Hi everyone,

Currently looking at either a Pixel 8 or a S23 as a replacement for my Zenfone 8 that is slowly becoming a hindrence due to (primarily) the battery. I would replace it, but as it costs a lot to do that here and I have needs for a non-compromised water protection DIY feels like a dangerous option.

So S23 vs Pixel 8, what would you guys recommend assuming I can get either for the same price?

I like the S23 hardware a bit better on paper, but as Pixel phones generally are very flashable my anti-Google sentiments might (ironically) push me there.

I would get a fairphone 5 for the hot-swappable battery etc if they weren’t so expensive for what you get, and as Im buying second hand reuse is better for the environment anyways.

  • Pantherina@feddit.deEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Comment 2, Lemmy had a limit I guess

    They are not transparent about the fact that they include actual, unrestricted Play services, but call it “private”.

    GrapheneOS is ENTIRELY open source. Look at their Github. Every site, even every Server configuration is there. Every app they do, everything.

    The nice thing is that with Fair phone, it seems much easier with all of the open source apps and the open source OS to limit that exported data.

    You said you flashed phones, and I dont get thid scentence? These apps are all just apps, you can install them anywhere.

    The other way around, (learned this after discussions with GOS devs), if you preinstall random apps, they are yours. You need to maintain them. If you remove them, with an update, data may be lost!

    They ship Bromite and QKSMS which are both unmaintained projects.

    Also, these are possibly system apps. Those have no permissions, they can do everything, which is crazy insecure.

    GrapheneOS is bad at guiding users what apps they should use, and where to get them. Basically because F-Droid is insecure and recommending apps could make them be liable for them.

    But GrapheneOS ships minimum apps. There is no good AOSP calendar, so they extracted the core of the AOSP calendar and only ship that, its needed to make other apps work. Their other apps can all be disabled, they are in the system partition and dont take up usable space.

    Regarding graphene, it is important how the team creating software behaves, I think it’s a salient indication of how good the software and especially how strong the actual project is.

    Daniel Mikay is not the lead of the project for quite some time. He is still active and doing very very valuable work (that nobody else does) but he is not head anymore.

    If I’m buying a house, and there are two identical houses, except one is a five bedroom with a landlord who is an asshole.

    You dont live with an OS developer, you dont even see them. Also you dont have to fear they increase cost because GrapheneOS is free software (that really needs funding). If you have issues, you have issues with a gift you get by them for free.

    This comparison makes no sense. But as I said, the devs may always sound a bit similar in their way they think, but its for the best of the project.

    It doesn’t matter if you get the fifth bedroom if you can’t trust your landlord not to change the terms of your contract or to abide by them.

    Wtf it is free software and will alway be. This makes no sense but is actively accusing of untrue stuff.

    You have no proof murena is insecure, and there is no evidence out there corroborating your claim.

    Yeah I dont need to read source code to you. Take what I wrote above, research the things, look what the difference is.

    This “give me evidence” makes no sense. It is open source code, you just have to look.

    microg is less of a concern for me since I don’t use Google apps, so the data that does get sent by micro g will be limited.

    MicroG is play services. They connect to Google and send them lots of data inaccessible to for example sandboxed play.

    It is preinstalled and cannot be removed, unlike sandboxed play.

    Every app from the playstore basically uses them, and many more. Chat apps will use it automatically for push notifications.

    Not using Google Apps to mitigate that is very naive.

    I’m not very concerned about rapid updates since the rapid updates that come out on Android, for instance, often corrupt or render features unusable. I’m fine without receiving “feature updates” every 2 weeks.

    These are monthly security updates. No idea what feature updates you are talking about, this is not Samsung.

    This is also not about biweekly, but delayed for months and probably still incomplete, as I mentioned already, Pixels get all Patches, other OSses only need to implement the minimum requirements.

    the fairphone 5 is going to be supported for 8 to 10 years until Android 18. That’s the longest supported phone, I believe.

    The kernel may get updates until then. But the firmware not. I dont have numbers, but they used some IOT part that gets longer updates, but it was already a year old and it will not get updates for 10 years.

    Many security patches are firmware, and this will not get updates.

    So a Google Pixel 8 is way more expensive and only gets updates for 8 years, but they are actually and fully 8 years, for every component.

    Internet search engines are really bad nowadays. You need to get the specs of every part of the phone and then check how many years they will get updates.