“Privacy what?” A different take on privacy phones

> The handset that is most compatible with those forks is – quite ironically – Google’s very own Pixel. The rationale being that those devices have additional hardware features that make them more secure than other phones.

The Google Pixel line's hardware features are not the reason for their better support in alternative Android distributions.

The reason is that only a small percentage of Android phones have bootloaders that can be unlocked and have kernel sources available to assist developers with porting another flavor of Android to the device. This is mostly enough to enable support LineageOS and other Android distributions that are designed to be used with the bootloader unlocked, provided that developers have access to these phones and are interested in supporting them.

Among those phones, only a few have a bootloader that can be relocked with a custom signing key specified by the user. This is necessary for official support on alternative Android distributions that are designed to be used with the bootloader locked. The Google Pixel line is well-known by developers and users of these distributions for being in this category. If any other phone manufacturer also produces phones meeting these specifications and publicizes this, I'm sure they would be embraced as alternatives to the Pixels.

I have my own take on this as well. The followings are only my opinions based on my experiences.

But simple doesn’t necessarily mean it's easy. To survive and thrive without a smartphone you probably need to:

Live in a non-Westernized location. Billions of people are still unbanked in the so-called developing countries. Entire economies still run on cash. You can function in those worlds the old fashioned way. Even without Apple Pay.

I have always lived in a westernized location. Never owned or needed a smart phone. The only gotcha is to ensure you have a current printout of proof-of-insurance because highway patrol are used to people having this on their phones.

Live away from big cities. Smaller towns and villages are easy to navigate and get to where you want to go. Even without Uber.

I have lived in big cities and navigation was rarely an issue. At worst I could stop at a convenience store and conveniently ask for directions. The only challenge I ever ran into was actually outside of big cities in suburban areas that had nested-upon-nested circular one-way streets that were like a rat maze. That dark pattern is the fault of housing developers doing their own weird cost optimizations.

Have a fixed home base, so you can know your terrain and remember where everything is. Even without Google Maps.

People have done just fine for all of human existence up until smart phones made having a pocket GPS easier and that only happened because of the E911 project and regulations that required all phones to have GPS. I've traveled all over the continental United States of America just fine without GPS. In fact, I now have a couple GPS units and they take sub-optimal routes even after being freshly updated or in some cases get it wrong all together. GPS units have encouraged me to be lazy and far too trusting.

I think this is the actual root cause of the problems. People born into using smart phones have been conditioned into trusting and relying on their device.