After using LineageOS for long time, I have finally moved to GrapheneOS. I use a lot of banking and financial apps which I never felt comfortable using on LineageOS due to lack of proper sandboxing, unlocked bootloader etc.
GrapheneOS works flawlessly just like Android. You don’t even notice there’s hardening underneath. Also it protects from Google’s evil location tracking using WiFi/Bluetooth or even when the Location is turned off. I don’t understand how people in general are comfortable with Google tracking all the time. You can use Google Play and Play Services in a sandbox that works just like regular installation, but without deep tracking.
If you haven’t tried GrapheneOS, try it. You won’t go back to regular Android.
Yeah the fact that Pixel Phones are the defacto standard for privacy phones is absurd. It’s guaranteed chock full of hardware surveillance tools you can’t remove with custom roms or kernels.
Outside of the Pixel lineup, custom rom support is almost non-existant in 2024. it’s wild, you can get the same or better hardware for half the price.
Xiaomis and some other chinease brands have decent custom rom support, but no grapheneos and no bootloader relocking (except some oneplus phones)
I have a Xiaomi, I love their hardware and the fact that it’s bugged by a foreign nation rather than my own. But Xiaomi software is garbage and flashing is an absolute pain. I looked at what rom support modern Xiaomi devices have and I am not impressed. It’s almost all half baked or not privacy oriented. I’ve been struggling with one of said ROMs for years.
I am sick of flashing one-off ROMs without proper support or OTA, and constant system level bugs.
I’d love to have a manufacturer with open-source/open hardware focused cheap high performance repairable hardware and with privacy ROMs as a first-class citizen. Like a Fairphone if it was good.
But sadly all of these devices end up with bad support too in the end.
I think the main issue is that most ROM developers today only buy the most high end flagship devices, since those are the only ones that get any decent support. I’m guessing that’s because they all got high paying tech jobs now.
Well, there is no support from privacy roms, but I can survive with lineageos+microg (with somewhat decent updates) on redmi 4x. There is support for poco f5 and redmi 12 from crdroid, which supports microg and is apparently decent. Cheaper options usually have mediatek processors (mediatek doesn’t opensource their software or release fw blobs), so the support on those phones is terrible. Support on snapdragon xiaomis is still way better, then on samsung, oppo, etc.