this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2022
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/e/OS currently has an alpha image for the FP4, I imagine LineageOS will soon too. Both are well-known degoogled ROMs.
It's expensive yes, unfortunately prohibitively so for many, but that expense goes into sustainable, conflict-free materials, many years of continuous support, and the engineering required for a semi-modular phone. It will more than likely last you a very long time, longer than any other Android phone, especially since the battery, the first thing to fail in a phone, can be freely replaced.
Last time I looked, /e/ OS was going-to-be-open-source-later software (but was already distributing images). Now it looks like they have published a lot of source code but their FAQ ominously says
...which, for me, goes from cool to wat to nope in three sentences.
(I do wonder what their one proprietary app is, but am not going to spend more than the minute i just spent trying to find the answer to that question.)
The only app is magic earth, a maps app. It has a great privacy policy, tho, and works very well. You can use whatever you want, of course
Why include it as a default though? If they simply dropped a recommendation, or asked to install it letting you know it's proprietary, sure people might still complain but it won't be seen as nearly as serious a violation of FLOSS principles.
I vaguely remember there was this weird PDF reader app I'd never heard of the last time I used /e/. Going to bet it was that. Never used it, installed Book Reader from F-droid in its place.
Now, why that would be a default, I don't know. The only non "it's sponsored" theory I can come up with is that vanilla AOSP, by itself, has no actual ability to read PDFs. There is no default app for it and none of the common browsers can open them either. This is actually a problem in LineageOS because it only ships the AOSP default apps.
Or maybe it's their custom app store that connects to Google Play without signing in? It doesn't seem it's based on Yalp/Aurora Store.