I am currently in the market for a new mobile phone. The current’s one battery is basically dead and because of security patches now being about 2 years old I have to replace it whole instead of just getting the battery replaced again.

Pixel with GrapheneOS has been my number one choice for some time but…

1. there is no (privacy friendly & legal) replacement for Google Play Protect. My banking app won’t work without it as well as one other app I kind of need too.
2. I am also just too used to having a phone in the 250-300 EUR range in the sense that I don’t have to care about it that much.
   It’s a “consumable” product for me. Loosing/drowning it is not a big deal, where drowning 800 euros is just hard to justify no matter how much money I make.

I will probably just get the OnePlus Nord 4 instead because of their pledge to do 6 years of updates.

GrapheOS now officially supports…

[please… something other than Pixel…]

Pixel 9

Lead dev of grapheneos is extremely toxic in communication. I don’t trust someone like that developing the software running on a phone.

EDIT: This comment seems to be particularly controversial, with many people praising GrapheneOS as a project, while ignoring the developers views and actions. Although my opinion of the main developer is negative, the project itself and its goals are great. To clear up some confusion, I want to add to my previous statement:

At first, this seems like the standard “separating art from the artist”, however, GrapheneOS is a ton of code, not just art. When it comes to other forms of art, like literature or paintings, an artist maliciously hiding their personal beliefs in their otherwise “unbiased” work might degrade the quality of the final result, but does not have much significant impact outside of that. When it comes to code, programs, OSes, this changes. The artist (programmer) changing their art (code) based on their personal beliefs is not just a degradation in quality, but a security risk for anyone running the code and trusting the developer. Having seen the way the GOS dev speaks about its community and even people in support of him (see Louis Rossman’s video), it becomes clear that the mentioned “risk” of malware is very much present. Like many others, I don’t have the time to verify the source code of an entire Android rom myself, which means I would have to trust the GOS dev to not insert anything malicious, after the statements he’s made. I’d have to trust him after he’s grouped a majority of his community into “people who are after him and are swatting him”. It’s a very real possibility that someone with beliefs like that would add malicious code to his project, and I’m personally not willing to run that risk.

Please note that I am not encouraging people to “go harass the dev”, that is an immoral action nobody should be doing. I am trying to inform people of the developers behavior online, past and current, so they can make a decision for themselves whether to run his software on their personal devices.