They’re baking this right in the package installer of android, it goes beyond play services. I have my doubts that this will pass in the EU

For what its worth, my Sony Xperia 1 VI didn’t come with a lot of google apps and it was easy enough to get rid of those. Obviously play services and some other stuff remain, so it’s not a degoogled phone, but it’s alright. Sony asks for some analytics stuff, but that’s all very easy to deny.

Sony also makes it very easy to root, unlock and flash your phone, with an official guide on how to do that. It’s not as easy as installing graphene OS, but I’m sure somebody will built lineage or something for it at some point

Edit: Here are links to the official documentation, Sony makes it pretty easy to built and flash AOSP

https://developer.sony.com/open-source/aosp-on-xperia-open-devices/guides/aosp-build-instructions/build-aosp-android-14/

https://developer.sony.com/open-source/aosp-on-xperia-open-devices/get-started/unlock-bootloader/how-to-unlock-bootloader/

Wait, Renault doesn’t ship anything outside the EU?

Yeah that’s totally true and worth a bit extra for me too

Yeah I suppose that’s not too expensive, although it feels like a waste when I’m not using all the services provided

I’m pretty much in the same boat, you think it’s worth subscribing only for the vpn and email?

It is google Android but they do not pay for the name so they call it ‘FairphoneOS’.

That’s not how that works, they call it FairphoneOS because they added their own customizations. Default Android is pretty barebones nowadays so nobody uses that. You dont have to pay Google to use the Android name

Yeah it doesn’t work for every website, but it’s an okay starting point

Pretty much all junk which isn’t human readable is tracking info

On the one hand I hear self hosting email is great, on the other hand I hear it’s a pain in the ass to get whitelisted

Pretty sure it’s mandated by the EU

That would mean pretty much none of the search engines on this list are search engines

I really don’t like how they tried to make it look like an iPhone or whatever, otherwise I’d love to try it