*In terms of privacy, customisation, camera quality, and battery time.
For the longest time I have only used either iPhone or Samsung. I plan on switching to Android for the next phone I get, but I find that Samsung phones are often too big for me and put too much energy on camera quality (I don’t take many photos). I have started to look into brands such as Nokia and Motorola, and I would like to know what you guys think of them. Additionally, do you suggest any other phone brands aside from them? My biggest priorities are privacy and long battery time. Bonus if the phone can run LineageOS (I have excluded Graphene as they are only compatible with Pixel phones).
Thank you for any answers. Cheers!
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I read or skimmed each of your links each time. I’d quote from them, but it’s incredibly annoying since that particular link is an image and the others are massive walls of text (that mostly attack the character of individuals, not technical work).
I’ll quote one particular part that relates to what I’m talking about:
You seem to do the opposite. I agree those people suck, but I don’t agree that implies their work sucks.
Out of the box means what you get right after installing the ROM. It’s the set of defaults. Like on a Linux distro, it’s the firewall configuration, default apps, memory allocator, etc.
It’s still not going to get you everything GrapheneOS, DivestOS, or CalyxOS provide. A firewall isn’t going to protect you from an app accessing files it shouldn’t, memory exploits from an attacker, or fingerprinting with your MAC and IP address.
Custom ROMs provide a level of protection that users messing with permissions and firewall settings won’t get. Here’s how I see it, using the Pareto principle:
As you go further down that list, you get more painful tradeoffs. So you need to decide how far down that list you want to go.
I think GrapheneOS has the best trade-off of usability vs security and privacy, but everyone is different. For some people, even LineageOS has too many tradeoffs.
I don’t see how that’s relevant at all. Linux was incredibly insecure, had very liked hardware support, etc until others joined. These days, most code comes from manufacturers building drivers or large tech companies (like RedHat) driving subsystem development (BTRFS, systemd, etc).
These days, the value of a Linux distro has very little to do with the developers (people who write code) and everything to do with the maintainers (people who build, test, and publish packages).
Yeah, cost.
I don’t know the requirements, but I know there’s a trust system there. If you break the embargo and release early, that gives attackers who didn’t know about the vulnerability a window to attack participating projects (i.e. the rest of the Android ecosystem) before the embargo is lifted. Here’s an example of OpenBSD getting in trouble for patching before the embargo was lifted.
Perhaps those other projects just don’t have the manpower, organization, or funds to get a partnership. Partnering with Google on security embargoes likely has no impact to the privacy of a given project’s users, it merely has expectations on the participant.
Tor cares more about privacy and anonymity than security, and Firefox likely provides a stronger base for that. But security is another issue entirely.
After a brief review of that linked Tor page, here’s what I saw:
Here’s DivestOS’s take, which ships Gecko-based Mull on why Android Chrome has superior security. The big one is per-site process isolation:
That said, I agree with DivestOS devs here:
I also care more about per-site data isolation:
It’s a trade-off between security and privacy, and Chrome arguably has better security, while Firefox arguably has better privacy. Both are quite secure, so I prefer Firefox.
That’s not a security or privacy issue, and is essentially the same across custom ROM vendors.
He’s neither. He was a contractor for the NSA who had way more access than he needed (NSA fail), and was under less scrutiny vs full time employees. I think he largely got lucky and only got away once. I’ve read both his account and an alternative perspective and that’s my assessment.
I think he has valuable things to say (and should be protected as a whistleblower), but I do verify what he says.
From your link (edit to post concerning the OpenCamera alternative):
OpenCamera doesn’t have as good of quality as either the system camera or Pixel Camera included in GrapheneOS (both seem to be based on upstream code).
My guess is that this shutter sound issue is from upstream, and likely only takes effect in Japan. It’s a miss for sure, but the GrapheneOS docs make it clear that the goal is to have the same features as the original camera, but with some privacy and security features on top (stripping of metadata, fewer permissions, etc).
But you really shouldn’t be using the built-in camera anyway for OPSec, there’s too much risk of OTA updates, metadata (tons of sensors), etc. There are smaller cameras if you need something discrete, and OpenCamera may be good enough for even sensitive uses.
That said, good example of a miss by GrapheneOS, I’m interested in any more you might have. That’s an odd one I wouldn’t have thought of (I rarely use my camera).
This is an unfair comparison imo. Android gives users and apps a lot more system features, so the attack surface is much larger. I’d have to look at the report, but it’s probably counting all costs across vendors as well, which have a lot of different hardware.
I’d be interested in narrowing it to just Pixels (or any other phone line) vs iPhones. That’s a bit more charitable toward Android since Pixels aren’t nearly as popular as iPhones, but it’s at least fair from a number of supported models standpoint.
Both are sketchy. Apple is sketchy because it’s closed, Android is sketchy because it’s run by an ad firm and tons of data is run through Google’s servers (notifications, Play services, etc).
I’d much prefer a Linux phone (Pinephone Pro ideally) to Android, but usability counts too, and Linux phones just aren’t there yet.
Every phone has proprietary hardware they won’t open up, the most important of which is the modem. Even Linux phones have this issue.
So I have to ask myself what Google gets out of screwing me with their security chip. It doesn’t help them get more ad revenue, and if there’s a breach, it could scare customers away from using their hardware. So I don’t see any special motivations for Google to compromise this and other phone vendors not to. Google surely doesn’t need the NSA’s money either.
If you’ll look, you’ll find Google getting into hardware security tokens (Titan), offering FIDO U2F on their products, etc. They want more people trusting their security so they can collect more interesting data, so it’s more likely for them to fingerprint through things like Play services (to serve more relevant app recommendations) than to compromise security.
That said, if you know of a provably more secure device, I’m so ears.
That’s a good question for the other custom Android projects. I’m guessing they haven’t put in the effort needed or don’t have the infrastructure to comply with whatever Google needs to include them.
I’ll have to ask their maintainers.