LOTS of phones other than Pixels come with an unlockable bootloader, just check the list of supported phones for Lineage, Postmarket, Ubuntu Touch, crDroid, etc.and you’ll find a multitude of choices - many (most) of which are readily available in the USA as well. (source: me, who has flashed alternative AOSP ROM’s and Ubuntu Touch to around a dozen phones & tablets, none of which were Pixel’s)

What isn’t possible though is relocking the bootloader after flashing an alternative ROM or OS onto nearly all of these, meaning there is minimal security if the phone is stolen, or tampered with while unsupervised. And for those requiring physical security for their devices, that is a big deal.

Nothing vague about the plain fact that all governments abuse powers and commit violence.

More like “statists gonna state” ;)

But yeah, optimally every person’s human rights should be honored, regardless of what side of imaginary lines they were born in, but I’m not holding my breath to see that happen, or thinking that we just need to join in a round of “kumbaya” to get there.

…a bit more benevolent to some of their people.

If authoritarianism & the violence it brings (which there is a ton of) in the USA correctly upsets you, then authoritarianism everywhere else (for which there is a ton in China, as well as across most of the rest of the globe) should upset you as well. Trying to make excuses for it in one place or another for ones “team” is pathetic. Fuck all the “whataboutism” - it’s all counter productive.

Sadly Jolla only offers their products in the EU, for those of us in North America we just have to flash old Sony models, or look on with envy, as far as a phone with Sailfish OS goes. The one thing that bothers me is not all of Sailfish is open source though, but overall I think its a cool project.

“Don’t be an idiot” - yet the big idiocy I see over & over on the Fediverse are Graphene evangelists that want to knee jerk condemn the multitudes of other mobile libre projects that are doing some good things, with its supposed (and disputable) “perfect”.

Graphene is indeed the current best solution towards security hardening for mobile devices, and I would certainly recommend it as first choice especially for anyone working in truly sensitive areas (e.g. journalism, political activism, closed source design, utility maintenance, etc.), or for whom anyone for which security is their primary concern.

However - at this point Graphene is 100% dependent on Google for continuance - both to a large extent the coding of its AOSP base, for the timely security updates Graphene prides itself on, AND in ALL of the hardware it currently supports. As such, given Google’s direction, with the next gen Pixel phones likely not to be easily unlockable, and with security updates possibly only provided in a timely way to an insiders list of oem’s, until Graphene issues their own devices, or expands beyond only Pixel support, it faces a potential expiry date (similar to what has happened for CalyxOS).

Meanwhile there are TONS of use cases of people with devices from all kinds of oem’s, that simply want an experience on these that offers better privacy and more digital sovereignty relative to what Google & Apple offer. As such one can achieve a close to an ad free & data mining free, with much less overall tracking, experience on all of the solutions I listed. And many of these solutions, unlike Graphene, do not depend on Google for their software & hardware. Do some of these solutions have flaws in their security & privacy? Absolutely. For which the thing they need is folks to join in to help fix these flaws. And I’ve been happy to see increased momentum across lots of these projects to do exactly that recently.

Unfortunately Samsung is making it more difficult to impossible to unlock the bootloaders of their recent devices, but you can reflash some of their older models at least to ROM’s like crDroid - https://crdroid.net/

The best general resource for instructions on how to unlock your phone’s bootloader and flash alternate AOSP ROM’s or non-Android OS’s is https://xdaforums.com/

Please note that not all carriers and oem’s allow you to unlock the bootloader though, so choose your device carefully for this.

You will also most likely need a PC (desktop or laptop) with adb & fastboot on it. These are apps used in the terminal, but you only need to copy and paste a few commands into them to use it.

If you have a Google Pixel then best option is Graphene - https://grapheneos.org/

For other devices you can use a “degoogled” Android ROM and get apps from the open source F-Droid app store - https://f-droid.org/

Some choices for this are:

Lineage - https://lineageos.org/

crDroid - https://crdroid.net/

/e/os - https://e.foundation/e-os/

Iode - https://iode.tech/iodeos/

OR use a a true alternative mobile OS. Options for this are:

Ubuntu Touch - https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/

Sailfish OS - https://sailfishos.org/

Mobian - https://mobian-project.org/

Postmarket OS - https://postmarketos.org/

Plasma Mobile - https://plasma-mobile.org/

Droidian - https://droidian.org/

You can also purchase devices with alternative OS’s already preinstalled from:

Volla - https://volla.online/en/devices/

Jolla - https://jolla.com/

Fairphone - https://fairphone.com/

Murena - https://murena.com/

Furilabs - https://furilabs.com/

Brax - https://www.braxtech.net/