Either one of these phones will effectively be without warranty from the start. I can't file a warranty claim for a Fairphone 5, because they offer no warranty in my country. I can't file a warranty claim on a Pixel 8a, because I can't create a Google account.

Free open source software is important to me, and these are the free-est phone OSs I could find.

I'm planning to install Magisk to root the phone. I need adb root at a minimum. Will this prevent automatic updates?

Why do the GrapheneOS people say that rooting breaks the whole security model of Android? I can't understand this, because only a few specific apps are granted root access, or possibly only adb.

Reasons I need root access:

I need a comprehensive backup system. Non-root backup systems skip files.
I want to block connections using the hosts file.
I want to study the filesystem to learn more about Android.
I want to mess with apps' internal states.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Device integrity is important, but in the sense that I don't want police to be able to get in if they take my phone while it's locked. The phone should not be trying to protect itself from me, the owner.

I'm not planning on running any banking apps, nor any other proprietary apps that need any sort of remote attestation. For sensitive data, nothing like "other people's social security numbers". Just my own data, which I would prefer remain private.

Seedvault uses Android's built-in backup infrastructure, so it won't back up things like Signal, or proprietary apps that resist being backed up. Only a rooted app (or rooted adb) can properly backup an Android device.

By "mess with apps' internal states", I want to see what data proprietary apps are storing about me, and selectively delete it. I want to replace their certificate authorities with my mitmproxy's certificate authority, and intercept their connections to understand them. I want to try modifying apps' code -- for example, call recording doesn't work on my current phone, because there's supposedly some XML file somewhere that marks all the US as "recording is illegal". GrapheneOS claims to fix this, but there may be future problems in that same style, which could be fixed by modifying just one file.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Appreciate the info & context, and I agree with your overall sentiment WRT device protection against authorities.

I'll be moving to grapheneOS for my next phone (which unfortunately may be another from the pixel series). I suppose I can try my hand at magisk and other things (I'd still prefer to use MicroG on GOS). If it writes a custom boot image then there's a chance it'll prevent boot entirely. I'm not sure if there are other methods for installation or temporary use of root?