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Comment by aeblyve | Hacker News Reader

The writing's been on the wall for custom ROMs in general for a while, so I've been starting to think about a mobile phone vendor I could actually have a decent business relationship with. I.e. use their stock ROM and be fairly happy with it.

Any opinions? Samsung was a candidate for their somewhat unified ecosystem. Maybe even apple.

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I still really like Sony phones. Excellent hardware. They have no online services they are trying to push, they just want you to buy their phones. As a result, the stock software is very clean Google Android without much extra. But they're not available in every region, and quite expensive. Used to have very short software support but now they do 4 major Android version updates / 6 years of security updates.

You get no ecosystem benefits though, it's really just plain Android.

Though for Americans, Sony sadly doesn't release their phones in the USA anymore

The last few years it's been tougher and tougher to get them. Even in Europe you can now only buy them directly from Sony, and Amazon in a few countries. Sony is not selling them via any other retailers or operators at all from this year onwards.

Sony phones generally have a ok-ish hardware(their old 4k oled screen is still top-tier for watch videos to date in my opinion) and emmmm-ish software support. And depends on your region, the software support can be even worse. For example, TW-version sony phones have a serious delayed update schedule. You may get an update that others already received for half an year (and pixel phones have already got two years ago)

I really wanted a Sony phone as it ticked all the boxes. Headphone jack, SD card slot and bootloader unlock with LineageOS support. AFAIK no one else does that in current phones.

But the sad reality hit when there were all kinds of hurdles around getting 5G/4G working in Australia. Was not going to risk ~$900 dollars on a phone that could end up being a paperweight and returned it.

It's a sad state and makes me miss the good old days.

Do they work well on the big US carriers? Especially the ones starting with V?

Whatever floats your boat. I'll remain with the latest vendor making custom OS possible.

FYI Pixels still allow flashing custom ROMs, they've just slightly inconvenienced developers.

It's not necessarily about it being possible, but the level of support and refinement.

The future I'm seeing is one in which custom ROMs still exist as hobby projects, but aren't suitable for use in "production".

In this domain, things change so fast that I decided to just focus on my next phone, or like the following 2-3 years.

The future is as bleak for the custom ROMs as is their past. They are aftermarket modifications of the phone software, entirely dependent on the manufacturers and Google, and these release new things yearly.

Pixels are a good choice I think because they come with the least amount of bloat, and with Android, the connection to Google is always there anyways.

You still don't get any better support than with Pixel though. I wish it was different. And I'll be using my Pixel 9 with GOS until its no longer supported (so several more years), and if then there are no viable Android options? Well, so be it, iOS (which i despise but Android with Google pervasive surveillance is unusable. I know, iOS is not much better but at lease is about as secure as gos).

Samsung carries a lot of advertising crap, tracking, etc. Pretty much every phones is going to be worse than Pixel in that respect, since you get Google's tracking + whatever pile of crap the vendor added (which in the end they all seem to do).

So it's basically:

Pixel with GrapheneOS > iPhone >> Google Pixel with PixelOS

I wouldn't recommend anything else. Theoretically Fairphone + e/OS may have been an option, but the security is crap.

I guess there is Sony, you could even install Sailfish OS, no experience though.

I've owned a few pixels but for whatever reason in my case the hardware had a habit of randomly dying just outside of the warranty period. But maybe I can revisit.

> Theoretically Fairphone + e/OS may have been an option, but the security is crap.

Lack of current privacy/security patches and the current privacy protections in Android means having very poor privacy too. There's no equivalent to the privacy protections added by GrapheneOS either including ones also offered by iOS now such as iOS having a more basic equivalent to the GrapheneOS Contact Scopes feature since iOS 18 and iOS having better storage/media control than Android similar to Storage Scopes in GrapheneOS.

> I guess there is Sony, you could even install Sailfish OS, no experience though.

SailfishOS is much less private/secure than AOSP and is largely closed source. It's the opposite of a more open OS.

Check Nothing

Apple is good out of the box, and has a strong ecosystem.

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