That's true, but for the price and compared to non-Samsung they are doing really well. Our daughter's A54, which was a bargain at 300 Euro, is still getting monthly updates after three years and looks like it's still getting them for at least another year (since A53 is also still supported).
Though for price vs. updates it's hard to beat the Pixel 9a. It's currently often ~349 Euro and gets updates until April 1, 2032.
This is one of the advantages apple currently has: Staying on the bleeding edge of or buying an iphone is cheaper than you would think, because iphones in general retain their value longer than the average android
I have found that you can also use the less long value retention to your advantage by not buying an Android phone on release day. E.g. Pixels often go for hundreds off after 6 months or so. E.g. here in Western Europe, including VAT: Pixel 9a 549 -> 349, Pixel 10 899 -> 549, Pixel 10 Pro 1099 -> 769. At the same time the iPhone 17 has only gone down about 100 Euro. When getting e.g. a Pixel at the discounted price, the loss is not so much after selling after 1-2 years.
Also, I had a habit of getting a new iPhone every year and the loss of selling second-hand is now much larger than in the early days. I think the demand lessened due to the market largely reaching an equilibrium + there not being a lot of advances in smartphones, so people are staying on their phones longer, so there is less demand for second-hand phones (e.g. my parents were on iPhone 11 until recently, my mom still is).
The typical interested buyers are also more annoying to deal with these days (also probably due to the changing iPhone demographics). So nowadays, if I cannot sell it to family or friends, I'll often just send it to a company like Rebuy.
I think I was wrong. Googling suggest that Qwant is owned by Octave Klaba, the founder and majority owner of OVH. Murena seems to be owned by Gaël Duval.
It's just from their website a lot of mentions of Murena seemed to say powered by Qwant, or similar, and so it looked like they were closely linked.
I you ever cross a border or attend a demonstration, privacy requires security. Unfortunately, /e/OS (and most hardware) is severely lacking in that department.
I have phones with both, but I don't necessarily agree that /e/OS is easier. E.g. things like doing or restoring in-app purchases often do not work, even when logging in through microG. Want that nice backup option that Signal is now offering? Well, good luck, you cannot purchase it on /e/OS (at least I couldn't). In general when it comes to compatibility, my experience is that GrapheneOS is better because it can use real Google Play Services, albeit sandboxed. I think you can use the Play Store on /e/OS as well, but it's going to have higher privileges.
They also use Google for assisted GPS when you use it, eSIM provisioning, widevine provisioning. Last time I checked, microG on /e/OS also downloads a Google binary blob for SafetyNet.
Besides analytics, if you install Google Apps (e.g. for Android Auto), many of them get higher privileges on /e/OS.
The price to pay is:
I would also add installing F-Droid apps (if you use App Lounge) through 'CleanAPK', without wanting to reveal why this is necessary or who owns/maintains CleanAPK.
They do quite a lot of fishy stuff. It may be incompetence, but yeah...
If your main concern is protecting against state actors attacks or very specific threats
This always sounds like systems like GrapheneOS are for paranoid people. But this is basically you if you ever go to a demonstration (e.g. in the US) or cross borders of certain countries (e.g. of the US), sadly things like Cellebrite have become very common. Then suddenly layered protection, not running years behind in security patches, a duress pin, or rebooting after not unlocking for a few minutes to get back to BFU aren't so bad. (IANAL, figure out yourself which of these are legal and not destruction of evidence.)
Uploading speech-to-text to OpenAI? Regular communication with Google? Using Google for assisted GPS? Giving a bunch of Google apps privileged access (if you need them for e.g. Android Auto)?
Well and besides that only shipping ASBs and no other security updates outside major Android releases (and both usually late). Using heavily outdated kernel trees (e.g. FP4 is using a Linux kernel patch level that hasn't been updated since 2020!), outdated vendor firmware blobs, etc.
It might work, but it is not very secure, nor very private.
Reading the links posted in a sibling thread it only does it if you have text to speech enabled and they use an anonymizing proxy so openai can't associate sessions with any particular user ie it's not perfectly anonymous and private but I don't see how you could have totally anonymous and private until you have a fully offline on-device TTS model, which the fairphone guy said they tried and didn't feel it was up to scratch.
I don't use e/os but it doesnt' seem like a terrible compromise to me personally.
Though for price vs. updates it's hard to beat the Pixel 9a. It's currently often ~349 Euro and gets updates until April 1, 2032.
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