Interesting article from a generalist magazine. According to it:
- Best Preinstalled Phone: Fairphone 6 With /e/OS
- Best for Pixel Phones: GrapheneOS
- Best for Non-Pixel Phones: /e/OS
- For the DIY Tinkerer: LineageOS
Honestly Graphene is the only one that I’d trust unless you’re not going to add any Google play services at all with Lineage, and I’m including micro G on that too.
Sailfish OS is beautiful and really nice, decent app support, but kind of a pain in the USA, postmarketos shows strong promise, but doesn’t have VOLTE support yet which makes it a dealbreaker for me personally. I know a lot of folks love UBports, it never really was something I enjoyed. I’m really hoping to use Sailfish in the USA someday
I’ve had my fairphone for a couple of weeks now and am loving it!
Thinking of getting a fairphone 3/4. Currently use a dumb phone and a fire tablet I got second hand very cheap.
I have the 6, and it’s well worth it, I’d assume the 3 or 4 will be quite the upgrade from a dumb phone
Kinda. Battery life will be worse though. Tablet has a larger battery as there is more space, dumbphone has longer battery life because it uses so little power. It will be far more powerful than the tablet and with fdroid I can install pretty much everything I need. Family like to message on whatsapp though, which is the only thing keeping me from immediately sticking PostmarketOS on it which I have used before on a Pinephone.
Do wish that larger powerbanks were more common. ~74Wh (20,000mAh at 3.7v) seem to be one of the cheapest per capacity available and I suspect it is because of mass production. Larger are usually more like camping batteries and cost more, I suspect because they don’t sell as many of them. Cheapest per Wh for larger capacities is probably best achieved by just sticking multiple together.
For some time now, I am looking with interest at Fairphone and /e/OS/. However, I am somewhat perplexed about the Murena workspace/Cloud. Based on your experience, is it possible to use /e/OS/ without joining Murena? Perhaps associated with a self-hosted cloud workspace?
I don’t have Murena service, and don’t use their cloud, and don’t see any of their apps on their phone, so I think so?
I don’t have Murena apps. I use their service because I am not aware of other options in my location. Cheap and good. No issues here.
Edit: the customer service resources are limited because they are small. They are responsive, but slow.
really glad to see someone finally making a distinction between pixels and the rest, had about enough with the graphene/pixel pushers. also didn’t know eOS (not typing up them slashes) has a web installer, albeit only for a handful of models; hopefully that will expand. eOS to lineageOS would be like ubuntu to debian, making the thing more useable for a newb and every stride in this direction helps.
This post’s headline (not Wired’s) is a tad misleading. Even the Android without Google Services still comes from Google originally.
Buy it used. The hardware doesn’t call back home.
Are the upcoming sideloading rules going to impact these forks? If so, we might need to get a Dev fund set up and get EFF involved.
Forks are not directly impacted:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Android_Developer_Verification#Affected_devices
But alternative repos, like f-droid, may have challenges because of some sort of mutual exclusion of developer space, but honestly I didn’t fully get this part
https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
