The Absolute State of Custom Android ROMs

Android has become trash. They used to make cool operating systems for phones, now they make adware machines that will install 20+ garbage apps including "games" with similar names that ask you to agree to a privacy policy when you open them; system gallery apps with advertisements built into them; invasive Google integration of shitty AI services and voice-activated assistants that you can't turn off; even the UX isn't safe: some versions of Android choose to flip the Go Back and Task View buttons, or change the way you take screenshots, so now you can't even switch phones without having to relearn how to interact with it every time (made worse by the fact that you're forced to switch phones uncomfortably often due to the short support periods).

All of these evils originate in the fact that these greedy companies are "building" on top of AOSP (Android Open Source Project), adding their own flavor of shit to the mix. This is why many people, myself included, turn to community-made ROMs that remove all of this shit and offer a more pure Android experience. Imagine you could have a phone with standardized controls every time, without ads being shoved in your face, with longer battery life— now you can!

Except... with the passage of time, we've put more and more burden on smartphones, relying on them for high-risk tasks like money transfers and personal identification; our security standards have also increased along with these burdens, and it's no longer enough to just slap ol' CyanogenMod on your phone and call it a day. On that note, LineageOS doesn't support bootloader relocking and isn't particularly secure. Well, we have Divest- wait, that one's dead. How about CalyxOS? Nope, core maintaners have dropped out and it's gone on indefinite hiatus, and on top of that they're being accused by GrapheneOS of leading a harassment campaign against Graphene with the help of Louis Rossman and Kiwi Farms (???). So how about GrapheneOS? Yeah, it's great, unless you live in a country where they don't sell Google Pixels, and if you don't mind that the project is lead by someone who's probably schizophrenic. IodéOS? Sketchy. /e/OS? Honestly, I don't even know. I'm so tired of having to thoroughly research so many different options just to have half of what I would've had for nothing 15 years ago.

Everywhere you look there's holes. Apparently there's no way to choose any custom ROM and have a clear conscience, but sticking with Stock Android feels the dirtiest of all. On top of that, Google is only making it harder for people to develop custom ROMs, using obstruction tactics like not releasing device-specific source code until a certain amount of time has passed, or deciding that installing apps that aren't Google-verified isn't legal anymore. So, is there a third option? How about Linux phones? Nah, they're just not there yet.

Things have gotten so bad that the Free Software Foundation stepped in with the announcement of the Librephone Project, saying they're going to reverse engineer the firmware and binary blobs of modern smartphones. We don't know how this will turn out though, or in what way it will change the landscape even if they do succeed. Things are looking so bad that I've seriously considered getting an iPhone for the first time ever, but that's a line I can't cross after all. At the end of the day, I haven't found a good solution. I feel a deep sense of dysphoria when using or being around smartphones, but there's nothing I can do about it. I can only hope things will get better soon.