My phone is no longer getting updates, so it’s time to buy a new one. The hardware could easily last 1-2 more years but I’d have to replace the battery, which is a pain on my phone.
I’m looking for something that has long firmware support and some good privacy roms while not being worse than my current Oneplus 8 in any way. I don’t care about cameras at all and I’m still mad about the missing headphone jacks, but unfortunately those don’t seem to be coming back and I can survive without one.
So, the options are Fairphone 5 and Pixel 8 from what I found out. The Pixel 8 is a little small for my taste and with 256GB storage it’s more expensive, but it does have grapheneOS, which I’d prefer because the app sandboxing would allow me to have peace of mind even if I have tracking apps sitting on my phone. I could use the proper play store and do IAPs without fiddling with aurora store. I use it already and it isn’t great.
With the Fairphone, I’d get a replacable battery so I can buy a spare and swap instead of charging my phone. I used to do that with the good old S3 and it was great. MicroSD slot is also nice. But the ROM options are CalyxOS and /e/OS. I know Calyx has a nice firewall to keep tracking at bay and /e/OS is an LOS fork mainly focused on getting rid of google from what I know, but neither has as much protection as grapheneOS.
My main goal is to become less dependant on google while still being able to use google maps for my way to work. The traffic aware routing saves me 10 minutes every day so letting google know when I go to work is a fair deal.
So, any opinions or experiences with either? TIA
Fairphone is known to have several hardware related problems, but they usually ignore or do not acknowledge them. Recently they tried to argue a hardware problem (ghost inputs) can be solved via firmware update, but of course it couldn’t. Additionally you lose support for device when using custom roms (even /e/os). They only support google Android. You could buy from Murena but they can not help with hardware or firmware issues. Fairphone is very to patch their devices in terms of security.
But google is google. I would never give them money.
I’ve always bought used phones anyway. With eBay/kijiji/others you can request the seller to enable OEM unlocking so you know it can be done and you don’t even need to boot it into android before installing GrapeneOS.
My experience, not many people are willing to do that for you. YMMV.