Interesting article from a generalist magazine. According to it:
- Best Preinstalled Phone: Fairphone 6 With /e/OS
- Best for Pixel Phones: GrapheneOS
- Best for Non-Pixel Phones: /e/OS
- For the DIY Tinkerer: LineageOS
Honestly Graphene is the only one that I’d trust unless you’re not going to add any Google play services at all with Lineage, and I’m including micro G on that too.
Sailfish OS is beautiful and really nice, decent app support, but kind of a pain in the USA, postmarketos shows strong promise, but doesn’t have VOLTE support yet which makes it a dealbreaker for me personally. I know a lot of folks love UBports, it never really was something I enjoyed. I’m really hoping to use Sailfish in the USA someday
It’s better to tinker with LineageOS than use /e/OS
Forks are not directly impacted:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Android_Developer_Verification#Affected_devices
But alternative repos, like f-droid, may have challenges because of some sort of mutual exclusion of developer space, but honestly I didn’t fully get this part
https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
All of them unfortunately based on and rely upon Android.
I’ve had my fairphone for a couple of weeks now and am loving it!
Thinking of getting a fairphone 3/4. Currently use a dumb phone and a fire tablet I got second hand very cheap.
I have the 6, and it’s well worth it, I’d assume the 3 or 4 will be quite the upgrade from a dumb phone
Kinda. Battery life will be worse though. Tablet has a larger battery as there is more space, dumbphone has longer battery life because it uses so little power. It will be far more powerful than the tablet and with fdroid I can install pretty much everything I need. Family like to message on whatsapp though, which is the only thing keeping me from immediately sticking PostmarketOS on it which I have used before on a Pinephone.
Do wish that larger powerbanks were more common. ~74Wh (20,000mAh at 3.7v) seem to be one of the cheapest per capacity available and I suspect it is because of mass production. Larger are usually more like camping batteries and cost more, I suspect because they don’t sell as many of them. Cheapest per Wh for larger capacities is probably best achieved by just sticking multiple together.
For some time now, I am looking with interest at Fairphone and /e/OS/. However, I am somewhat perplexed about the Murena workspace/Cloud. Based on your experience, is it possible to use /e/OS/ without joining Murena? Perhaps associated with a self-hosted cloud workspace?
