Really, it’s gonna depend on what your top priorities are. I run a Pixel 6 Pro with CalyxOS and I love it. But for you, it depends on whether you really need top security or want to go for a more open and long term design (which may not be entirely beneficial or all that special now).
For the Pixel 8, you’re gonna get much better cameras and more of those “Pixel Features” even when running something like GOS or CalyxOS. Its really nice cause you can even use GBoard and GCam and just firewall them (or however you do the equivalent in GOS), so you get the benefits without the downsides. Though it will be more expensive too.
With Fairphone, you’re gonna get a more open design that likely will last longer. That said, it doesn’t have a top end processor in it, so you have to imagine what it’ll be like in 6-8 years trying to run Android 20. Longevity is nice, but not as helpful if it can’t keep up physically with new releases. Also, with the Pixel 8 line now set to be supported for 8 years, it kinda… Undermines the Fairphone argument somewhat, though not to a huge degree.
Personally, if it were me, I’d choose the Pixel (and also choose CalyxOS as well, but that’s more a personal choice, don’t let the Graphene folks try and sway you with a bunch of FUD. CalyxOS is just fine, but GOS is a good choice too). It will have higher quality hardware, the processor should be able to handle tougher workloads into the future, and I think you’ll quite like the experience.
But, the Fairphone isn’t a bad choice either, and its definitely supporting a better ecosystem overall. It just won’t have as good of cameras and may not run as well a few years down the road, which could be an issue for the longevity. It can also run CalyxOS as well, so you won’t be missing out on using most other normal apps.
Really, it just depends on your use case and priorities. I don’t think you can go absolutely wrong choosing either one though.
not op but the calyx community and owners are far better than the grapheneos ones, that’s enough for me to use one over the other. if you need any other info, louis rossmann and techlore have good videos on the grapheneos side of that.
Longevity is nice, but not as helpful if it can’t keep up physically with new releases.
You also have to imagine what that longevity is going to really mean. Even a sturdy phone with a good case is in an unfriendly environment. They live in pockets, purses, and get dropped. Getting updates for 10 years is great, but it’s not too useful if the phone is dead. It’s always good to pursue increased longevity, but there is diminishing return for many reasons.
This is absolutely true. The Fairphone kinda gets around this since its got open parts and can be user serviced for most things, but the honest question for that is how many are gonna go to that trouble, not next week when your phone is still new, but 5 years from now? The dedicated certainly will and I commend Fairphone for it, but a lot of average folks with a slower phone are gonna want to upgrade at that point.
Do be careful, your choices are very limited. All the carriers in the US, except TMobile today, have a whitelist of devices. Even if you make your own phone or buy an awesome phone from out of market, it won’t work.
Technically, there is no reason it won’t work. But the carriers block it from registering on the network unless roaming. Our non-American devices have been kicked off every network now except TMobile.
So your choice is really just the small list of devices they choose to support and 75% are the same phone. Samsung whatever with some various sized screen and various sized storage. Or Apple iWhatever.
They make your life hell with a non-standard carrier phone. And yes I’ve been buying out of region phones for 20 years now, even back with Windows Mobile and Palm devices with 2G text based web. Every year it gets harder and harder.
Im using my imported Zenfone 9 on AT&T without (much) issue. I did have to change some settings using ADB/terminal as root to enable volte so i can make calls since the phone doesn’t support all the bands used.
All you need is the TOTP secret, and it will generate OTPs. If you enter the secret in another TOTP app, you’ll also get OTPs. Here’s a Ruby lib that will render OTPs from a secret, for example: github.com/mdp/rotp
For an Android TOTP tool, I like FreeOTP+. You can even use it for Steam OTPs.
GrapheneOS, a privacy/security focused operating system is compatible with a limited amount of devices. The pixel series is part of those compatible devices.
People or rather I didn’t buy pixel as its more privacy friendly but its the only one available here that let’s me install another ROM on day 1 without voiding warranty. And grapheneos being one of the best privacy focused ROM only available for pixel and that pretty much every ROM is available on pixel is another reason. I was basically forced into buying a google product as everyone else void warranty on unlocking boot loader or they don’t have much of a custom ROM scene.
They use Graphene. That’s the point. Pixels are unfortunately the only supported devices. That’s why I won’t use Graphene as I would never support google. A pity, many do
I personally think this might be a “vote with your vallet” situation. Signaling to Google (and to other manufacturers) that people appreciate openness in their smartphones. Knowing Google though, it’s unlikely they will get it.
The fediverse has too many children who cry and throw a fit when someone expresses the wrong opinion, there are very few healthy function adults.
People who promote Mastadon and even Lemmy claiming freedom because of its federated services, is a lie they use to push tyrannical censorship for people having the wrong views, or wrong think, so they use services like ActivityPub where people are not allowed to prove them wrong, due to how traumatizing it is to read words on the internet that they don’t like.
No matter how bad centralized social media can be, at least there people have to be adults and handle criticisms and being corrected or challenged for what someone posts. There is no escaping all the evil cruel people who disagree and believe differently.
If you think every instance is going to follow suit with your example you're an idiot. I'd love for you to show numbers of instances that follow your logic, and not just a single comment that made you unhappy with how it played out.
Wow, that’s crazy! Hey, would you mind linking to a comment where someone says “Gas the Jews?” I can’t seem to find one.
Also, if you have time, can you link to an explainer for “trans ideology?” Is that like Caitlin Jenner (pro-Trump, anti-speed limit)? Or something else?
I thought you people had stayed on Reddit. Y’know, the people who live to say shitty things to people and then sulk when they get edited/removed/banned and blame it all on ‘the hive mind’ or ‘group think’ or some other sneering put down when the reality is simply that most people don’t like shitty people saying shitty things.
+1 for iPhone. Is it as private as GrapheneOS? No. Is it more private than almost all out of the box android phones? Yes.
Apple still use a lot of your data, although they at least claim to anonymise most of it. But that data stays internal to try boost more apple sales, and isn’t sold to other companies. I’d rather 1 company have my information than 100.
Any apple apps you don’t want are easily removed once it’s set up and they don’t come back with updates etc.
This is the privacy community, I wouldn’t consider iOS appropriate here at all, since you really can’t do anything to limit the data collection. Especially not for a “what phone should I get” question. If someone already has an iPhone, asking what you can do is a good question (“not much” is the answer you’ll get).
Is it better out if the box than most Androids? Probably, maybe, depending on how that’s defined. But I can quickly make most Androids far better than iOS, even ones with a lot of vendor bloat.
For example, I recently cleaned up a Verizon Samsung just using the Universal Android Debloat Tool. This is stuff I used to do manually with ADB.
Then adding a VPN and I could restrict apps calling home and bypass Google DNS.
You can even disable google services, play, etc, and just don’t use a google acccount on the phone.
They are good products, even if they don’t have the nerdy cool factor. Each day I’m working on old C/C++ code in Linux, so having my phone be a reliable appliance instead of yet another computer to fuck around with is totally fine for me. I liked my past Android phones too though.
No carrier bloatware and very long software support.
I carry an iPhone for work, corp IT manages it, I use little more than comm stuff there, so theres no advantage to having an Android. (Before that my work phone was a blackberry, because I need work calls, email, messaging, etc to just work, and you couldn’t beat the battery life).
My personal is Android, because I want the tools I can use there.
Two very different use-cases.
And I really dislike iOS UI/UX, the limitations are very constricting. But for the basics it “just works”, but it isn’t something to recommend for privacy.
Weirdly in this case I think I agree. You can look at my previous comments about how much I hate Apple but it seems to me that OP isn’t too technical and installing a custom ROM might not be what they’re after. iPhones don’t have any of those annoying games and stuff preinstalled, as long as the carrier doesn’t install stuff. I’d suggest a refurbished unlocked iPhone though, to save some money. Make sure the previous owners account is removed from the device or else it’ll probably just be a paper weight.
If OP is open to custom ROMs then GrapheneOS is a great choice but LineageOS and DivestOS are also great options for someone that wants to get started with privacy and they support a lot more devices, that can be got for cheaper than an iPhone/Pixel. Again, I’d recommended a refurbished, carrier unlocked phone that is supported by one of these projects
Its not hard to flash a rom these days, unlike ten years ago.
Now developers post instructions for each device type. Look at Lineage, Graphene, DivestOS. Very good instructions from all of them, including installing ADB on Windows or Linux.
Of the dozens (hundreds?) of times I’ve flashed over the years, I’ve bricked 1 device, and that was from experimenting and not following instructions, I knew it was risky.
And with Pixel it’s about as straightforward as it gets.
Damn this was unexpected. So it seems they’ll just proxying / serving all email to Outlook apps through their servers. Damn Microsoft that’s really fucking anti-competitive.
Honestly the thing that annoys me the most about this isn’t the privacy aspect. It’s the fact that they called it “new outlook”. Which means now at work I have to explain that no, this isn’t real outlook it’s just MS being useless wankers and not being able to come up with a new name for a new product. See also, teams vs teams for work and school. They did the same thing with Skype and Skype for business back in the day and still pisses me off.
I like that too and I don’t understand why people are so very fundamentally against having stuff recommended to them based on what they’re already following.
I’m not keen on it, prefer to find things organically so I usually ignore or (if possible) hide recommendations. But I don’t understand getting mad about it and judging people who find it useful. People gonna people, I suppose.
I may accept an algorithm IF I can know what and why things have beem filtered. A private algorithm which could be observed and manipulated would have my vote.
I want to know what are the bubbles I am in snd and be able to remove them so see something perhaps less biased.
I used to like it, now I avoid it at all cost. The problem is that the algorithm is never neutral, even if it's made with good intentions it can be gamed and manipulated, and it traps you in a spiral where what you interact with is what it shows you is what you interact with is what it shows you...
I never really used Twitter or any similar service, so I never had this happen to information shaping my opinions. I did, however, feel that the music I was listening to became shaped by the Spotify algorithm, and that I ended up listening to less rather than more diverse music than when I was sticking to vinyl. That's absurd - you have all the music in the world at your fingertips, and you end up limiting yourself more. That was my experience of course, other people probably have different ones. Anyway, I cancelled my subscription.
If there's a risk for music streaming services narrowing your field of vision, platforms shaping your opinions are downright scary. Algorithms can be tricked into showing you content, which is what russian troll farms excelled at. Tech bros tend to believe the solution is in adding more and more complexity to the point where nobody understands how it works - this is the opposite of how I want the content that helps informing me about the world to be curated.
I'm obviously not diagonally opposed to algorithms. The choose your own algorithm approach might have some merit, and I look forward to seeing more experimentation with this in the fediverse. But I do not trust corporate interests with any of this - nor do I trust a bunch of tech-optimistic rich man's sons.
I used YouTube with the algorithm, mostly for educational stuff, like vsauce, kurgsat and tech stuff. I started showing some interest in politics and news, start watching tldr news, then it pulls me into Vox, as I showed some anti trump sentiment. To put it quickly, it didnt take too long for me to realise that I was being drawn to ever more left leaning content (obviously a lot further than merely Vox, second thought and deeper)
Which is why I left algorithmic YouTube by using alternative frontends
Pixel is stock android and is guaranteed to not have bloat unless some carrier is involved in it. Whenever anyone here suggests pixel they are definitely doing it for custom ROM like grapheneos and its pointless to buy otherwise.
I also caved for a pixel (4a) for my last phone, it still has Google’s bloatware (can’t remove youtube music app for example), but at least it doesn’t have Samsung’s bloatware in addition.
Still interested where this thread goes in other options though, as it’s getting worse in battery life and I’m also looking out for something new.
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