> I'd like to switch phones soonish and was looking at the fairphone 6 with /e/OS but feel deterred by its mid range specs which would probably limit its longevity. I would like to get away from google.

Fairphones lack proper security patches and OS updates from day one. /e/OS makes this substantially worse compared to Fairphone's own OS. Fairphone tends to lag 1-2 months behind on Android's standard partial security backports and a year or more behind on yearly OS updates. They skip the monthly and quarterly releases. Fairphone 5 uses the Linux 5.4 LTS branch which will be end-of-life in December 2025 with no plan to move away. Older Fairphones use end-of-life kernel branches.

Here's information from the author of the divested projects about /e/OS including data on updates from 2021 up until late 2024:

Issues with /e/OS: https://codeberg.org/divested-mobile/divestos-website/raw/co...

ASB update history: https://web.archive.org/web/20241231003546/https://divestos....

Chromium update history: https://web.archive.org/web/20250119212018/https://divestos....

Chromium update summary: https://infosec.exchange/@divested/112815308307602739

For the Chromium update summary from July 2024, note 128/135 was shipping each update on a given update path. /e/OS only shipped 12/135. They did not ship most Chromium security updates and skipped most releases. They're still skipping many releases and have significant delays for the ones they do ship.

Here's an article from another privacy/security researcher on /e/OS covering some of these issues:

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/e-datenschutzfreundlich-bedeutet-...

As documented there, /e/OS has their own invasive services including user tracking in the update client. https://community.e.foundation/t/voice-to-text-feature-using... is another example where /e/OS sends user data to OpenAI without consent for speech-to-text compared to Apple doing it locally by default and Google at least supporting doing it locally and encouraging enabling it.

There's a third party comparison table at https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm with a privacy and security focus. It doesn't currently cover invasive services added by operating systems or privacy/security regressions beyond patch delays though. It covers what is done with most of the standard AOSP services and how Google service compatibility is handled.

> Is waiting for the new pixel and then putting grapheneOS on it a good way forward? Seems weird to pick a google device to get away from that company.

The purpose of GrapheneOS is providing a high level of privacy and security. This requires secure hardware/firmware with important hardware-based security features and driver/firmware patches. Using a Fairphone with /e/OS is nearly the direct opposite of GrapheneOS.

> Alternatively, there is the iPhone but I do like fdroid and the more open nature of android.

An iPhone would be a far better choice for privacy and security than anything with /e/OS.