I always found it weird that the OS that attempts to limit the impact of Google’s severe privacy issues mostly only runs on hardware by Google.
Not only weird, but it's beyond rich. There's no way on God's green Earth I'm giving money to Google to buy hardware that allows me to escape Google's corporate surveillance machine. That's just too much irony for me.
My deGoogled cellphone therefore is a FairPhone running CalyxOS.
CalyxOS is a mighty fine AOSP distribution, in case you wonder. Very pro, very polished, and I've never had a problem with it.
The Pixels (and the Nexus before them) are very hackable compared to most other phones. They're a good platform for this sort of thing, and why not use it? If you have alternatives, get portin'.
I really want Linux Mobile to work but last time I looked the receiving calls from idle was unreliable and it's the most important part of a mobile phone.
By idle I assume you mean while the phone is suspended? It works fine for me (verizon US, phosh) though there's an extremely rare bug where the phone will fail to resume from suspend and needs to be rebooted. Also I find I need to restart modemmanager after I boot or the modem doesn't come online, though that may just be a problem specific to me since I think I installed the open source firmware for the pinephone modem incorrectly since there's a bunch of other stuff that doesn't work properly (hangs on a lot of AT commands).
Well. I was literally considering getting a pixel fold in the next few days to give grapheneOS a try. I guess I won't now? What other good options are there for a (mostly) casual who wanted minimal fiddling and maximum privacy? Just switching back to iPhone?
I doubt iPhone is better, and it's marketing instead. Or it's a matter of time before they wanna go the data mining road. You can also get a fairphone and install a custom ROM