Android's sideloading limits are its most anti-consumer move

As someone who doesn't really care about apps, if I wanted to move away from Android what phones and OSs are worth considering?

GrapheneOS on a Pixel

You don't really have a choice: it's either Android or Apple iOS.

It's kind of ironic that you have to actually give Google money in order to not use Android. I'm still amazed that there's no Graphene support for any other device.

Let's see what will the future of Graphene be, since Google is not publishing the device tree anymore for Pixel devices...

Don't know how the Google's actions with affect AOSP. There are few options depending on location / country with base band frequencies.

Murena with e/OS/ [0], Purism with PureOS [1], Volla with Volla OS or Ubuntu Touch [2], and Furei Labs with FuriOS [3].

Those are the companies actually trying to sell a phone versus Pin64 selling a device to tinker with.

Alternative is checking personally managed OSes like postmarketOS [4] and Ubuntu Touch [5].

[0] https://murena.com/ [1] https://puri.sm/ [2] https://volla.online/en/ [3] https://furilabs.com/ [4] https://postmarketos.org/ [5] https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/

That's a non-issue for them: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/115299586595207105

They are building their own device trees now.

It's not a non-issue i'm sure it's quite annoying to deal with, they just work around it. I hope the deal with their unnamed OEM works out and we get a native GrapheneOS Device. I'd buy it day one.

I've been using Sailfish OS for quite some time, but I don't do all of my computing on the phone. There's quite a high friction for using any of the mainstream Android apps, so usually you have to find an alternative if possible.

I also use Sailfish OS - its not perfect, but useable. :) And the way Android and iOS goes to shit, its current state might already be better than them soon. ;-)

(Sailfish OS is improving over time, if a bit slowly. :) )

PostmarketOS, Mobian, and GrapheneOS all seem to be good choices. Or simply not carrying a phone as I often do.

Does anyone have a rough estimate for how many installation of GrapheneOS there are?

Graphene is still Android.

They all died. There were Linux phones until Android and there were some non-Android phones until Android 8 or so, such as Qt Extended, RIM BlackBerry OS, Palm webOS, Mozilla Firefox OS, and Microsoft Windows Phone, to name a few. They all died from numerous footgun wounds as well as pressures from competition.

VoLTE was one of major contributors to the situation, by the way. Only iOS and Android supported voice call on 4G LTE for first 3-5 years, due to it being a huge pile of TBDs and transitional hacks. There were political fights in whether the LTE is to be 4G or it was to be 3.9999G and superseded quickly by a completely separate 4G standard. This meant that companies and consortium that maintained alternative OS could spend unrealistic amount of lobbying and engineering effort trying to get into it, risking investments needed for it, or give up and start procurement process for a white flag. All chose the latter, and we ended up with an iOS/Android duopoly with unprecedented totality.

Truly the OS by and for people are into excessive nitpicking. I suppose that's what you want for security.