I’m frustrated. I’m a long time fan of Motorola. Their phones have been pretty simple and easy to remove junk apps. Recently I got an update that forced perplexity on my phone.

  • That’s what OnePlus, Nothing, and FairPhone are supposed to be about.

    For privacy, I like my iPhone, but I can’t really recommend them anymore. Even with “Apple Intelligence” the keyboard is hilariously terrible. It gets a few things right and I’m wondering more and more if the ecosystem is worth it. But throwing money at Google somehow seems worse.

      • OnePlus originally had really nice enthusiast features and support for the CyanogenMod ROM. Now it’s just another manufacturer of corporate-safe glass-and-metal slabs while the soul of CyanogenMod lives on in LineageOS.

        Carl Pei left OnePlus and put together Nothing. Nothing is a bit closer to what OnePlus was supposed to be, but they still leave much to be desired. They went all the way to implement a detachable back on the CMF phone, but the battery is still sealed inside. Absolutely no advantage compared to manufacturers like Google in terms of the third-party ROM experience.

        FairPhone is the best of the bunch, but their priorities don’t necessarily match those of the community (i.e. security concerns, loss of audio jack and USB 3.0 on the FP6)

    • jcarax ( jcarax@beehaw.org ) 
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      1 year ago

      Shift and Volla are closer than Nothing, I’d say. OnePlus, like you said in another comment, belongs nowhere near that list anymore.

      But I have a feeling privacy and security minded folks are going to be moving more towards Linux phones (I know Android uses a Linux kernel) over the next few years, as Android continues to get locked down, and cater to government surveillance.

      • Huh. I haven’t even heard of those two.

        I want to believe Apple has my privacy in mind like they say because I want to believe they’re a computer company first and not an information services company and all that… and it would make me feel better about my iPhone 16 Pro Max having such lousy software running on it… but also because going back to Android seems scary. No good privacy options. Nova is basically dead. Google is going after sideloading. Google is going hard with AI. The Pixel camera straight up hallucinates detail. And yet if I needed a new phone right now it probably would be a Galaxy S25, but I can’t say for sure it wouldn’t be an iPhone 17.

        • jcarax ( jcarax@beehaw.org ) 
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          1 year ago

          It’s probably not a good idea to believe that. Even if they do fight for you behind closed doors, which I doubt, they will still have to bow to large governments for the sake of their shareholders. That’s the world we live in right now.

          I’m on Graphene on a Pixel 8 right now, but I really don’t trust the overall direction that Google is pulling AOSP, nor the closed security chip in Pixel phones. I’m trying to decide if I want to stick with AOSP with a non-Pixel device, or give some form of non-Android Linux phone a shot. The Jolla C2 is looking intriguing, but getting one in the US isn’t the easiest thing. I’ve also considered a Shiftphone 8.1 and Fairphone 6, but I’d want to run Calyx, and the future is murky. The Shiftphone is also tricky to get in the US, as is Volla which comes with an AOSP OS without Google services.