@rl_dane @spaceraser agree everyone in mobile hardware sucks btw. If I were independently wealthy, one of the things I’d work on is building better phones. Open hardware; open software. I use an iPhone today because it’s simply the best on every axis but it’s a closed system at the end of the day. Android is honestly worse because its security model is broken at the most fundamental levels, and calling it “open source” is a stretch of the term.
But there’s no money in that…
I think running a FOSS Android build is probably the best option right now, because at least you have some pretty decent control over what information leaves your phone. Of course, as soon as you install your first google app, all that flies out the window, but there are mitigations for even that (I only have Google Maps, which runs in a "Private Space" sandbox, not logged in, and I occasionally wipe its data (virtual reinstall)).
But the hardware is still garbage from a freedom perspective, and only got worse last year as Google stopped considering their Pixels to be their open dev platform and instead is using some kind of vm. So getting AOSP to work on even Pixel phones has now become a guessing/reverse-engineering game like everything else.
> But there’s no money in that…
Yeah, this is how #crapitalism destroys everything. Even if you have amazing, world-changing ideas, they go nowhere unless they're profitable. Under capitalism, you're either an exploiter ("entrepreneur") or an exploitee (laborer). There's nothing else.