this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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Privacy
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We all love grapheneOS, but please stop buying Google Pixels to do it. It's such a contradicting action to first stuff googles pocket with even more money, and then be like "I am privacy conscious." Please spend your money on alternatives that will put the money to actually developing good alternatives like FairPhone.
Second hand and refurbished is a thing
How about putting your money where it will actually contribute to foss tech
Just don't buy them new, and it becomes far more ethical.
(US perspective disclaimer)
It's unfortunately a lot more involved and a lot less stable/reliable to install graphene on non-pixel phones. Most of the big names are extremely locked down on the hardware end, and for a good few years Google was basically the only big tech hardware manufacturer that still let people root their devices. They were consistently better than Samsung, Motorola, and of course Apple in this one category and so were the go-to despite it giving money directly to Google in the process. I get that giving money to big tech in general was part of the problem but there were legitimately few to no good alternatives until pretty recently.
If you check the officially supported hardware list for GrapheneOS, you will find that it's exclusively populated by different Pixel models :/
Last I remember (before writing this) FairPhone was an exclusively EU product and wasn't available in the United States, mostly for environmental reasons surrounding shipping. I just checked and it appears they are now available over here via Murena which is really good to know; if/when the time comes where I need to replace my current phone I'll be strongly considering them as an option.
There are also the Chinese smartphone brands which are increasingly becoming compelling options. I'll probably be looking into some of those too but the govt here seems very trigger happy on banning Chinese manufacturers, and I think several of them also don't allow rooting either.