Time to dump the Pinephone (part II)?

Last Updated on January 11, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org

For our applications we do not know if we come back to the Pinephone. Single board computers are better suitable for this since they are more flexible, and we experienced that it is difficult to install new apps on the Pinephone which are not pre-installed or offered in an app store, as the example of LibreOffice has shown.

The Pinephone as a privacy phone is still interesting for us personally. We made made very negative experiences with Google who wanted to force us to do things we won’t do as for instance sync all or files from our phone over a cloud as for instance over Google Drive to be able to access those on our PC.

The Pinephone is one of the more affordable privacy phones and it is one of the most flexible we know. But Shipping and import taxes from US to Switzerland are high. But if we have the choice between and Android phone or a Pinephone we prefer the Pinephone for privacy reasons. And if the Pinephone would be offered by Digitec Switzerland we would eventually consider it to use it as our daily driver as a privacy phone:

https://www.digitec.ch/en/producttype/showdiscussion/pinephone-10746

But happily there are also phones from Google which can be made more private which are more affordable:

We did not test privacy phones at all, but we are interested in those since we want to have control over our privacy and do not want that Google is the one who controls it.