Ironically, a large number of privacy minded individuals are using Google Pixels flashed with custom roms (Calyx, Graphene, Lineage, etc)
If not designed specifically for privacy, these Android forks are at the very least not stock Android, and stripped of many anti-privacy features.
This can be accomplished due to the Pixel’s (mostly) unique attribute - a bootloader that can be unlocked and relocked.
I don’t know why Google have allowed their bootloaders this freedom, but I can’t imagine that a company with a reputation for killing anything they touch would allow it to continue for much longer.
If/when the day comes that the Pixel is fully locked down, what options are there for privacy enthusiasts to continue using a smartphone, an inherently unprivate device?
Does anyone know of development going into looking at how to unlock bootloaders on any device, opening the door for custom rom flashing to continue?
Are the pinephones, fairphones, etc going to have to ramp up production?
Anything going on in the iphone department allowing for detachment from the Apple ecosystem?
What happens next, really?
Well there is always SailfishOS which you can run on Sony phones. It’s a Linux OS but runs Android apps as well.
I doubt Google will stop offering the bootloader option tho. Because most of those custom roms are based on AOSP, and anything done with that that’s open source, can be used again by Google too. I can’t imagibe they don’t keep an eye on the bigger projects like GrapheneOS. Free innovation, done by passionate people (who tend to make some if the best code).
At the same time, people who’d buy hardware just to flash it with a privacy-focussed OS aren’t going to walk into the Google eco-system if they close it. They’ll just go further away from it, while now they buy hardware and otherwise support or perhaps even contribute code (be it by development or by “testing” and adding bugs to github). So there is little to gain, only to loose.