TLDR: i complain about samsung’s flagship and newer android.
I use samsung flagship phone and it’s crazy, how unable I am to use full potential of my phone, just because I don’t want to log in to google neither to samsung. I try to use F-droid and Aurora Store whenever possible, but its so bad experience…for maps I use Organic Maps, but google forces it to be installed specifically from Google Play Store to work with Android Auto, so I have to log in every time there is an update. Most of games won’t work, because they require being signed-in to google, and thats actually kinda weird…before my phone now I had an old Galaxy S5 Android 6.0 and games there didn’t complain that much as here on Android 14 (so the newer android the less privacy you get, while them all companies “focus on privacy”, bullshit liars), samsung requires signing-in to usd like 1/10 of the flagship features…It’s so sad, as I love samsung’s quality, phone is really outstanding, overall all samsung products are very good quality, but pushing these fucking accounts is convincing me not to buy samsung’s flagship anymore. We need to finally unite and make some alternative to those close-sourced bloatware, as phone industry is nowhere near to being as free as desktop industry. I feel more free using Windoze than those fucking " smart"phones. Really if you have to buy new smartphone and are into privacy, think twice before you buy samsung…phone itself is great, but software side is a nightmare.
I bought a phone for something like $20 which is very simple. It has no vibration. It has 65 KB of onboard storage. And it is not a smartphone. I don’t even take it with me most of the time, because I know that nobody will call me anyway, so why bother. I use it very rarely. The most usage I have from it is calling, flashlight and maybe as a clock once every so often, since I have many actual clocks.
On the computer I use GNU / Linux. And I have no complaints.
So I don’t understand why even bother with a smartphone in the first place?
PS: I would love to try Pinephone or Librem5 though.
You can’t really expect to have any privacy if you’re using any online service anymore, so I just stopped trying. Blasting a Samsung phone with all the features enabled and not thinking of going back really.
/e/os?
I used to use Lineage OS before without gapps and it worked flawlessly although it was few years ago. Give it a try.
If you liked LineageOS without gapps, than I highly recommend DivestOS. It is a soft-fork of LineageOS with significant security hardening and removal of proprietary binary blobs.
Ive been meaning to flash this onto my fairphone but the websites instructions are a bit confusing (I’ve installed calyx, eos and graphene on other phones)
I would avoid /e/os (and iode) because they are frequently behind on Android security patches. More information here: https://divestos.org/pages/patch_history
lets start the divestos wave, its somehow rarely heard of but has the support of lineageos with the hardening of (almost) grapheneos, and the principles of GNU.
