I mean, you could buy used, but if you are going for privacy you lose a number of assurances from doing that.

I mentioned it in a comment below. But that also depends on how the used market works where you live. To buy something privacy-minded used, I’d have to buy it either from a meatspace vendor I can check myself, or from an online vendor that will take cash in split payments and has a verifiable history in the platforms I trust.

But that means making new phoens and getting them to market (and then to an affordable price), right?

If I was to make a deal with a manufacturer it’d be about releasing the relock keys for the firmware on extant builds, since there’s a reasonable overlap between people who want to go to a phone for getting outside the Google / Apple ecosystems and people who want to get their already extant devices to last.

¡Exactly! Like, at that point you could buy a Fairphone used, and if you do that in your own country at least you have some level of assurance that it was already working with the cellular network in-place.

“break free from Google”

requires investing in Google devices

I swear, the low quality posts with scam-like titles one sees in the Fediverse these days…