If you just want something that’s more privacy-minded out of the box without messing about with custom ROMs etc, maybe consider an iPhone?
Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
+1 for iPhone. Is it as private as GrapheneOS? No. Is it more private than almost all out of the box android phones? Yes.
Apple still use a lot of your data, although they at least claim to anonymise most of it. But that data stays internal to try boost more apple sales, and isn’t sold to other companies. I’d rather 1 company have my information than 100.
Any apple apps you don’t want are easily removed once it’s set up and they don’t come back with updates etc.
This is the privacy community, I wouldn't consider iOS appropriate here at all, since you really can't do anything to limit the data collection. Especially not for a "what phone should I get" question. If someone already has an iPhone, asking what you can do is a good question ("not much" is the answer you'll get).
Is it better out if the box than most Androids? Probably, maybe, depending on how that's defined. But I can quickly make most Androids far better than iOS, even ones with a lot of vendor bloat.
For example, I recently cleaned up a Verizon Samsung just using the Universal Android Debloat Tool. This is stuff I used to do manually with ADB.
Then adding a VPN and I could restrict apps calling home and bypass Google DNS.
You can even disable google services, play, etc, and just don't use a google acccount on the phone.