phones, but I’d like to wait until the app ecosystem is more mature. At least with Android I can use the F-droid apps for privacy consciousness.
I never said anything like that, what I said is that any purchase you do is going to be on a company that has or has had ethically questionable practices. One could say, “Well, you should at least buy from a company that isn’t the biggest surveillance machine on earth, to fight back against such practices”, to that I answer that I would fight back (if I had the money) by buying a Pixel and using the most private and secure mobile OS by reinforcing my individual privacy and reapropiating the meaning by which that hardware was created.
What I set is that your proposition contributes more to Google of what one could think. The features GrapheneOS try to raise are not-so-recently but truly-recently promoted features from Google to create a walled garden around Android with their prepared and incoming integration with high-level things like SafetyNet and similar technologies that close the environment to the users in the “general Android ecosystem”.
Maybe if the “verified boot” and their very near tech were not developed or suggested by Google and even promoted and implemented with these integrations I referenced I would have had a different opinion.
Well, and that is without counting the price of these devices even in second hand or from where it comes.