Comment by ux266478

5 hours ago

Easier said than done in the US. Even of the phones that allow for rooting (which is few and far between these days) you're at the complete mercy of the carrier for whether or not that ability is actually available to you. Even if the gracious lords may allow it, you have to engage in a long and drawn out Byzantine rite just for the privilege. Currently sitting on a Pixel 10 that will not let me have root.

Give me a Linux phone with halfway decent modem drivers, or give me death.

If you do not update the phone, chances are high that there is some Linux vulnerability you could expoloit. The privileged vendor software also can have vulnerabilities. For example, here [1] researches hacked the phone with Verified Boot using a boot logo parsing error.

My impression that you should treat your phone as something that can be hacked any moment and not store anything important there.

[1] https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2024/SSTIC-actes/when_vendo...