I have been using xiaomi phones for a long time now, for most of them the (xda) community eventually had great ROMs that (eventually) worked without problems or with very little.
Though these days I need a working phone so I didn’t bother with my (Mediatek) Note 8 Pro - last time I looked phones with these chips were a lot harder and more dangerous to flash then the Qualcomms I had before (loved my Xiaomi A1 for that tinkering with Ressurection Remix).
So I am looking for an investment - a device I won’t have to replace for another ~6+ years but I really want my device to do mostly what I would expect, without any snooping or other privacy shenannigans - I know xiaomi is probably the worse choice for this but their hardware specs were always the best for the price and were generally easy to flash.
I don’t like pixels - they are too expensive for the hardware it offers, at least in my country.
Thank you for any tips in advance.
Update: iPhone is a no go for me because of the walled garden - I am a software developer by trade and hobbyist, I like to have the possibility of cracking the device open, both HW and SW wise. I am willing to trade the longevity of the device for this.
Dev = Pixel man. Why go with anything thats not the official development baseline for Android?
And then we queue GrapheneOS. Once privacy and security are a concern (should always be) then the desicion is easy, and made already.
oh yeah I am fully aware Pixel is the best choice for all of this, but until my current phone I was always able to pay less for more (Xiaomi) and have the ROM cake too.
the new pixels have 8 years of support so they’ll probably be durable. Maybe change the battery after 4 years and it’ll be as good as new.
Yeah with Xiaomi I really see the phones just for their hardware, better OS is going to be figured out by the community anyways