housemate and I are sick of smartphone AI and spyware!! looking for cheap, refurbished cellphones from the 00s
- the problem: all models we have found run on 2G, which is rapidly being phased out by all US carriers
- desired features: basic call and text functionality, durability, physical buttons, fits in pocket
The only downside is Pixel 10 support is coming via alternative methods from standard, as Google stopped shipping the binary blobs to run the hardware. Pixel 9 series may be the last to have truly native Graphene support. Graphene is looking into long-term solutions though, although last I heard they were looking at Qualcomm-based chipsets which is bad news on some level, as they’re a US military contractor.
I agree, that is a concern long-term.
I think the best path for the future is supporting Linux Phone alternatives like PostMarketOS so they become polished enough to daily for the average user. That likely won’t be as secure as GrapheneOS with specialized hardware for quite a while, but should be good enough for most use cases, and would give us a platform that can’t be rug pulled out from under us as we slowly improve it.