I'm thinking of getting a second phone to ease off iOS. It has been good for productivity stuff but the closed off nature of the device keeps disrupting my plans. Everything is either expensive or ad ridden. (Except floccus, floccus is awesome)
So far I have read about graphene OS and am quite interested. I really despise google though. Any chance to use another device and put some linux flavor on it? I was playing with the idea of a pinephone but it seems to be nowhere near daily drivable, fairphone is starting at 580 €, volla phone (german) 450 €...
Some people said xiaomi should be rootable. But the amount of different phones is huge. The price range is awesome though. I was thinking sub 300 €/$ would be awesome so tinkering doesnt hurt me financially.
Disclaimer: I dont want to go full hermit mode with no sim and a faraday bag. I respect the opinion but thats not what I'm trying to do. I want to write some small apps for my phone and use it as a computer if needed. Calling, matrix and browser should work flawlessly.
Any ideas or suggestions? :)
I think you could reconsider your position re Pixel/Google phones. It is the one major maker that allows you to deploy an OS securely on their phone and GrapheneOS is grand. I have used it on a secondary phone for years.
Seconded.
I have calyx os running on my pixel 4 as my daily driver, with microG so I can still use banking app and M$ apps I need for work.
As you can unlock and relock the bootloader, the device security will still attest to the OS validity so security sensitive apps will still work. You can also put the stock Google OS back on easily at a later date if you so choose.
I could, for sure. It may even be a great idea. I'll just have to solve that by myself since I'm very disillusioned by google. Its like if the devil made a good product.
But I get your point. Graphene is probably a lot more mature than others OSs.
This is the ONLY reason I got a pixel, alternate os support. The data they get from me is not worth much in the end as I already know what I will buy from reading on reviews etc. ads, even when I watched TV, don't really work on me and the ones that do catch my eye usually make a sale for another co than the one advertising. Being ND has its benefits
Google dont manage to get data phoned back with GrapheneOS i seem to recall. I may be wrong
Graphene has researched this, and there's one little thing one of the Blobs does - kind of a DNS lookup thing (not actually DNS), I forget exactly what it is.
There was a discussion of it about a year ago.
Graphene gang gang