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My Samsung Galaxy S turns 10 this year. It runs the latest compatible version of Cyanogenmod. Despite the obvious security drawbacks, I am still using it as my day-to-day smartphone for these reasons: * These things are seemingly indestructible. In 10 years, the only problems I had was a deteriorating battery (which I replaced once) and a broken back cover (which I replaced by a 2,99 EUR one from eBay). The screen is still unbroken, fully working, and without scratches * They are small, handy, and slim (thinner than many modern smartphones) * Browsing is so slow that I cannot do anything except checking Hackernews and reading the local news. So it is definitely not a procrastination tool for me * The camera still works great, and makes good pictures * I don't care about security holes. I have no important passwords stored on the phone, I don't use it to check my mail (for the reason above). The only password stored is the ical service password on my private server which is used to update the calendar app. I couldn't care less if anyone had this password, my calendar is really not interesting. * Osmand (for OpenStreetMap) and the national route planning app for public transit still work So basically, I have an extremely reliable pocket machine which can be used as a telephone, to send SMS, to do route planning, to check the news, to check my calendar, to provide a Wifi access point for my laptop and which is also a world wide map. I don't need anything else, so why replace it? During these 10 years, I saw my then-girlfriend and now-wife go through 5 new smartphones, which regularly broke. I used it to make pictures of all our vacations, our engagement, our wedding and our child as a new-born. It has accumulated an amount of experience-patina which is very rare for physical things these days, so I also cling to it out of sheer nostalgia. |
Anecdote:
6 months ago I got a OnePlus 7 Pro and installed LineageOS (continuation of CyanogenMod) on it. The 7 Pro has very small screen borders and no notch (iPhone) / punch hole (Samsung); instead a motor makes the selfie camera pop up & retract from the top of the phone. I also never updated LineageOS because it went from an unofficial build to officially supported so updating would require a complete reset.
About two months ago I noticed that the camera would pop up every once in a while for seemingly no reason.
I could only conclude that it was hacked; worse, I would have never noticed on a 'normal' phone without a pop-up camera. Was my phone also recording me the entire time?
I don't know what the vulnerability was - it could have been a remote exploit in Android itself that's also exploitable on your phone, or it could have been from an app that I had installed (the only apps I had with network usage + camera permissions were Firefox, and the latest version of WhatsApp from when I bought the phone (no updates since I don't have Google software on it, I just downloaded the WhatsApp APK when I set it up)).
You've said that you don't have any sensitive data on your phone, but still be careful.
I updated LineageOS and since then the issue has disappeared. I update the OS about every week now to hopefully prevent this from happening again.