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There's a compromise solution to achieve something equivalent. And I say so after having tried many possibilities. Buy a Pixel or any other phone that supports
by nextos 8y ago
There's a compromise solution to achieve something equivalent. And I say so after having tried many possibilities.
Buy a Pixel or any other phone that supports AOSP (Sony does too, with some caveats) and install plain AOSP.
It's not perfect as you need a bit of infrastructure to compile it yourself and keep OTA updates. But it's the most practical secure and privacy-respecting option, I think.
- pedrocr 8y agoAs far as I know those have the exact same issues with their kernels. The problem isn't the Android side of things, that's workable with Android One phones too. The problem is what is described in the article, the kernels at best get some patches but are never upgraded to new versions. Imagine if your Linux laptop was restricted to the specific kernel version the particular vendor had decided to ship initially.
- liotier 8y ago> Imagine if your Linux laptop was restricted to the specific kernel version the particular vendor had decided to ship initially In older times, kernel patches for exotic hardware often tied the user to a specific version - of course a very stale one... Let's not go there again !
- metildaa 8y agoThe shoddy build quality, plus lack of microSD & heaphone jack means I will never buy a Pixel or other Google branded hardware. My friends seem to get a year or so before the SoC desolders from the motherboard, causing the device to bootloop, or the battery fails, or one of a million other things. Among us, there are a few dozen Pixels that are unusable due to their hardware defects. Meanwhile, both of my old Galaxy S4's is going strong, and ditto for all but one of my LGs (one had its charge controller start smoking, LG repaired it).
- tremon 8y agoSame here. Galaxy Note II, still going strong. I bought a new battery for it a year ago, expecting the old one to go out soon, but I still get more than three days battery life from it.
- mavhc 8y agoMy Galaxy S3 died due to a known fault with the flash storage, can't repartition it to fix it
- noderat 8y agoI have owned since launch day a Nexus 1, Nexus 4, 2x Nexus 6, 2x Nexus 7 and Pixel 2 XL and they are all currently still functional well past their warranty. (The Nexus 1 was replaced by Assurion for water damage with a refurbished device @1.5yrs but replacement is still running.) In fact my Nexus 4 is still in use every day as an APRS GPS receiver/data logger, and one of the Nexus 6s is now in use by a co-worker as a OBD2 data logger/HUD. I've avoided Samsung devices (including Galaxy Nexus/Nexus S) because the girlfriend has had the last 4 Samsung devices fail or become completely usable right at the end of the warranty (+/- 2mo) running completely stock. For those that became completely unusable it was usually pitiful battery life, the others became too slow to function on stock roms that I suspect they failed due to internal storage wear. Not even custom roms could save them. I keep my devices a long time, and frequently repurpose them after they are no longer my primary device. Non-Samsung "Pixus" problems are overblown, except Nexus 6 AMOLED burn-in which is annoying but didn't present itself until it was used daily as a HUD.
- metildaa 8y agoSeems like you missed the horrid bootlooping issues of the Nexus 5x, the bad battery firmware on the Nexus 6p, and the bootlooping and flakey charge controller on the OG Pixel. Your choice in devices of the Nexus/Pixel series is very lucky, you avoided the defective models nearly entirely. I have no faith that I will be similarly lucky.
- paulie_a 8y agoI won't buy anything but pure Google, Moto or lg phones anymore. If they start adding crappy software replacements I will switch. Samsung is a non starter there, hard coded button for bixby is idiotic. Also bixby is idiotic.
- shmerl 8y agoDoes Pixel work with upstream kernel? Does it use many blobs? Sony Xperia XA2 looks interesting, but not sure how usable it would be with upstream kernel and Mesa.
- izacus 8y agoPixel uses the same SoC as most other phones and thus has about same amount of blobs. The difference is that Google tends to update the OS faster and they're noticably more hardened in security sense.
- Vinnl 8y agoThe Fairphone actually provides an official AOSP image, so you don't have to compile it oyurself and you keep OTA updates. However, it still has the problem that it cannot realistically update beyond Android 7.