A week ago, we swapped some phones. Mitchie got a new one, Zuleikha got her Pixel 4a 5G, and Zuleikha’s 3a went to my brother Willi in Cologne after packing it like this:
Which means that by now, I have the oldest phone in the household. Mine will still be supported until August next year, and by then I’d have to decide what other system to put on it. I wanted to test some, but not on my working phone – instead I grabbed for the much older Nexus 5 which we still have:
This isn’t supported even by LineageOS anymore, except if you’d install some unofficial custom ROM or even build one yourself. But that is currently a bit too much even for me, so I checked and found a supported environment in the e.foundation which looks like this:
So this afternoon I first charged that device, and when turning it on I first got a bist nostalgic, seeing that cute animated robot during the boot process, but anyway, it had to go. And now I have /e/OS on it:
What you can also see in case that you know /e/OS is that I already installed two more apps, namely F-Droid and Zapp (and by now, also Firefox Focus).
So – it will be interesting to see how this goes with no Google services on board. The installed MicroG fakes some of them, so that you can still get notifications, or run Google Maps if you’d need that – but I’ll try to keep it safe and simple. Will be interesting… and who knows, maybe I’ll even prefer this newly found privacy? And there’s no reason to dump a perfectly fine phone which isn’t even 10 years old… and it has a screen of under 5 inches which is FullHD and beats the current iPhone SE, go figure…
Anyway, like always, thanks for reading.