While iphone is more privacy friendluly than OEM android, it’s much more restricted. You can do amazing things with AOSP Android (compile arm busybox, have a linux toolchain on it, host adblocking), and most importantly totally breakaway from big tech, much more than iphones.
Gcam builds are still a thing. But you need to lurk on forums/telegram to find the right one. It’s sad this is a thing nowadays for pixel.
Lots of caveats there. To preface, most active rom development used to take place on forums, mainly XDA. Nowadays it’s on telegram, which is gated unfortunately, so lot’s of knowledge get lost.
First, you NEED to be able to unlock your bootloader to be able to install custom ROMs. Here is a source
Back to hardware, recent chinese bought Xiaomi are nearly impossible to unlock bootloader without paying a 3rd party. EU/Global ones can be unlocked, but it’s a hassle (waiting 30 days + need to have windows). That makes finding device tree for them hard let alone, finding ROMs.
Oneplus unfortunately is getting worse. Op13 onwards has hardware ARB (which Will brick your device). OP15 onwards has a bit complex way to unlock bootloader.
If you buy it from China, it must be ColorOS version otherwise, you won’t be able to unlock the bootloader. Even with COS, you need to install an app to get an unlock token from their server to allow you to unlock the bootloader (this for now, takes 24 hrs max, but this might change and could be like Xiaomi). The Global/EU ones, are fine for now.
Remember you need to have the device tree (basically all the recipes for the hardware of the device to get it to work with other ROMs). Google used to publish this for Pixels, that’s why it used to be easy to build ROMs for Pixel. This has changed recently.
So it’s getting gloomy for Android devices. I just wish Fairphone would actually follow their “eco” mission, and become the new Pixels. On the other hand Jolla seems to be following up with a no compromise “Linux”. Time will tell.
Great project. One risk I see (and faced in the past) is dying sdcards. They hold up much less overtime compared to ssds. Did you face this before? I have gotten a bunch a corruption on my dbs, and even filesystems (ext4). SDcards are vulnerable especially if running 24/7. I wonder if there are better tiers or better solutions.
Also futo is open source. Nothing nefarius about their network access tbh.