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.
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There’s essentially Lineage (formerly Cyanogen, or a fork of it) and Graphene.
Ignore /e/ OS - it’s Lineage with their crap on it.
Go read about those two.
You can go with GrapheneOS. Currently, it’s only Pixels supported. GOS and Motorola have a partnership and GOS on a Moto should be available in 2027.
I installed GrapheneOS on a Pixel for my dad along with Sandboxed Google Services so I know you don’t have to fully degoogle with GOS. The good thing with this setup is Google only gets the info you allow it to have.
Sandboxed GS can also be installed in a second user profile.
So, for example, I could use Maps this way on the GOS?
What do you use for 2FA?
As far as I know, yes, Maps should be fully functional.
I use KeepassDX and KeepassXC (laptop) for 2fa with Aegis as a backup.
As a fellow former CyanogenMod user, I run GrapheneOS. I like that it gives me the most control over my hardware, of any of the Android variants I have tried.
Edit: I buy phones specifically looking for GrapheneOS support, now. But for non-pixel phones, I have found LineageOS to be fine.
I guess I’ll keep my Android phone for whatever I need big corpo for (bank app, whatsapp every1 uses, 2FA), and get a GrapheneOS-able phone for the rest.
Nice. That is what I did, at first, as well.
One thing I discovered is that the vast majority of 2FA uses a shared open standard. I was able to cut way down on the count of 2FA apps I had to install, and just use Aegis for almost everything.
Aegis runs fine on GrapheneOS, too.
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.
I genuinely don’t understand why people make the switch and then worry about bank apps. Don’t people have cash and credit cards? What about using an internet browser on a PC or laptop for logging in to bank accounts?
I use a Chromium-based browser (that allows extensions) in desktop mode to access my bank because they deliberately give a crappy experience to mobile users. How do I know this? Because their site used to work just fine in standard Android Chrome up until 2-3 years ago when they “overhauled” their site. Made me refuse to install their app even harder.
Generally speaking, I don’t do apps if going to the site does the same thing.
The real answer to a good Android alternative is probably not another android fork, but another Linux distro, like SailfishOS that the Jolla Phone ships with: https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-sep-ii-2026 It has support for Android apps though, so you can still use your bank app (probably), but it runs them in sandboxes
Great if you’re in Europe (which I think I’d rather be, but can’t afford to do).
