I have a vague memory of my dad watching something on youtube about the iphone when jobs introduced it in 2007. i was 8.
i was always interested in smartphones. i remember playing with a sony experia play on display at a booth at costco. i used to look at all the bestbuy and futureshop ads that came in the newspaper and would compare them to find the best phone on the market
my first phone was a HTC desire 2 with a destroyed screen. my uncle gave it to me. he dropped it in the sink and took it apart to dry it out. the camera stopped working after so i inherited it.
i used it for years. worked a-ok for me because i was anti-social media and basically just used it for the mp3 player and the browser. i ended up cracking the motherboard one time when i was taking it apart to try to fix the camera.
i had a brief iphone thing for a while, when i was unaware of how easy it is to flash FOSS android roms to phones. it sounded super hard especially when i heard how easy it was to brick a phone.
i took the plunge eventualy, and i got a used samsung s10 in 2021 and went to install lineageOS on it. much to my chagrin i realized that i was not able to unlock the bootloader on the phone. i sold it and bought a used pixel 3.
i got lineageOS to run on the pixel 3, and opted not to install Gapps/google play services suite, which is the package that contains all the google apps and services and telemetry software pre-installed on most androids.
most people opt to use graphineOS on pixels but as im new to android and custom roms and graphineOS has a smaller community, i wanted to try something with more community support.
honesty i dont have a almost any issues with this phone and lineageOS. id rate the experience an 8.5/10
i do have a issue where i dont get any notification dots on apps when i receive a notification from said apps. its annoying to be sure but livable.
occasionally some apps wont run without google play services, kijiji and skip the dishes will crash automatically and close. however, most apps will display a warning but will run just fine.
i will be temporary discontinuing use of this phone, as i accidentally damaged the charging port at work and the battery will need to be replaced soon. atm i dont have enough money for the repairs so ill have to wait a bit to fix it.
i have a 2014 LG G3 i plan on using, it has a microSD card slot and a headphone jack, so that will be fun. im planning to try e/OS this time.
e/OS is based on lineageOS but has some refinements, and comes with microG, which replaces Gapps. e/OS also has a whole bunch of system apps built in that work well and provide some of the same services that the iOS system apps do.
more to come in the future, ill be providing more detailed write-ups later
