It's not only that.

I really gave it a shot and I'd be totally willing to accept a phone with reduced functionality as long as I can use it as a hotspot.

The problem is that that thing is so buggy and error prone that it's borderline unusable.

Initially it could do Umlauts (Language setting is German), but can't anymore since it ran a software update. Email (very primitive, but would have been fine for on the road) is broken.

Add to that the force install of Twitter with said update and a lot more niggling annoyances.

The only useful feature (and the reason I got it to begin with) is the 4G hotspot so at least it's still usable with another device. But the overall experience is so frustrating that I'm just waiting for the breaking point to get an iPhone, since there reallay doesn't seem to be any alternative if you're even slightly privacy concious.

You can use dozens of android phones with custom ROM without any google services. It's usable and a lot more private than iPhone(which is only better than google because they failed to build a successful ad network) But for example if you are in any authoritarian state like china, Apple will hand over all your data to authorities, just in case. And Google at least some time before hasn't agreed to do that and got screwed over(now they are trying to get back to mainland market by building censorship search, sucking up to Huawei and other CCP(Chinese Communist Party) branches)

I don't know about other Applie services, but if you don't back iMessage up to iCloud, the messages stay on the device exclusively.

That's a pretty good default security level for personal communications.

Thank you,

I'll give it a serious look.

Just note you do need to think about device support when using something like LineageOS.

You can see officially supported devices on the https://download.lineageos.org website

https://stats.lineageos.org/ will give you a bit of an idea of the activity for certain models.

Checking out the forums for unofficial device activity is also a good idea https://forum.xda-developers.com

Using a site like https://www.gsmarena.com/ can be useful for comparing specs. I would also suggest looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LTE_networks when determining which phone to buy.

For me, I wanted one that supported Band 28 700MHz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APT_band_plan_in_the_700_MHz_b...

So It's a good idea to look at phones. The OnePlus phones tend to have good support, I think in part because of the developer seed program https://www.xda-developers.com/oneplus-developer-program-cus... the Xiaomi Redmi Notes are not bad either for a cheaper phone.

Thank you so much.

I mailed your comment to myself in order to dig deepeer into the subject.

Android with Google services is just dead in the water for me (I'll be damned before hooking the arguably most private device into the Google spy machine) and so Apple seemed the only viable alternative.

But if I can run a Google free alternative without too much headache (and at a reasonable price) I'm all for it.

Can't upvote this enough.

There is already very little accountability or awareness about what Google Services do behind the scenes. You make a call, your phone connects to 1e100.net; you change some settings, your phone connects to 1e100.net. It's insane that no one seems to be paying attention to any of these.

Where did you get this from? I just checked my local DNS server and my home devices have never attempted to connect to this domain even though I have quite a few android devices.

It's an internal domain. The user-facing stuff uses vanity domains (google, youtube, etc) but the servers' "true" hostnames reside in 1e100.net.

https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/174717?hl=en

For example, here's the IP I get for "google.com":

    $ dig google.com +short
    172.217.10.238

A reverse lookup on that IP resolves to...

    $ dig -x 172.217.10.238 +short
    lga25s59-in-f14.1e100.net.

So, you're most certainly connecting to things in that domain, which is just a roundabout way of saying you're connecting to some Google property.

Could it be Google Analytics or Firebase Analytics tracking phone usage? Is there an option to disable telemetry in settings?

I'm seeing lots of traffic to amazonaws now too.

Note that most KaiOS devices can be flashed with GerdaOS[1], which claims to be more privacy focused.

1: https://gerda.tech/

but isn't fully open[0]. it's a firmware mod than a from scratch build like lineage for android, unfortunately.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/akftmi/comment/ef5yh...

What Google services are you talking about exactly? Recall that KaiOS doesn't run Android, so just becomes it comes bundled with Google Maps & co doesn't mean that Google receives any kind of data if you don't use the apps.

Yeah it's pretty bad. You can't even uninstall them and it drains the battery in 20h instead of days.

Also, you get some other crap pre-installed that cannot be removed: a few demo's of games & twitter a.o.

Google services don't run in the background so they have no effect on battery life if you don't choose to use them. This is true also for the voice assistant which is only active once you long press a key.

What are mainstream options then? Apart from Apple obviously.

The Nokia 3110 3G reboot[0] that came out in 2017 is pre KaiOS. It works on US GSM networks (T-Mobile, AT&T). It has Twitter and FB apps you can't uninstall, but they're custom rolled ones that just open the website.

[0] https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_3310_3g-8876.php