It's a valid point, and should not be downvoted. Personally, I consider any code produced by Google to be hostile malware. Meanwhile, I'm quite competent with

It's a valid point, and should not be downvoted. Personally, I consider any code produced by Google to be hostile malware. Meanwhile, I'm quite competent with managing a Linux machine. For me personally, the choice is easy. The current crop of Freedom Phones are targeted at people like myself who can break things and fix them ourselves. My hope is, in the future, you will be able to install vanilla Debian for example on your phone, which I think even the more paranoid of us would consider safe.