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Comment by crossroadsguy | Hacker News Reader

I have made peace with it. It's not coming. When I look around me - the number of people who want a small sized phone is exactly zero. The ship has sailed. I will still buy an SE if it's much cheaper than the base iPhone model and just one version old (on most hardware and doesn't have to be as powerful as the base iPhone) when my iPhone 14 dies. But seeing they are releasing it in 3 years now (or 4?) I am not sure that SE will be the one-gen-old when I might change my 14.

It's been close to 2 years and I still struggle with the size of my iPhone 14 - and to think that this fucking phablet is the smallest iPhone.

At this point I am just waiting for a much more affordable simple Android phone (with the OS being OEM-deGoogled and supported for at least 3 years with timely updates). I mean I will buy it even if it's slightly bigger than base iPhone because size was the reason I had bought my first iPhone which was the first SE :)

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I've also just made peace with Apple not releasing another small phone - I bought a used (unfortunately not Apple-refurbished) iPhone 13 Mini a few days ago.

I'm holding out hope for: https://smallandroidphone.com/

plus one for refurbing my own (not buying) a mini instead of being forced to the larger form factor.

I love this idea except for the stock Android part. I don’t want anything Google Services even near it. Google absolute tracking of every Android device for ads and there being no clean way to prevent it is one of the prime reasons I had moved to iPhones.

If need to, keep your eyes open for phones that you can use Graphene on - it is the easiest, possibly safest, de-googled operating system. And very easy to install.

I don’t think any OEMs are going to support that. The ones that might or sell those niche de-googled phones are not selling in my country and seeing the world tier country is in those small firms are not selling/servicing here (and maybe rightly so). Also, I have tried flashing on my own. It’s not for me. I will however still have faint hopes for an OEM supported de-googled OS other than iOS.

I went down this path. The OEM support isn’t going to be your main problem.

Google has pulled more and more of android out of the open source project (AOSP) over the years and replaced it with Google Play stuff that has hard dependencies on letting them surveil your phone.

In practice, this means that stuff like GPS lock “needs” the cloud and won’t work reliably for most apps (it works fine for ones in fdroid, and in third party map apps, but not in Lyft, Uber, EV charging apps, or other commercial stuff that wants location).

On top of that, many apps will silently crash at startup. Sometimes, giving them google play services fixes them, sometimes not. When I installed graphene, my phone battery got 2x the manufacturer estimate. When I added sandboxed google play services, it went down to the advertised battery life, so the phone spends about half its power budget spying on you.

On top of that, if the iPhone not pro / max were an android, it’d be one of the smallest on the market.

Good luck. I’d love to be proven wrong on either point.

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