Hardware far outlasts software in the smartphone world, due to aggressive chronic designed obsolescence by market abusing monopolies. So I will never buy a new smartphone - don’t want to feed those scumbags. I am however willing to buy used smartphones on the 2nd-hand market if they can be liberated. Of course it’s still only marginally BifL even if you don’t have demanding needs.
Has anyone gone down this path? My temptation is to find a phone that is simultaneously supported by 2 or 3 different FOSS OS projects. So if it falls out of maintence on one platform it’s not the end. The Postmarket OS (pmOS) page has a full list and a short list. The short list apparently covers devices that are actively maintained and up to date, which are also listed here. Then phones on that shortlist can be cross-referenced with the LineageOS list or the Sailfish list.
So many FOSS phone platforms seem to come and go I’ve not kept up on it. What others are worth considering? It looks like the Replicant device list hasn’t changed much.
(update) Graphene OS has a list of supported devices
(and it appears they don’t maintain old devices)
Pixel 9 Pro Fold (comet)
Pixel 9 Pro XL (komodo)
Pixel 9 Pro (caiman)
Pixel 9 (tokay)
Pixel 8a (akita)
Pixel 8 Pro (husky)
Pixel 8 (shiba)
Pixel Fold (felix)
Pixel Tablet (tangorpro)
Pixel 7a (lynx)
Pixel 7 Pro (cheetah)
Pixel 7 (panther)
Pixel 6a (bluejay)
Pixel 6 Pro (raven)
Pixel 6 (oriole)
So Graphene’s mission is a bit orthoganol to the mission of Postmarket OS. Perhaps it makes sense for some people to get a Graphene-compatible device then hope they can switch to pmOS when it gets dropped. But I guess that’s not much of a budget plan. Pixel 6+ are likely not going to be dirt cheap on the 2nd-hand market.
What are peoples’ issue with Organic Maps? (seriously - it would be interesting to know) I use it all the time, and it’s great. Some of the routes are sub-optimal, but not often. Finally you can search with postcodes (that has been a problem in the past).
Maybe it’s not perfect, but I only ever have to default to google maps when someone sends me a crappy shortened link to something. Once I get the actual address, i can swap back to Organic Maps. It used to eat battery on my Fairphone 2, but I had other problems with that phone too!. I love it, and the offline maps are perfect for when I am travelling.
I get terrible (not “suboptimal” but genuinely ridiculous) routes enough of the time to call the program not fully working. There is also a thing where if there are two routes of roughly equal quality, instead of choosing one and sticking to it, OM will keep trying to switch between them, asking for a lot of crazy U-turns. The POI search is also lame: if you enter “McDonalds” and there are 10 of them in the area, it shows them in some weird random order instead of nearest first.
I do use OM in preference to Google Maps because privacy and offline etc., but it is only usable maybe 75% of the time. If I’m in a hurry or otherwise unwilling to make some wrong turns, or if OM messes up, I end up using Google. Google simply works a lot better. Ugh.
It would also be nice if OM’s voice directions included street names, and that map updates didn’t download entire new maps, but those are features to be engineered. Still, the California map data is over 1GB all by itself, that has to be re-downloaded once a month or so. De Lorme Street Map in the Windows 95 era fit all the US streets on a CD-ROM (700MB) so while OSM data might be richer, there’s still a bunch of bloat going on. And streets don’t change that often, so the monthly update should be tiny compared to the initial download.