Samsung has great hardware, but their version of android is getting more and more bloated. And android itself is moving in a direction reminiscent of how I felt about Windows after win7.
Some 20 years ago I used Cyanogenmod on a Samsung phone, and that worked great, but it seems to no longer be active.
I see many alternatives, such as graphene, lineage, et.al… what are the pros and cons of each? For one I see that GrapheneOS only supports the pixel.
Note: I’m not 100% ready to deegoogle entirely, so if possible I would like to keep some features related to Google Play and its services.
I’d love an actual linux phone again; I bought a Neo FreeRunner early 2008, and while the tech wasn’t very mature at that point, it was my daily use phone for a while.
And no, I’m not buying a fucking iPhone. Made that mistake in 2009.
All those alternatives are Android, but mainly degoogled, lots are pretty good, I like CrDroid on my Poco F3, this is a very nice ROM, Graphene, Lineage, etc are all fine.
Main problem is mainly a lot of banking apps will not work, oh yes you can install Magisk, SuperSU, Zygist, SusFS, keybox, Mask Integrity, Autofix, TEE hacking, spoof a lot of things, etc and BANG! your bank app or Google Wallet will work and you can tap to pay with NFC! It will work 2 or 3 weeks until a google update/bank app update, and you re-spend countless hours on XDA or Telegram to find how to fix this. Until next time.
If you don’t tap-to-pay or your bank app does not mind running on an insecure OS, everything else is perfect in all those ROMs, pick one.
If you want a real alternative, you have the Apple world but you already made the mistake before 😜, or Ubuntu Touch maybe.
Great point about bank apps.
Thankfully I never got in the habit of tap to pay with my phone.
The amount of data that bank apps want to slurp up in the name of “security” makes me uncomfortable, anyway.
I just bank via web browser, today.