I am currently an IOS user, however, as the title suggests, I wish to switch to android. This is because I would prefer to use free software and not be locked into the apple ecosystem. That being said I am already locked into apple and would like to know how anyone else here has managed the switch.
I for one know I will face problems regarding group chats with friends and family on IOS, I will lose out on iCloud+ features, I will have to buy a replacement for my HomePod, I will need to replace apple home, etc.
How did anyone else here who has made such a switch replace or solve these issues?
I would definitely recommend trying Droidian (Mobian for Halium) and UBPorts (although UBPorts is less traditional Linux, as it uses Snaps and has an immutable filesystem by default).
Manjaro is also available, but I don’t recommend Manjaro in general due to untimely security updates.
You can use Waydroid as an Android compatibility layer.
Loooking at the wiki for those doesn’t list modern devices, or even older ones like the pixel 4 through 7. The phone I was looking at buying was a pixel 7 pro as people here seemed to recommend the pixels. Will droidian or others run on this?
As for operating system, manjaro is obv a no go. I also will avoid UBports as I don’t really like snaps or Ubuntu. This leaves droidian and I was looking at postmarketOS, but that doesn’t seem ready. Ideally as I’ve said phosh or gnome shell mobile distros would be best but I can’t find any that support modern devices that run these and I don’t really want to spin my own. Are there any you can think of or perhaps some privacy respecting androids that still let me use google apps I may need or stuff of the like?
Droidian would be more to try out and less to use as a daily driver. It runs atop Halium, so it should work on most modern Android devices that support Treble. Hardware support is a bit hit or miss.
I’d stick to Graphene OS for now.
I think grapheneOS will probably be fine. There are however a few google apps I absolutely need for work, namely google docs and sheets. From what I could read on their website the google services aren’t included at all, even microg and require extra setup. Can this be made to let me run all my apps that need them?