Hardware far outlasts software in the smartphone world, due to aggressive chronic designed obsolescence by market abusing monopolies. So I will never buy a new smartphone - don’t want to feed those scumbags. I am however willing to buy used smartphones on the 2nd-hand market if they can be liberated. Of course it’s still only marginally BifL even if you don’t have demanding needs.
Has anyone gone down this path? My temptation is to find a phone that is simultaneously supported by 2 or 3 different FOSS OS projects. So if it falls out of maintence on one platform it’s not the end. The Postmarket OS (pmOS) page has a full list and a short list. The short list apparently covers devices that are actively maintained and up to date, which are also listed here. Then phones on that shortlist can be cross-referenced with the LineageOS list or the Sailfish list.
So many FOSS phone platforms seem to come and go I’ve not kept up on it. What others are worth considering? It looks like the Replicant device list hasn’t changed much.
(update) Graphene OS has a list of supported devices
(and it appears they don’t maintain old devices)
Pixel 9 Pro Fold (comet)
Pixel 9 Pro XL (komodo)
Pixel 9 Pro (caiman)
Pixel 9 (tokay)
Pixel 8a (akita)
Pixel 8 Pro (husky)
Pixel 8 (shiba)
Pixel Fold (felix)
Pixel Tablet (tangorpro)
Pixel 7a (lynx)
Pixel 7 Pro (cheetah)
Pixel 7 (panther)
Pixel 6a (bluejay)
Pixel 6 Pro (raven)
Pixel 6 (oriole)
So Graphene’s mission is a bit orthoganol to the mission of Postmarket OS. Perhaps it makes sense for some people to get a Graphene-compatible device then hope they can switch to pmOS when it gets dropped. But I guess that’s not much of a budget plan. Pixel 6+ are likely not going to be dirt cheap on the 2nd-hand market.
Idk what the deployment issues are for 5g vs 4g, but I get the impression that at least here in the US, most new installs are 5g which means that 4g coverage will gradually worsen, then maybe go away. Same with 5g but not as soon, I'd guess.
The countryside will never be covered by 5G. The range is massively decreased due to the higher frequency. You would have to litter the forest and fields with antennas. 4G isnt going away any time soon unless we intend to cut off all sorts of infrastructure and farmers and hikers and emergency services from internet access.
4G has a range in the 10+ km area
5G is in the low hundreds of meters range so its a fancy city tech
5g exists at different frequencies, just like 4g.
The lowest 4g frequency is 410mhz, and the lowest 5g frequency is 450mhz
The range of a 5g tower can be the same or higher than a 4g tower depending on the frequency used.
I think your confusion seems to come from the existence of 5g mmWave, which is sometimes uses synonymously with 5g. But 5g mmWave towers actually make up only a small fraction of 5g installs, the majority is using the same frequency band as 4g, and when comparing 5g to 4g at the same frequency then 5g actually even has a small range advantage
Isnt the bandwidth also gonna dip to 4G levels tho if you drop the frequency to those levels?
It will be slower than 5g mmWave, but faster than 4g at the same frequency