I'm trying to make my own smart watch as a hobby experiment at the moment, and one of my most important features is NFC payments. It's a nightmare, although I understand why. Currently my plan is to buy another smart watch or smart ring and take the NFC chip from it, which is maddening, but more or less my only option due to contactless payment security.

To do contactless payments, your bank must effectively permit the specific device, otherwise go through GPay or Apple Pay, who in turn just do the permitting themselves. Anything outside of the standard ecosystem just gets overlooked.

The best workaround while avoiding these companies is to find a smart watch or ring that has compatibility with a proxy card, such as Curve. But beyond halving the price of the accessory, this is pretty much an arbitrary decision.

i have oneplus12r this my first non-pixel phone, you might want to visit the oneplus sub to look for other peoples experience. if you are looking for good deal on phones, online stores like swappa is a good start. i like the battery life of it. midsize cost, if your looking for budget , you can go motorola series, i did consider it at first.

isnt graphene mostly pixels only.

Still use my Windows Phones with Windows 10 Mobile as my daily drivers. Best OS to date.

This is false. Lenovo has some of the highest marks for reliability, customer service, and upgradability; not to mention price.

F-Droid is a decent replacement for the play store. Lots of FOSS and less-enshittified apps available.

So… we are nearly there but unless you have a very VERY minimum usage of your phone, basically a dumb phone with a bit of CLI to remote connect to your own server from time to time, it’s probably not practical for now.

....and, that's me.

I gave up on my phones. There's no way to remain connected to the modern world and my own without just keeping everything off of my phone and using it entirely in stock NPC mode. Trackers? Adware? Malware? Doesn't matter, I only use it for calls, banking apps and cash apps. How do I access my personal, more 1337 haxxor shit?

Laptop, although I can do a lot of work over ssh on phones and use things like syncthing and nextcloud to get around the ecosystem, still, but for the most part, I'm back in 2007, baby! We're carrying messenger bags! We don't care!

the ecosystem is so weak at this time, So maybe in the future it will improve?
Ik you can run Android apps via a container or smth

Yep, didn't use it much but I have studio headphones that I lliked to plug from time to time.

EU only

Ebay it is. Bands are what matter. If it picks up Tmobile, Tello and the like, who cares who's market it's for?

But really, for me, it's still Android. It's just a band-aid on the bigger problem of reliance on Google.

it's not "mostly", it's only available for several latest Pixel generations.

Android has always taken the approach of it being developed in private and then having the full sources and commit history published for each stable release.

We're going to be moving forward under the expectation that future Pixel devices may not meet the requirements to run GrapheneOS.

Many companies and individuals are trying to mislead people about the future of GrapheneOS to promote their insecure products and services.

European authoritarians and their enablers in the media are misrepresenting GrapheneOS and even Pixel phones as if they're something for criminals.

It's the year of the Linux phone!

MS keeps making Windows worse but that is not a problem because Linux is great on PCs. The reason is that PC is made out of standardized plug&play components that you can make generic OS image for.

There is no such thing in smartphone world. Each chipset is it's own Linux fork that gets only most crucial bug fixes while in warranty. Same is true for ARM SBCs where I believe the only board that supports generic image are new RPis.

I loved my Lumia 1520, but it just doesn't hold a candle to a modern Android phone with LineageOS installed. Both in functionality and in privacy.

European authoritarians and their enablers in the media are misrepresenting GrapheneOS and even Pixel phones as if they're something for criminals.

Spanish authorities*. Not really European-wide thing, but a local one.

PostmarketOS using Waydroid for the neccessary apps, anyone has experience to share?

But is it even slightly better? It's debatable. Both are completely awful, but I guess iOS is just terrible in different ways.

Tried to rely fully on F-droid several years ago. That experiment went just fine until I needed up update the apps. Turns out, there wasn't a simple one button solution to that. I had to manually update each and every app one by one. Is it any better these days?