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I know I really don't matter to Apple, but this walled garden and app store dictatorship is what finally made me move away from iOS to Android last year. I had

I know I really don't matter to Apple, but this walled garden and app store dictatorship is what finally made me move away from iOS to Android last year. I had used Android in the past, but it was with Samsung Galaxy's which where very bloated and awful when compared to Apple. But when a friend told me that Samsung just ruin Android [1] and I should try an actual Google phone, I bought a Pixel and it's honestly great. I can install apps I build myself very easily without Google's input at all, although I don't even need to build apps since their PWA's can do almost anything I'd want. I highly recommend people who are sick of this Apple crap, to try a Google Pixel. I haven't even needed to sign up for a Google account since using it (although I have to use an alternative app store). I've already moved three family members over and after a few days they basically don't notice a different. Between moving to my Pixel and a Purism laptop I'm pretty much free from Apple, apart from my work laptop, which isn't my choice. 1. Disclaimer! I am very privacy, open-source, freedom orientated so if you don't mind a bunch of binary blobs that track you maybe Samsung would work for you.

fermienrico 6y ago
Unpopular opinion that I hold: The walled garden is exactly why I love Apple's iPhone. iPhone keeps the rifraff away, third-party sniffers at check, they've recently added clipboard notification if some app tries to paste random stuff from my clipboard (given that we use it so much for 1Password and other password managers). I absolutely do not trust any third party - there are some insane apps like LinkedIn that tries to sell your privacy at every corner. That said, Apple should allow Jailbreaking to aficionados who want to mess around with it. But, there should be significant impedance to that - your average joe working as a bartender doesn't have a clue of how to keep his iPhone secure. Apple should make it explicitly clear - hey! ALL BETS ARE OFF WHEN YOU JAILBREAK OUR DEVICE. CLICK AGREE.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  Me too, I've chosen Apple devices, mostly because I like Apple's Continuity features and their walled-garden mindset. In particular, I really wish Apple would push Apple Pay and Sign-In with Apple more: I already trust Apple with all sorts of private data (Face ID, iCloud Keychain, etc.), I don't want to also have to evaluate PayPal/Google/FB/whoever as an alternative sign-in or payment vendor.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    I am thinking of getting a Mac and iPad too now. Apple's whole game is to make profit from hardware and their services, not ads. Even if Apple charged - $50/month privacy fee to keep things secure, I am fine with it. I'd pay twice as much for an iPhone - at $2000 even - something that keeps everything about my life secure - I have no problems paying for it.
    - wolco 6y ago
      You are the perfect rare customer. You will pay crazy amounts higher than market rates in order to get a safe feeling. You would probably pay a $500.00 a month privacy fee.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- turblety 6y ago
  Dangerous stuff still gets in the app store [1]. The correct solution to the problem of dangerous apps, is sandboxing and elevated permissions with user consent. We've solved this in the web browser, let's solve it for apps. 1. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-store-malware-click-fraud/ https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-store-malware-click-fr...
- malshe 6y ago
  Unpopular only on HN.
- zelly 6y ago
  Most of the world agrees with you which is why they keep buying iPhones as soon as they can afford them
  - noisem4ker 6y ago
    I doubt that's the "why they keep buying iPhones" when other factors include wealth signalling, social fit-in and SMS bubble color fashion.
    - zelly 6y ago
      If they had a problem with the walled garden they wouldn't buy it. Say "walled garden" to the average iPhone owner and they'll say "So? That's a good thing".
      - SahAssar 6y ago
        The average iphone owner (and average android owner) would ask why you are asking them about their backyard.
  - dariosalvi78 6y ago
    People don't understand what's at stake, just ask around. People buy iPhones because they're "nice" and because their best friend has got one and he/she's showing off how expensive it was.
kuzimoto 6y ago
> I am very privacy, open-source, freedom orientated I like to think I am as well. How do you balance this when moving from Apple to Android, where Apple (seems) to be much more privacy-focused and basically at zero for open-source/freedom, where Android is basically the reverse? I think there are ways to make it better (custom ROM, alternative app stores), but you give up a lot of functionality (Play Store, Google Pay, etc.), and I'm not sure you can entirely eliminate all concerns. I like the freedom of Android, so as long as I understand what I'm giving up privacy-wise I don't mind the trade-off. I have at least tried to make it a little harder for Google, using DuckDuckGo, but I'm guessing it only makes a dent with the other massive amounts of data they can still glean from the various services running on the phone, Gmail, Maps, etc.
- edoceo 6y ago
  Not OP but, I'm on a Pixel for the "bloat" free Android experience. I don't install any apps, I do all webservices through Firefox, DDG and have uBO enabled. I'm only moderately privacy concerned and I fell like this is an ok balance. Seems like every app on either platform comes with some problematic BS.
  - nullwarp 6y ago
    I use my phone the same way, no apps and run GrapheneOS - no problems.
    - tomcam 6y ago
      What brand/model?
      - searchableguy 6y ago
        Most likely pixel as those are the only ones with official support for graphene.
- JeremyNT 6y ago
  You can use stock Android without a Google account. You can avoid the Google Play Store, disable most google default provided apps, and sideload apps of your choosing. You can use a browser (such as Firefox) that the phone vendor has no control over. You can even install an alternate app store. This sounds like what the parent is doing, and it's the best mainstream experience for anybody looking for a privacy and security oriented mobile device (while still actually having control of their own device). With a Pixel phone, you can go further, unlock the bootloader and install a third party OS that does not even include Google services installed at all. Of course, on the other hand, you could sign up for every google service, load all their apps, and consent to all their tracking, in which case you give away everything. Google makes it very easy to do this. But either way, it's at least your choice. Unlike Apple, which thinks it certainly knows best what code should be allowed on your computer and how it should be placed there.
ShamelessC 6y ago
yeah Samsung bloat is annoying. you can still enable usb debugging and disable a good deal of it, but it's still there on a read only partition. I'm curious what your views are on the Play store services, and binary blobs needed for 4g/5g chips and what not. I believe Lineage is an attempt at "un-googling" Android and there's f-droid for APK's. Have you gone that route at all?
- amanzi 6y ago
  I would argue that with the Samsung bloat, a bunch of it adds value and you can safely ignore the rest of it. There are probably only a couple of minor features that are actively annoying. Overall, I'm happy with my Galaxy.
YetAnotherNick 6y ago
Android is also kinda a walled garden. At least in this context play store terms is not more developer friendly than app store in ios. While installing APKs is more easier than codesigning custom apps for iphone, I think it could be used in rare cases.
- shkkmo 6y ago
  > At least in this context play store terms is not more developer friendly than app store in ios. I'm not aware of any instances where google forced a developer to monetize an app. Indeed, unlike apple, google is fine with you using a 3rd party payment provider (i.e. not paying the 30% cut) if the product purchased can be used outside the app (which is clearly the case for a domain name.) >> Payment is for digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g. songs that can be played on other music players). [0] [0] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9858738 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
- pier25 6y ago
  > Android is also kinda a walled garden You can send an .apk to any android user and they will be able to install it. That's the opposite of a walled garden. > At least in this context play store terms is not more developer friendly than app store in ios. You don't have to pay Google $100 every year. Your app is published within 30 mins. You can deploy pretty much any app that runs on Android (other browsers, other stores, etc). You can sell stuff on your app or even put a button to your website to buy stuff. Etc.
  - onemiketwelve 6y ago
    Thank you. I don't understand the enlightened centrists on this issue. I can see the merits of the Apple approach and the criticisms of the Android one. But to say that Android is just as bad... Nah
sschueller 6y ago
The play store is getting worse and worse. It will eventually end up being just a bad. Meanwhile every iteration of Android is getting more locked down because of "security". No more external cameras etc.. The future look bleak until we get a true open source alternative running on open hardware.
- turblety 6y ago
  Absolutely. Unfortunately at the moment it's a case of choose the best of a terrible bunch. I have really high hopes some good will come out of Purism's Librem 5 and the PinePhone.
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    I would be willing to buy these to attempt to kickstart this market. But maybe I'm confused, these seem only to be ROMs that are installed on existing hardware? This can't be right. Where can I go to buy these? I typed "buy PinePhone" and got a wikipedia page with supported hardware made by other companies.
    - ffpip 6y ago
      1st Result - https://store.pine64.org/product-category/pinephone/ https://store.pine64.org/product-category/pinephone/ [Out of Stock] Librem5 - https://shop.puri.sm/ https://shop.puri.sm/
      - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
        Thank you, I really appreciate that!
- ffpip 6y ago
  God. I just stopped opening the play store. Everything is ads and autoplaying videos. I added the update shortcut to homescreen to go straight to updates
api 6y ago
Unfortunately going from iOS to Android is out of the frying pan into the fire. Android is much worse from a privacy point of view. You can easily see this by just spying on network traffic and DNS requests from the device. It's constantly telling everyone about you. Your choice in mobile is walled castle or forest full of thieves. I suppose there are open source phones around but I don't personally find them that useful yet. The main things I want to do with a mobile device is interact with services like Uber, Lyft, Netflix, etc., and get directions. I suppose directions exist via OpenStreetMap but can you reserve an Uber on a Linux phone?
- hundchenkatze 6y ago
  > can you reserve an Uber on a Linux phone? Yes. https://m.uber.com https://m.uber.com
- syshum 6y ago
  I will choose a forest of thieves long before a knell to a tyrant king
  - edgyquant 6y ago
    With android you're kneeling in a forest
  - api 6y ago
    Android has a tyrant: Google. The tyrant is just allied with the thieves.
brundolf 6y ago
> so if you don't mind a bunch of binary blobs that track you maybe Samsung would work for you I've got some bad news for you about Google Services
eblanshey 6y ago
> I haven't even needed to sign up for a Google account since using it (although I have to use an alternative app store). This means you can't use any Google apps like Maps, Photos, etc, right? What Google alternatives do you use?
- turblety 6y ago
  Yup. I try to use as little Google as possible. Maps does work without an account, and is preinstalled, so I can use it if I want. But I try to use duckduckgo maps as much as possible. Photos works just fine without an account too.
  - distances 6y ago
    There are many other maps apps, such as HereWeGo for HERE maps, and MAPS.ME for OpenStreetMaps. Both work well and have very good coverage, OSM generally a lot better than Google at least in Europe. Downsides are that they don't contain such a wealth of place info as Google Maps does, and surely do some tracking too (from which you should be able to opt out thanks to GDPR).
ex3ndr 6y ago
This is a funny way to be privacy oriented and have a phone that when you press home button a little bit longer than usual make an screenshot of your screen and upload it to google. Thanks, but no.
ViViDboarder 6y ago
Just so you know, your Pixel also has a bunch of binary blobs that track you. Google Play services track nearly everything on the device with system level access. I switched to an iPhone a few years ago to get further from Google, but the crap with the App Store is getting so out of hand now. My next device will probably be a Pine Phone.
- HJain13 6y ago
  If you really want to, atleast on a pixel phone you could unlock your bootloader and put 3rd part open source OS like Graphene OS, Lineage OS or Heck even an AOSP rom
  - ViViDboarder 6y ago
    That’s what I did before my iPhone. Most apps that work with self-hosted services kinda suck. The AOSP mail and calendar apps haven’t been refreshed in years since Google changed the default to Gmail and Google Calendar. On iOS I get a nice email client and calendar that is integrated complete with on device AI that finds events in my inbox and adds them to the calendar so I don’t forget. There’s a bunch of neat little things like that you get on Android if you use Google, but you can get on iOS with any server backend. I hope Apple opens up a bit because there really needs to be serious competition in this space.
- monkeyshelli 6y ago
  > My next device will probably be a Pine Phone. As a long time iPhone user I'm on the same boat. I do hope there will be a somewhat beta level Pine Phone soon. I'm already thinking should I get my old Nokia n900 from the storage box and start using that. Not comfortable with Androids and the latest Apple actions are making me feel a bit unsure on the direction they are taking.
  - tpxl 6y ago
    There is a beta level pine phone :) The calls/texts, bluetooth and wifi all work.
manmal 6y ago
If you don’t want to send your data to Google, you can’t use an Android phone period. They don’t need you to sign into the Play Store to track you.
Youden 6y ago
If you're concerned with privacy but still want a phone that mostly works, I recommend installing MicroG [0]. It's an open-source implementation of Google Play Services that gives you support for things like location and push notifications without installing proprietary Google stuff on your device. The easiest way to install it is their LineageOS build. If one isn't available, NanoDroid [2] provides flashable ZIPs that work with Magisk. If you're not okay with either of those but you can spend a bit of time, you can add it to your own AOSP builds. If you really really care about security and don't care too much about all the apps in the world working, there's also GrapheneOS for Pixel devices [3]. The cool thing about Pixel devices is that they allow you to add your own verified boot key and re-lock your device with a third-party ROM installed. GrapeheneOS supports this and a variety of other security-focused features like reproducible builds [4]. And final honorable mention goes to RattlesnakeOS [5] which allows you to set up your very own AOSP build system complete with OTAs and ROM signing. It also allows you to add MicroG [6]. [0]: https://microg.org/ https://microg.org/ [1]: https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/ [2]: https://gitlab.com/Nanolx/NanoDroid https://gitlab.com/Nanolx/NanoDroid [3]: https://grapheneos.org/ https://grapheneos.org/ [4]: https://grapheneos.org/build#reproducible-builds https://grapheneos.org/build#reproducible-builds [5]: https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack [6]: https://github.com/RattlesnakeOS/microg https://github.com/RattlesnakeOS/microg

fermienrico 6y ago

Unpopular opinion that I hold: The walled garden is exactly why I love Apple's iPhone. iPhone keeps the rifraff away, third-party sniffers at check, they've recently added clipboard notification if some app tries to paste random stuff from my clipboard (given that we use it so much for 1Password and other password managers). I absolutely do not trust any third party - there are some insane apps like LinkedIn that tries to sell your privacy at every corner. That said, Apple should allow Jailbreaking to aficionados who want to mess around with it. But, there should be significant impedance to that - your average joe working as a bartender doesn't have a clue of how to keep his iPhone secure. Apple should make it explicitly clear - hey! ALL BETS ARE OFF WHEN YOU JAILBREAK OUR DEVICE. CLICK AGREE.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
Me too, I've chosen Apple devices, mostly because I like Apple's Continuity features and their walled-garden mindset. In particular, I really wish Apple would push Apple Pay and Sign-In with Apple more: I already trust Apple with all sorts of private data (Face ID, iCloud Keychain, etc.), I don't want to also have to evaluate PayPal/Google/FB/whoever as an alternative sign-in or payment vendor.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  I am thinking of getting a Mac and iPad too now. Apple's whole game is to make profit from hardware and their services, not ads. Even if Apple charged - $50/month privacy fee to keep things secure, I am fine with it. I'd pay twice as much for an iPhone - at $2000 even - something that keeps everything about my life secure - I have no problems paying for it.
  - wolco 6y ago
    You are the perfect rare customer. You will pay crazy amounts higher than market rates in order to get a safe feeling. You would probably pay a $500.00 a month privacy fee.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
turblety 6y ago
Dangerous stuff still gets in the app store [1]. The correct solution to the problem of dangerous apps, is sandboxing and elevated permissions with user consent. We've solved this in the web browser, let's solve it for apps. 1. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-store-malware-click-fraud/ https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-store-malware-click-fr...
malshe 6y ago
Unpopular only on HN.
zelly 6y ago
Most of the world agrees with you which is why they keep buying iPhones as soon as they can afford them
- noisem4ker 6y ago
  I doubt that's the "why they keep buying iPhones" when other factors include wealth signalling, social fit-in and SMS bubble color fashion.
  - zelly 6y ago
    If they had a problem with the walled garden they wouldn't buy it. Say "walled garden" to the average iPhone owner and they'll say "So? That's a good thing".
    - SahAssar 6y ago
      The average iphone owner (and average android owner) would ask why you are asking them about their backyard.
- dariosalvi78 6y ago
  People don't understand what's at stake, just ask around. People buy iPhones because they're "nice" and because their best friend has got one and he/she's showing off how expensive it was.

kuzimoto 6y ago

> I am very privacy, open-source, freedom orientated I like to think I am as well. How do you balance this when moving from Apple to Android, where Apple (seems) to be much more privacy-focused and basically at zero for open-source/freedom, where Android is basically the reverse? I think there are ways to make it better (custom ROM, alternative app stores), but you give up a lot of functionality (Play Store, Google Pay, etc.), and I'm not sure you can entirely eliminate all concerns. I like the freedom of Android, so as long as I understand what I'm giving up privacy-wise I don't mind the trade-off. I have at least tried to make it a little harder for Google, using DuckDuckGo, but I'm guessing it only makes a dent with the other massive amounts of data they can still glean from the various services running on the phone, Gmail, Maps, etc.

edoceo 6y ago
Not OP but, I'm on a Pixel for the "bloat" free Android experience. I don't install any apps, I do all webservices through Firefox, DDG and have uBO enabled. I'm only moderately privacy concerned and I fell like this is an ok balance. Seems like every app on either platform comes with some problematic BS.
- nullwarp 6y ago
  I use my phone the same way, no apps and run GrapheneOS - no problems.
  - tomcam 6y ago
    What brand/model?
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      Most likely pixel as those are the only ones with official support for graphene.
JeremyNT 6y ago
You can use stock Android without a Google account. You can avoid the Google Play Store, disable most google default provided apps, and sideload apps of your choosing. You can use a browser (such as Firefox) that the phone vendor has no control over. You can even install an alternate app store. This sounds like what the parent is doing, and it's the best mainstream experience for anybody looking for a privacy and security oriented mobile device (while still actually having control of their own device). With a Pixel phone, you can go further, unlock the bootloader and install a third party OS that does not even include Google services installed at all. Of course, on the other hand, you could sign up for every google service, load all their apps, and consent to all their tracking, in which case you give away everything. Google makes it very easy to do this. But either way, it's at least your choice. Unlike Apple, which thinks it certainly knows best what code should be allowed on your computer and how it should be placed there.

ShamelessC 6y ago

yeah Samsung bloat is annoying. you can still enable usb debugging and disable a good deal of it, but it's still there on a read only partition. I'm curious what your views are on the Play store services, and binary blobs needed for 4g/5g chips and what not. I believe Lineage is an attempt at "un-googling" Android and there's f-droid for APK's. Have you gone that route at all?

amanzi 6y ago
I would argue that with the Samsung bloat, a bunch of it adds value and you can safely ignore the rest of it. There are probably only a couple of minor features that are actively annoying. Overall, I'm happy with my Galaxy.

YetAnotherNick 6y ago

Android is also kinda a walled garden. At least in this context play store terms is not more developer friendly than app store in ios. While installing APKs is more easier than codesigning custom apps for iphone, I think it could be used in rare cases.

shkkmo 6y ago
> At least in this context play store terms is not more developer friendly than app store in ios. I'm not aware of any instances where google forced a developer to monetize an app. Indeed, unlike apple, google is fine with you using a 3rd party payment provider (i.e. not paying the 30% cut) if the product purchased can be used outside the app (which is clearly the case for a domain name.) >> Payment is for digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g. songs that can be played on other music players). [0] [0] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9858738 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
pier25 6y ago
> Android is also kinda a walled garden You can send an .apk to any android user and they will be able to install it. That's the opposite of a walled garden. > At least in this context play store terms is not more developer friendly than app store in ios. You don't have to pay Google $100 every year. Your app is published within 30 mins. You can deploy pretty much any app that runs on Android (other browsers, other stores, etc). You can sell stuff on your app or even put a button to your website to buy stuff. Etc.
- onemiketwelve 6y ago
  Thank you. I don't understand the enlightened centrists on this issue. I can see the merits of the Apple approach and the criticisms of the Android one. But to say that Android is just as bad... Nah

sschueller 6y ago

The play store is getting worse and worse. It will eventually end up being just a bad. Meanwhile every iteration of Android is getting more locked down because of "security". No more external cameras etc.. The future look bleak until we get a true open source alternative running on open hardware.

turblety 6y ago
Absolutely. Unfortunately at the moment it's a case of choose the best of a terrible bunch. I have really high hopes some good will come out of Purism's Librem 5 and the PinePhone.
- RonanTheGrey 6y ago
  I would be willing to buy these to attempt to kickstart this market. But maybe I'm confused, these seem only to be ROMs that are installed on existing hardware? This can't be right. Where can I go to buy these? I typed "buy PinePhone" and got a wikipedia page with supported hardware made by other companies.
  - ffpip 6y ago
    1st Result - https://store.pine64.org/product-category/pinephone/ https://store.pine64.org/product-category/pinephone/ [Out of Stock] Librem5 - https://shop.puri.sm/ https://shop.puri.sm/
    - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
      Thank you, I really appreciate that!
ffpip 6y ago
God. I just stopped opening the play store. Everything is ads and autoplaying videos. I added the update shortcut to homescreen to go straight to updates

api 6y ago

Unfortunately going from iOS to Android is out of the frying pan into the fire. Android is much worse from a privacy point of view. You can easily see this by just spying on network traffic and DNS requests from the device. It's constantly telling everyone about you. Your choice in mobile is walled castle or forest full of thieves. I suppose there are open source phones around but I don't personally find them that useful yet. The main things I want to do with a mobile device is interact with services like Uber, Lyft, Netflix, etc., and get directions. I suppose directions exist via OpenStreetMap but can you reserve an Uber on a Linux phone?

hundchenkatze 6y ago
> can you reserve an Uber on a Linux phone? Yes. https://m.uber.com https://m.uber.com
syshum 6y ago
I will choose a forest of thieves long before a knell to a tyrant king
- edgyquant 6y ago
  With android you're kneeling in a forest
- api 6y ago
  Android has a tyrant: Google. The tyrant is just allied with the thieves.

brundolf 6y ago

> so if you don't mind a bunch of binary blobs that track you maybe Samsung would work for you I've got some bad news for you about Google Services

eblanshey 6y ago

> I haven't even needed to sign up for a Google account since using it (although I have to use an alternative app store). This means you can't use any Google apps like Maps, Photos, etc, right? What Google alternatives do you use?

turblety 6y ago
Yup. I try to use as little Google as possible. Maps does work without an account, and is preinstalled, so I can use it if I want. But I try to use duckduckgo maps as much as possible. Photos works just fine without an account too.
- distances 6y ago
  There are many other maps apps, such as HereWeGo for HERE maps, and MAPS.ME for OpenStreetMaps. Both work well and have very good coverage, OSM generally a lot better than Google at least in Europe. Downsides are that they don't contain such a wealth of place info as Google Maps does, and surely do some tracking too (from which you should be able to opt out thanks to GDPR).

ex3ndr 6y ago

This is a funny way to be privacy oriented and have a phone that when you press home button a little bit longer than usual make an screenshot of your screen and upload it to google. Thanks, but no.

ViViDboarder 6y ago

Just so you know, your Pixel also has a bunch of binary blobs that track you. Google Play services track nearly everything on the device with system level access. I switched to an iPhone a few years ago to get further from Google, but the crap with the App Store is getting so out of hand now. My next device will probably be a Pine Phone.

HJain13 6y ago
If you really want to, atleast on a pixel phone you could unlock your bootloader and put 3rd part open source OS like Graphene OS, Lineage OS or Heck even an AOSP rom
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  That’s what I did before my iPhone. Most apps that work with self-hosted services kinda suck. The AOSP mail and calendar apps haven’t been refreshed in years since Google changed the default to Gmail and Google Calendar. On iOS I get a nice email client and calendar that is integrated complete with on device AI that finds events in my inbox and adds them to the calendar so I don’t forget. There’s a bunch of neat little things like that you get on Android if you use Google, but you can get on iOS with any server backend. I hope Apple opens up a bit because there really needs to be serious competition in this space.
monkeyshelli 6y ago
> My next device will probably be a Pine Phone. As a long time iPhone user I'm on the same boat. I do hope there will be a somewhat beta level Pine Phone soon. I'm already thinking should I get my old Nokia n900 from the storage box and start using that. Not comfortable with Androids and the latest Apple actions are making me feel a bit unsure on the direction they are taking.
- tpxl 6y ago
  There is a beta level pine phone :) The calls/texts, bluetooth and wifi all work.

manmal 6y ago

If you don’t want to send your data to Google, you can’t use an Android phone period. They don’t need you to sign into the Play Store to track you.

Youden 6y ago

If you're concerned with privacy but still want a phone that mostly works, I recommend installing MicroG [0]. It's an open-source implementation of Google Play Services that gives you support for things like location and push notifications without installing proprietary Google stuff on your device. The easiest way to install it is their LineageOS build. If one isn't available, NanoDroid [2] provides flashable ZIPs that work with Magisk. If you're not okay with either of those but you can spend a bit of time, you can add it to your own AOSP builds. If you really really care about security and don't care too much about all the apps in the world working, there's also GrapheneOS for Pixel devices [3]. The cool thing about Pixel devices is that they allow you to add your own verified boot key and re-lock your device with a third-party ROM installed. GrapeheneOS supports this and a variety of other security-focused features like reproducible builds [4]. And final honorable mention goes to RattlesnakeOS [5] which allows you to set up your very own AOSP build system complete with OTAs and ROM signing. It also allows you to add MicroG [6]. [0]: https://microg.org/ https://microg.org/ [1]: https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/ [2]: https://gitlab.com/Nanolx/NanoDroid https://gitlab.com/Nanolx/NanoDroid [3]: https://grapheneos.org/ https://grapheneos.org/ [4]: https://grapheneos.org/build#reproducible-builds https://grapheneos.org/build#reproducible-builds [5]: https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack [6]: https://github.com/RattlesnakeOS/microg https://github.com/RattlesnakeOS/microg