I decided to support AES with my penny, so I want to buy a phone that has 3+ years of support and is good at privacy. I was a Galaxy user with a Lineageos rom before, but I think even stock roms can be debloated.
Lemmygrad (and hex) must be the only place with pro-China folks who are also enthusiastic about privacy, so I’m asking here
All of the Chinese OEMs are pretty bad with software support tbh. Here’s an overview. Especially cheap phones will get very bad software support. If you want a capable cheap phone with reliable software updates, Samsung is probably your only safe bet right now (and they’re not Chinese).
Xiaomi has recently started making some promises for software updates, but only for their flagship devices. None of the Chinese OEMs want to support their cheaper throwaway devices. Also, expect the software of many android OEMs to be riddled with crapware and ads (Samsung, Xiaomi, and Realme are notorious for this). If you want good hardware with clean software and privacy a recent Google Pixel flashed with Graphene OS is probably your only option.
In the end it’s still a capitalist enterprise you’re “supporting”, they all want the most of your money for the least amount of work done on their part.
I second the Pixel idea. They’re getting 5 years of OS updates and 2 more of security updates, and they’re not expensive (~250) if you buy second hand or on a sale. Plus installing GrapheneOS is very simple, they even have a web that does it for you (Chromium-only).
Other brands are either don’t like you installing your own OS or are very expensive or old.
Pretty sure my Xiaomi Redmi 4 (best phone I ever had btw) that I bought in 2016 still gets software updates, at least it did a couple years ago. Six years of software updates is pretty decent. If Xiaomi stops with the updates, there’s always custom ROMs like MIUI.eu, LineageOS, ROMs on xda-developers or rolling your own.
Google Pixels are expensive, aren’t they? Personally, I wouldn’t spend more than 150-175€ on a phone and I expect them to last at least 2-3 years. I’ve been buying/using Xiaomis since 2016, never had a reason to switch to anything else. I don’t know how people can drop 500-600€ on a phone, you can practically buy a car for that much.