Or…buy used and get an older, almost identical Pixel!

And Pixels aren’t the only ones with custom ROM support nowadays. Sony’s Xperia devices have the headphone jack (hooray!!!), the microSD slot (hooray!!!), and no notch/cutout (hooray!!), and are supported by LineageOS too (+ derivatives). My next phone might be the Xperia 10 VII actually, it’s relatively new and has good support by LineageOS too.

You also have Fairphone (no jack though, like the Pixels), who make super repairable devices that have excellent custom OS support. Degoogled Android and mobile Linux (!!) are an option, which is awesome! And the devices themselves are quite good for the money, at least if you are European.

And of course, you have companies like Volla and Shiftphone doing their own thing, the former putting mobile Linux as a first-class citizen and the latter focusing on modularity and repairability, like Fairphone.

That’s probably why they’re doing it, now there will be a drop in sales, bc, like using IE to download chrome back in the day, people are buying Pixels to load GOS. Now Scroogle is saying no. Their loss!

Isn’t it fucking awful. We need some independent phone compute platform.

My understanding is that GrapheneOS chose it for specific hardware security requirements that no other family of devices meet (or met at the time) but I kinda agree that it always felt icky to me that Google was simultaneously the software vendor we’re hiding from and the hardware manufacturer that we’re supposed to buy from.

Hehe, I’ve never NOT used a custom rom since, …well the last Nokia with Symbian-OS.

My first Android phone had CyanogenMod available. With tons of extra features, back in the day the camera would get better, you’d get an equalizer for the headphones, some privacy features like remove permissions from apps, revoke their access to contacts, and extra menu options. It stayed like that for a while. Then we got the times manufacturers dropped updates within 2 years but my phones lasted me 4… So I made sure to always pick something with a good chance of LineageOS support. In order not to constantly throw phones in the bin and buy new ones. They also added tons of crapware to my friends’ phones, while mine were without any bloat… That eventually got removable, they added a somewhat proper permission system to stock Android… I had to rock a ZTE phone with the stock operating system for a while because it took the community quite a while to get LineageOS run smoothly. But that’s mainly it. After that I had two Pixel phones. I made sure to try the Google experience for a day each, without any private data on them. Then flashed GrapheneOS. Can’t complain. It’s stupid easy to install it these days. And while you won’t get a bazillion extra features like back in the day, I think it’s still worth it. Main feature is not to be 100% dependant on one big tech company and continuously send all data to their servers.

It doesn’t help that most modern phones don’t support it well because, as it turns out, companies love controlling the device you purchased with your money. If you use a custom ROM, they lose a revenue stream.

If you do want to try though, you can go with (used) Pixels, Sony Xperia devices (HEADPHONE JACK AND MICROSD CARD SLOTS!!), and Fairphone (repairable and modular, kind of neat if you live in Europe but I’m assuming you’re Aussie from your instance)

Very brave to admit you don’t care about your own privacy. Will you share your full name and address with us? You don’t care, right?