Got an iPhone some months ago because it was cheaper than getting a Pixel or S24 and I hate it.
The apps suck, sideloading sucks ass because of both apple restrictions and the lack of modded apps, browsing sucks because the adblockers suck because the extensions suck, FOSS is pretty much dead of iOS, call spam detection sucks, keyboard sucks.
I never saw an ad on android for the past three years because of how good my setup was with modded apps and Firefox+uBlock but iOS is pure Advertisement Hell.
The OS visuals and responsiveness are better than most android skins but 60Hz is trash as well and 4GB ram means that I can not even open like 3 tabs at once without the others shutting down.
The photo management sucks the most. Any photo I save goes straight to my Camera Roll and has ZERO organization which memes no more epic funny memes are getting saved on my phone anymore.
The integration with Google Photos is also non-existent and images get saved only when I manually sync them and I will never buy iCloud because I hate the locked down apple ecosystem.
Modded apps also suck and nothing is as good as revanced plus the 7 day refresh limit sucks because of course apple wants 99$ per year to have the godlike ability to install your own apps.
Airdrop is maybe the only positive I remember about this. And maybe the battery life which is better than my previous phone's battery.
Kind of like how they run on rare earth minerals from slave mines in Congo. Shit of course, but not much relevance to the dataharvesting part. Only thing I can see is on chiplevel. . Hoping we do get pure Foss Linux phones that are good enough soon..
I don't think anyone recently audited GrapheneOS, so I'm not sure about the trackerless aspect of it. Hardware wise, there's a bit of concern given the closed-source nature of the baseband firmware on pixels. Admittedly, it's been a bit since I looked into it, but last time I checked, there were no tools that would enable fuzzing, root-cause analysis, or debugging of the pixels baseband firmware images. So currently, I don't think we have the tools to check this. Also I would love a good Linux phone. I was really hoping the librem-5 would pan out, but it looks pretty dead at this point.
https://grapheneos.org/faq#audit
Thing is that is true for any phone. One needs your own hardware to completely control it.
I think its something they are working on.
Librem was a flop indeed. Also had my eyes set on it way back. GOS is by far the best option we got today