Things that make me angry about my current smartphone Samsung Galaxy S21Ultra on a Verizon plan is the mandatory software updates in which they install WITHOUT MY PERMISSION stupid apps like Netflix and addictive gambling games and stacking block games and Candy crush. God knows what else they install without my permission. I don’t want any of it!
Next phone I buy I want to start with a clean slate, I’m not going to affiliate with any conglomerate like Verizon or AT&T or Sprint or T-Mobile etc, I prefer to go rogue somehow,
which smartphone do you recommend that has no bloatware and it’s customizable?
+1 for iPhone. Is it as private as GrapheneOS? No. Is it more private than almost all out of the box android phones? Yes.
Apple still use a lot of your data, although they at least claim to anonymise most of it. But that data stays internal to try boost more apple sales, and isn’t sold to other companies. I’d rather 1 company have my information than 100.
Any apple apps you don’t want are easily removed once it’s set up and they don’t come back with updates etc.
This is the privacy community, I wouldn’t consider iOS appropriate here at all, since you really can’t do anything to limit the data collection. Especially not for a “what phone should I get” question. If someone already has an iPhone, asking what you can do is a good question (“not much” is the answer you’ll get).
Is it better out if the box than most Androids? Probably, maybe, depending on how that’s defined. But I can quickly make most Androids far better than iOS, even ones with a lot of vendor bloat.
For example, I recently cleaned up a Verizon Samsung just using the Universal Android Debloat Tool. This is stuff I used to do manually with ADB.
Then adding a VPN and I could restrict apps calling home and bypass Google DNS.
You can even disable google services, play, etc, and just don’t use a google acccount on the phone.
https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater