Comment by babypuncher
4 years ago
> You can't really compare Google to Apple. You can switch to a different company if you don't like pixel phones and get almost the same experience. You can switch between manufacturers and use windows/Linux as well. The same isn't true about Mac os or iOS.
This doesn't really make much sense to me. Unless you are going with a niche privacy-oriented fork of AOSP, any non-iOS smartphone you move to will still be controlled by Google. And if you do move to one of those forks, you are essentially migrating to an entirely new ecosystem anyways. It's no easier to leave Google's Android ecosystem than it is to leave iOS or macOS.
There is not just iOS and Android - Sailfish OS has been a thing since 2013 and while unforutnately not fully open source, it's perfectly usable (and on my primary smartphone): https://sailfishos.org/
Also, thanks to PinePhone finally providing open yet easily available hardware, there is now a new crop of fully open source mobile Linux distros being developed: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Release...
Sire, not everything might work yet & PinePhone is not at the same level as the latest Android flagship phone (well, you can hardly expect that for $150) but there are multiple people communities of people building new mobile operating systems, right now! Ones that are not controlled by a control freak (Apple) or spymaster dropping services left and right (Google).