I had the same skepticism, but I realized the rationale behind targeting Pixel phones makes a lot of sense. It makes development much easier for a small develop

I had the same skepticism, but I realized the rationale behind targeting Pixel phones makes a lot of sense. It makes development much easier for a small development team, Pixel is a high quality phone that also is one of the easiest to install custom ROMs on, and I think there's some sort of integrity checking hardware on Pixels not present on other Android phones. It would be great if some sort of libre Pixel clone could be made so that Google is not needed at that level, but that simply doesn't exist yet. Otherwise, all you're doing is trading the devil of Google for some other devil like Samsung. > There is no point in keeping a hardened OS with Google Maps and WhatsApp installed. Sandboxed Google Maps using sandboxed non-system Play Services or MicroG on an OS with hardened memory allocation is better than Google Maps on a stock ROM.