Hardware far outlasts software in the smartphone world, due to aggressive chronic designed obsolescence by market abusing monopolies. So I will never buy a new smartphone - don’t want to feed those scumbags. I am however willing to buy used smartphones on the 2nd-hand market if they can be liberated. Of course it’s still only marginally BifL even if you don’t have demanding needs.
Has anyone gone down this path? My temptation is to find a phone that is simultaneously supported by 2 or 3 different FOSS OS projects. So if it falls out of maintence on one platform it’s not the end. The Postmarket OS (pmOS) page has a full list and a short list. The short list apparently covers devices that are actively maintained and up to date, which are also listed here. Then phones on that shortlist can be cross-referenced with the LineageOS list or the Sailfish list.
So many FOSS phone platforms seem to come and go I’ve not kept up on it. What others are worth considering? It looks like the Replicant device list hasn’t changed much.
(update) Graphene OS has a list of supported devices
(and it appears they don’t maintain old devices)
Pixel 9 Pro Fold (comet)
Pixel 9 Pro XL (komodo)
Pixel 9 Pro (caiman)
Pixel 9 (tokay)
Pixel 8a (akita)
Pixel 8 Pro (husky)
Pixel 8 (shiba)
Pixel Fold (felix)
Pixel Tablet (tangorpro)
Pixel 7a (lynx)
Pixel 7 Pro (cheetah)
Pixel 7 (panther)
Pixel 6a (bluejay)
Pixel 6 Pro (raven)
Pixel 6 (oriole)
So Graphene’s mission is a bit orthoganol to the mission of Postmarket OS. Perhaps it makes sense for some people to get a Graphene-compatible device then hope they can switch to pmOS when it gets dropped. But I guess that’s not much of a budget plan. Pixel 6+ are likely not going to be dirt cheap on the 2nd-hand market.
I don’t mean OM gives me a choice of routes. Rather, say there are two reasonable ways to reach the destination. OM chooses route A, says turn right, ok fine, I turn right. Then after a few seconds, OM changes its mind and wants route B instead. So it says take a U turn and go this other way, oops! But if you do that, it changes its mind AGAIN, and you end up going in circles.
Re downloading a subset of the maps: yes I can do that, but then I have to predict which ones I’ll need, just another thing to remember. I have all the California maps installed so that if I suddenly decide to drive to Barstow or something, I don’t have to figure out which counties I’ll traverse, since they are all already downloaded. What I really want is to download ALL the maps, the whole world, might be 50GB or whatever, but that’s ok, we can buy 2TB microSD cards now. If that download was a one-time event with occasional small updates I could deal with it, but I don’t want to do the whole thing every cycle.
Anyway, as a development snapshot I guess OM is pretty nice, but I can’t call it a finished product,