There some threads here a couple weeks ago and on r/Purism, but it appears they have shipped 0 phones to customers so far. There are just a handful of pre-production units given to employees. Unfortunately it also sounds like they have spent all, or nearly all of the money they raised in crowdfunding, so how they are going to ship all the backorders is unknown.
While some will be happy with one of these three options, some will find it a step too far from mainstream, low maintenance high end options.
With this in mind, it's important to make recommendations across the spectrum, to encourage those not willing to go "all the way" to still go some of the way.
In this area, I'd look at Fairphone (not great on the high end cutting edge tech side for obvious reasons, but decent on openness), Motorola and One+ (both more mainstream high-end options but also not quite as heavy on user-hostility as some competitors).
Google are also quite good in this area, on the hardware side, but given their ownership of the software side and general practices in that area, I'd be in less of a hurry to recommend them.
Fairphone 3 doesn't quite fit the bill, but I'd still mention it in lists like these as it is possible to unlock bootloader, the phone is modular so can be repaired, and the Fairphone 2 ran a myriad of OSes (#3 just got released, give it some time).
I agree with this wholly. Devices like iphones or the samsung devices are riddled with user-hostile features like KNOX, locked bootloaders, pre-installed payment gardens and proprietary blobs all over along with carrier locked, contractually defined handset ownership agreements.
The state of open smartphones is rather nacient, checking the wikipedia list page[0] there hasn't been a real handset launched in numbers for 3 years. I would describe the availability of these devices at best as Very Poor.
That said, HTC is much better for open firmwares than the big ones like apple or samsung. You can just ask and they will return the bootloader key. Try that with Samsung, they are horrible. Samsung is a very integrated vendor, and it can be quite challenging to develop for these very closed platforms, the software sometimes takes ages.
Case in point the Galaxy s6. The verizon locked phones still have no public bootloader unlock tooling afiak. Quite a hassle.
Currently the only Openish devices you might be able to get soonish are ( In the order of my own arbitrary bias )
- PinePhone (Pre-Production Developer Kits Shipped) [1]
- Librem 5 (Production Batches Shipping) [2]
- Necunos NC 1 (Released, Unavailable?) [3]
Unless I've left any out.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...
1 - https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
2 - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
3 - https://necunos.com/