Android is struggling to keep its market share in the United States, as Apple continues to take over in the market. But, despite Android as a whole losing ground, Google Pixel phones are becoming a bigger slice of the US market.
Counterpoint Research reports that, in Q2 2023, US smartphone shipments dropped by 24% year-over-year. That includes both iPhones and Android phones, and virtually every brand saw a drop in shipments. Samsung saw US shipments drop by 37% while Motorola saw a 17% drop. TCL saw the biggest decline at just shy of 70% year-over-year, and even Apple saw a 6% drop.
A pixel with custom firmware that removes the Google is my preferred phone choice.
Is there a way to recover the stock OS if you brick it?
I know PCs are completely fail-safe in this regard, since you can always factory reset the machine by booting an installation image of the stock OS, but what about phones?
Google makes it very easy to flash Pixels back to stock through Chrome browser. Recently I was trying to flash /e/os to my Pixel 4a 5G. I bricked it 6 times and still can’t get it to install but I was able to flash back to stock easily. I recommend Graphene OS on the Pixel of you want to start taking back your life and start removing Google from it.
Nice.
Which keyboard do you use? I’ve been trying FlorisBoard (installed from F-Droid) on the stock OS, but the swipe typing is frustratingly inaccurate compared to Gboard.
I tried out FlorisBoard earlier this year and was having the same issues. I am currently using this and it works more or less like gboard but without the G.
Would you happen to know how exactly that works? Does the phone have an unchanging, always-present BIOS that can boot from USB, like a PC does?
Yes, it’s called a bootloader. It needs to be unlocked before unsigned firmware can be ran on the phone. Unlocking the bootloader is simple and the the guides with show you how to do it.