Ever since 2008 I’ve been an apple loyalist. While I am not the type to upgrade to a new phone every year, I’ve always bought apple phones.

Apple has always tried to be openly nice while also being sneaky and underhanded behind the scenes. When Antenna gate happened with the iphone 4 they apologized and gave everyone a free bumper to solve the problem. Then there was battery gate, where consumers found out that Apple was throttling their devices as they got older. Apple has been a little but too smart for it’s own good, coming up with tricks like proprietary screws and ports to keep people from being able to repair their own devices. Apple also claims to be privacy respecting but their devices have limited options and controls when it comes to disabling siri, system wide mic or camera access.

For this reason I tried a Pixel 4a from Google and installed Graphene OS. The pixel was a terrible phone and died quickly from a splash of water. Graphene, while extremely secure feeling was too restricted at the time and the Pixel’s decent camera was unable to be used with google’s AI magic.

A few years later I tried a pixel 7a and donated it to the family, to use when we are out at our property in the mountains. The 7a is a much better budget phone. It has better build quality, though it still is cheap feeling, and an amazing camera. By far, probably the best camera I have ever used on a smartphone.

I also have an android tablet and I was glad that I can sideload apps, install apps from other stores, disable the mic and camera, and use it without a google account being logged in if I so choose.

In the last few years, Graphene OS has found a way to sandbox Google Play Services so that only apps you wish to talk to google can do so. Additionally, in android devices you can boot into different profiles, some more restricted than others, this is a feature I plan to use often to restrict location leaking.

I plan to always keep an iphone as my primary messaging phone, but the phone I use day to day and when I’m out of the house will most likely be an android from here on out.