I’ve been using my current phone for about 7 years now and it’s well behind on updates and starting to fail in minor but foreboding ways so I’m looking to get a new one and was hoping people here could help me with my indecisiveness.
My greatest requirement is long term support, which immediately puts Google and Samsung at the top of the pack (Fairphone, I see you but you just aren’t supported well in Canada as far as I can tell).
My other biggest interests are display quality, battery life, and customizability. I like the 6.2"-6.3" screen size that both the Pixel 10 and S25 fall in.
I don’t care overly much about the camera beyond quite casual use and I don’t care about gaming on it at all. I don’t plan to use Graphene OS.
Given these preferences do people think one phone comes out over the other? I keep waffling back and forth. I’m also happy to hear about other android models too if someone thinks one fits the bill better that I’m unaware of.
Is it? Because it sounds like it is the same as what Samsung is doing with Knox. If you unlock your bootloader they have a way to track that now and it hurts the experience on the device. Want to sideload your apps in protest? You’ll only be allowed to sideload apps from developers Google screens and says are okay. Want to use custom firmware on your hardware? You can, but they won’t pass the integrity checks and even if you pay for the apps they can become incompatible with your device. And as someone else pointed out they stopped providing Pixel configs for AOSP so even getting people to try and make custom ROMs will be more difficult.
Samsung did it first, but Google just took it to the next level.