Using a Vivo smartphone (the Chinese ROM) for its good cameras (once you disable all the AI “enhancements” to the zoom that makes it all look like a messy oil painting). The OS spin is, in a word, pretty garbage. There’s unfortunately no LineageOS support for my device it seems like.

It’s got some neat features, but there’s a whitelist for SMS apps, meaning I was stuck with the stock one. Additionally, it pops up a security warning whenever you install any app that isn’t verified by Vivo, but it doesn’t hamper my ability to install apps from F-Droid and Obtainium too much.

Using NextDNS with a few blocklists shows that it phones home to Vivo constantly, Vivo-related links are far and above blocked by NextDNS over anything else on my devices. Not very good for privacy, like at all. It also tells me off for having private DNS and assumes that it’s the problem whenever there’s a change in the network connection.

I am currently using the Kvaesitso launcher (and I know many like Lawnchair, but I favour the more efficient search-based interface of Kvaesitso) and for a long while it randomly switched me back to the stock launcher. The swipe up gesture also sent me to the home launcher like Kvaesitso was running as an app. It turns out that there’s a hidden option in settings to disable that, but it took a lot of looking around online to figure that out. With Kvaesitso, much of the oddities of OriginOS work out better (like the advertisements and Baidu results in the global search). I also disabled the “Origin Island” since it only worked for Spotify and nothing else I used, as well as a few other bits that I didn’t really need.

If you want a neat phone that is good for user privacy and all that, Chinese ROM phones aren’t the way to go, but dang the camera hardware run circles around anything Apple and Samsung can produce. If you want something that supports custom ROMs, there’s of course Fairphones, which are super repairable and use fair materials and labour, but there’s plenty of other devices that support LineageOS, iodeOS, e/OS, etc. If you really want to become independent of Google you could also try a phone that supports mobile Linux (like the OnePlus 6)

I do have photos backed up with Immich, and it works quite well!