This sounds brilliant. If you were to start fresh today, what device would you use? My aged iPhone is on its last legs, and I’m looking for something on the small side (preferably Nexus 5 sized at most) that I can degoogle and use for telegram, HN, reddit, music, and podcasts. It seems like every older phone has a gotcha, like nonfunctional cameras or missing wireless bands. 7 days of battery sounds magnificent.
For 5 years of real support you will need to just get the pixel 6 when the roms you are interested in are ready. Graphene, Calyx, and Lineage will support it, but it might take a few months for their teams to get up and running. They are all very fast though.
Graphene and Calyx only support the devices as long as google is putting out the security updates, so all the phones before the 6 will only get the ~2/3 years that Qualcomm limits updates to. I am not sure how lineage is able to support devices for so long after vendors stop supporting it themselves. They are a super dedicated community of volunteers, though. [Here](https://grapheneos.org/faq#legacy-devices) is where Graphene talks about why they drop support after vendors don't officially support the device anymore
Of these projects Calyx and Graphene are the easiest to install. Graphene you only need a chromium browser and to allow unlocking your bootloader in the developer part settings, and over webusb the whole wipe, install, and flashing of their key so you can re-lock it. Calyx has a script you download to do the same. Lineage is a hair more involved.
Samsung S10 and S10+ looks to me like the place to be, flashed w/ a custom degoogled ROM. Nokia Maps (here wego), Open Camera, something like Aptoide, K9 mail.
I did a lot of research earlier, because I don't use a case, dropped my pixel 2xl, and the glass on the corner cracked. I ended up just putting a dab of epoxy on it instead though. I use the carbonOS ROM on the pixel, which os only for pixels I think. You do have to go through a lot of system services and turn off the unneeded ones though. Lots of useless stuff like "carrier services" and "sprint dm" and a bunch of other crap - just google them one by one. An app like Fibers is great too - I use it to do things like display percentages instead of icons, and when I need turn off half the screen pixels. You can do that in low brightness situations like reading this site in bed w/ the lights off, and you can't tell it's half the resolution. Adguard is great too - blocking ads at the DNS level saves quite a bit of battery when online.
Now here's the main thing - I do spend a couple of hours per day using it - either for email or reading sites. I get about 4 days from 90% to 25%. I never go below 25% or above 90% - my battery is like new 3+ years later. Another feature that an iphone can't have - an app having access to limit your max charge limit. I'm just guessing that 100%-0% is going to be about 7 days, so I can't fully promise that.
Also, a couple of banking apps don't work. The Uber app doesn't work either - you have to use the website versions.
Sadly it's just too big for me. The 4a is about as large as I'd go. And I'm even skeptical of that because as networks phase out 3G and even some 4G bands in favor of 5G, phones that don't support 5G will become increasingly hard to use. Talk about planned obsolescence!
You're ok w/ a pixel5 size (6" screen) but you're not ok w/ s10 size (6.1" and has headphone jack)? And the actual phone size of the S10 is smaller than the nexus 5 you mentioned.
The Pixel 5 is larger than the nexus 5, but it's almost in the range of reasonableness. The S10 is well past that size range -- there's no way I can reach the top of the screen.
Admittedly, it is nice that the S10 includes a headphone jack. But phone size is even more important than that to me. Guess I'll keep using my 2016 iPhone SE for a couple more years!
