I have had my ZFold 4 going on 3 years now. The battery is degrading significantly and the factory screen protector is peeling off.
Google has been shitting the bed; lately it is much worse and unlikely to get better.
I’m looking to alternatives; it looks like google pixels are the most recommended (GrapheneOS, Lineage, e/OS); I am not happy about supporting Google, so will not buy new.
I wish there was a real alternative; Jolla and fairphone don’t ship to my country, purism is far too US centric.
What to do…
You can look through the lists of compatible devices for Lineage or e/OS and do you shopping from there as they have larger lists of compatible phones. Pixels and Graphine are sort of locked together, but there’s a lot more options with other OSes.
https://lineagephones.com/lineageos-devices/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ https://doc.e.foundation/devices
Not all phones allow installs or run the OS the same way - pick maybe 2 or 3 or 4 options you like (go into a store or anywhere that you can handle a physical device as part of this) and then look at your install steps and check to see if people say online they have problems with that phone a lot. I suggest avoiding Samsung as they contain a small fuse that burns out when you root the phone and once rooted, you can never un-root the phone and go back to zero if you find that apps you need pitch a fit about a rooted phone.
Clarification: Samsung doesn’t add a fuse to the motherboard here - this is built into the die.
Incredibly common in semiconductors for all sorts of uses, most often for one-time programmable ROM chips (not used as an actual fuse, rather to etch specific data that can’t be erased or overwritten). Pretty cool little things.