With the recent changes to how Google is doing things with Android, is it even worth it anymore? Should I just accept whatever version of Android comes with whatever phone or are custom ROMs still worth it? Assuming they still exist after all of this, idk what’s going on.
Uhm, what’s the alternative? I don’t want my phone to send my location 24/7 to Google or Samsung, whom I talk to and what websites I visit, maybe every single keystroke if the keyboard does weird things for machine learning or backing up word lists in the cloud… I want an operating system that has all of this disabled per default. And as far as I know that’s some custom ROMs and there is no other alternative.
The alternatives are:
Pinephone - which is, IMO, insecure because it lacks a user relockable bootloader with a custom key for verified boot (making it suceptable to evil maid attack and malware would persist through reboots)
Librem 5 - which is sold by a shady company (search “Louis Rossmann Purism” and you’ll see why), and it also has terrible specs for the price.
Well, I already own a Pinephone and I can tell you it’s not a viable alternative. It’s awesome and great for tinkering. But try and use it for 2 days in real life and you’ll buy another Pixel and fit it with GrapheneOS, just to get on with your day. At least that’s what I did. It has minor hardware woes, major software issues, there is no modern standby and you just won’t get a notification if your friends change plans. And it’s 50 more annoyances like this each day. You constantly need to work around things like not being able to buy a train ticket. And the browser is as sluggish as on a first/second gen Android from 18 years ago. And a Librem isn’t substancially better, just 3x the price.
(And I’m not sure about Rossman’s take on Purism. They definitely made some bad decisions and severe mistakes. It is hard to do this. Projects run over budget. But it’s not necessarily all malice. I think Rosmann exaggerates it a bit for Youtube clicks. It’s more some stupid (and very questionable) business decisions. But there is more nuance to it.)
I tired to use my pinephone as a spare while my phone was getting fixed. I can’t wait for a Linux phone. Just trying to use spotify ended with me rebooting the phone and being required to login again. I couldn’t figure out why when I locked it my earphones disconnected, so I ended up just plugging it in so it wouldn’t hibernate.
None of this has anything to do with custom ROMs vs stock Android. These are all problems at the application and settings level and can be solved without changing the operating system.
Idk, can you easily replace the Location Services? The captive portal checker? GCM with a different push service, or the built-in Webview with a better version, and have the permission system and the firewall of the operating system prevent proprietary apps from having too much access and phoning home, unless they’re designed to allow it? …I mean sure, you can replace the default keyboard without much effort. But I thought all of the other things were impossible on a stock ROM and then you don’t even have things like storage scopes and so on?