Comment by kypro

Don't know how the Google's actions with affect AOSP. There are few options depending on location / country with base band frequencies.

Murena with e/OS/ [0], Purism with PureOS [1], Volla with Volla OS or Ubuntu Touch [2], and Furei Labs with FuriOS [3].

Those are the companies actually trying to sell a phone versus Pin64 selling a device to tinker with.

Alternative is checking personally managed OSes like postmarketOS [4] and Ubuntu Touch [5].

[0] https://murena.com/ [1] https://puri.sm/ [2] https://volla.online/en/ [3] https://furilabs.com/ [4] https://postmarketos.org/ [5] https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/

They all died. There were Linux phones until Android and there were some non-Android phones until Android 8 or so, such as Qt Extended, RIM BlackBerry OS, Palm webOS, Mozilla Firefox OS, and Microsoft Windows Phone, to name a few. They all died from numerous footgun wounds as well as pressures from competition.

VoLTE was one of major contributors to the situation, by the way. Only iOS and Android supported voice call on 4G LTE for first 3-5 years, due to it being a huge pile of TBDs and transitional hacks. There were political fights in whether the LTE is to be 4G or it was to be 3.9999G and superseded quickly by a completely separate 4G standard. This meant that companies and consortium that maintained alternative OS could spend unrealistic amount of lobbying and engineering effort trying to get into it, risking investments needed for it, or give up and start procurement process for a white flag. All chose the latter, and we ended up with an iOS/Android duopoly with unprecedented totality.

I've been using Sailfish OS for quite some time, but I don't do all of my computing on the phone. There's quite a high friction for using any of the mainstream Android apps, so usually you have to find an alternative if possible.

You don't really have a choice: it's either Android or Apple iOS.

GrapheneOS on a Pixel