LineageOS is supported on a bit more devices, and works with microG if you're willing to sacrifice Google Pay for better battery life and less privacy violations: https://lineage.microg.org/
This worked ok, but wasn't as nice as grapheneos' solution so I ended up upgrading to a pixel once my cheap chinesium phone was sufficiently old and haven't looked back since. If you do the microg route you should be using a throw away gmail account you don't care about losing with the aurora store (if you need access to the google play store) because there is a non zero chance they ban your account.
> a throw away gmail account you don't care about losing with the aurora store
They also have a pool of accounts you can use by clicking “anonymous”. They do get banned frequently, and you have to re-login once in a while (for me it's almost every time I want to download something new again), but it is definitely usable.
It's a lot less usable lately because of the "Oops this account is rate limited" error unfortunately. Sometimes it takes me 10 tries. Updates are fine though, it's just searching for new apps that trigger it.
LineageOS unfortunately dropped support for my Moto G4 relatively quickly after I installed it and it only was supported up to Android 7.1. I have been running an unofficial build of 8.1 ever since, but that is also horribly outdated by now.
Maybe you can try getting DivestOS running. They only have 14.1 (Android 7.1.2) but unlike old LineageOS builds they patch security vulnerabilities and include some hardening.
Oh yes, more e-waste, more consumerism. We don't have enough of those. Sending text messages and viewing images requires a 90's supercomputer. It's fine.
Same here. I've benefited from hand me down devices for a long time, and I wish I could still be using the Samsung S3- so light, I have several spare batteries, it fit in most pockets, and it has a 3.5mm headphone jack. The iPhone SE from 2015 that recently I gave to one of my parents was nice, too.
My laptop is also from more than a decade ago, and I'm happily running LMDE 6 on it.
Everyone doesn't have to live like this, but it's utterly valid, and no one has any right or justification to try to tell anyone else not to.
I can buy anything any time, but I miss swappable batteries, headphone jack, sd card. These were all basic utility features than made a device interoperable and more generally functional. Removing them only benefits the people selling new phones, wireless headphones, and cloud storage.
My old vaio 3 laptops ago is actually still perfectly fast enough at what I do today, it just only has usb2 ports, which eventually became too big of a pain point. But it also had a real docking station that you plop the machine into, not the stupid "docks" we have today that are not docks but just mega-dongle-hubs where you connect a usbc cable. I miss that dock every day since 5 years ago. I could easily still be using it today even though it must be 15 years old or more by now. And if I were, no one else would have any justification for trying to say that I shouldn't, and no software or service provider would have any justification for artificially creating some incompatibility that only serves their goals instead of mine.
It is for me. And there is nothing important on my phone so it is not a huge concern.
And why do we have to accept that phones just turn into garbage after a few years? Even my old 2009 laptop* still runs an up-to-date OS but my 2016 phone is obsolete after 2-3 years?
* but I have to admit that the hardware is quite slow
> And why do we have to accept that phones just turn into garbage after a few years? Even my old 2009 laptop* still runs an up-to-date OS but my 2016 phone is obsolete after 2-3 years?
It is because computers run one of a few available OS's. The OS is being maintained by the distributer (MS, Apple, Google) and your hardware is good as long as the drivers are still receiving updates.
Phones are different because even though everyone only uses iOS or Android, every Android manufacturer puts their own layer onto Android, so Google can continusously update it but the manufacturer might not. Most companies only maintain their phones for about 3 years, giving a significantly reduced lifetime than computers.
It still works fine, from from a security perspective, keeping the phone without patch support is a bad idea.
Even if your phone really has no access to anything that you wouldn't want leaked (although most people would object to a third party having access to their phone calls, text messages, and location data), a compromised device is still a great way to launch attacks on other devices including taking part in botnets. None of this is an objection to old devices, mind; I'm a big proponent of running new software on old hardware, but the security patches are important.
Interesting, can I still use the Play Store with mircoG?
I already run LineageOS, but with Play services. I would like to be able to ditch Play services, but still need the Play store for things like my banking app, and an app to log in to government services.
You can install apps from Play Store with Aurora Store, which is in F-Droid.
I'd say it's a toss up whether specific apps will definitely work. But if they don't I'd recommending segmenting between different physical devices, and making the one that lives in your pocket as secure as possible. It's likely that you don't need to run banking and government apps on the same device that's privy to your movement.
In my country (Belgium), mobile payments are a big thing using the national payment network (Bancontact). Lots of small shops don't accept cards and only do mobile payments because of the lower transaction fees.
These mobile payments only work with your banks app or a dedicated app (Payconiq).
My current approach is to put all these apps in my work profile which I can turn off (using Insular from F-Droid). Only apps for which I need background activity or instant notifications (Signal, an open source podcast app, and sadly WhatsApp) are installed in the main profile.
Sadly, this approach still requires me to have Google services always running in the background for a functioning Play store in my work profile.
I've heard something about using Play Store proper with microG, but obviously that's very flaky. Aurora Store is the way to go.
And banking / government apps tend to work in Europe (at least the ones I have tried). Notable exceptions for me are Revolut (shame!) and McDonalds (who knew microG is the healthier option haha). Of course, in the US things might be vastly different.
Yeah. It's either that or state-supported systems (UPS in India, SBP and MirPay in Russia). Cryptocurrencies could be the answer but governments would never let that happen I think.