I’m looking into my next phone. I actually have a perfectly good phone that I’m very happy with except [the CIA and NSA don’t like it.]{money.cnn.com/2018/02/1…} It’s a pity, because it is the first Android phone that I ever liked.
Moreover, I have a [Linux based phone]{puri.sm/shop/libr…} on order but it won’t be available until early 2019 and I’m not sure that it will work to my satisfaction right away. It might take some months of bug fixing and updates before it works smoothly. In the meantime I will need a working phone.
My worry is that US relations with China will go bad and that I’ll get stuck in a cyberwar with a Huawei phone with all sorts of backdoors. Anyway I’m not sure that I will change phones any time soon but I may change if US China relations start looking dodgy or if my Librem 5 phone isn’t quite working right for me.
So what to buy? It seems like an [Android One]{www.android.com/one/} phone might be the way forward. Regular Android phones do not get regular security or OS updates because that is in the hands of the carrier. With Android One you get 2 years worth of updates to the OS and the phone is not all garbaged up with carrier and/or manufacturer software. They run on what is very close to pure Android without a lot of proprietary modifications to the code.
It’s too early to specify a particular phone model, but at least I know know what to look for when the time comes.
