iPhone or some Android

Apple has had a huge number of security issues over the years; some taking years to fix much like Microsoft. The ones that are fixed the fastest are the ones that causes the most damage to their reputation in the press not necessarily the ones that are most severe. This extends not just to the iphone but icloud (remember all those leaked nudes of rich and famous). As for apps being restricted to apple store making it more secure - think about what you are saying for a while and you might realize the folly of your statement after all no one forces you to side load an app.

I will grant that apple makes decent but restricted hardware and has excellent support but given that once you get started down the apple ecosystem you are either locked into the ecosystem or have an expensive decision to make and this is not an accident.

My singular largest complaint with android is that the system is not fully realized because the only manufacturer large enough to take full advantage of it is Samsung and their design scope and objective is somewhat narrow or where they push the envelope (i.e, flip phone); is in a direction that does not interest myself.

Beyond Samsung no one has achieved the benefit of scale (other than apple of course). Google has the resources but they don't make (or sell) phones to scale; and it does not appear to be their objective.

For me I've gone with android for a few reasons:
first I want an sd slot (something that is becoming more difficult); not for music or games but for photos. I do not want to send my photos to the cloud. For those who are happy to upload their photo library to the cloud this is less of an issue.

second I do not want to lock myself into the apple ecosystem. One could argue that I'm locking myself into the andriod/google ecosystem but in all honesty as someone who has used both it is less heavy handed.

third security. I can not say which is more secure today but historically apple security issues has been extremely embarrassing and the timeline to fix frequently depends on level of public exposure. Andriod (and andriod apps) have had their own security issue and google has allowed its fair share of trojan horses onto google play so I will say that it is not without its own flaws but historically some of apple holes (and this extend to icloud) would make a child blush. I'm not a large app user (that is to say my selection of apps is fairly narrow and mainstream; which helps a bit).

fourth and last I do not want to be at the mercy of apples whims. They decide the direction they wish to take their ecosystem and phones. If they go a direction you dislike there is no alternative while staying in their ecosystem. With andriod there are at least alternative options (though in practice somewhat limited). If you do not like the direction of samsung or google hardware you can at least look at oneplus or motor. Having said that I will fully admit (as noted above) that very few hardware manufacturers have the benefit of scale to produce top tier hardware. Then again apple margins are obscene and that is mostly due to not allowing competition in their ecosystem (i.e, not only are they selling those phones for a pretty penny but their margins on each phones are much higher than the competition).
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As a caveat the philosophy one should take is anything unencrypted stored in the cloud is public information. What most of my friends do is install an encryption layer between their devices and 'cloud' storage so all items are stored encrypted and quite frankly all cloud providers should make this their default and required mode of operation if security was their #1 priority.
 
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Yes, I think there's a bit of misunderstanding here. I'm not saying open-source is magically more secure than closed-source software. Github is littered with abandoned rubbish I wouldn't touch with a barge pole, and of course plenty of all software is trash, however it's created. I said that I think the great majority of security folks prefer open-source, in principle.

And the reason for that is simply transparency. It can be argued that closed source has a slight advantage in the fact that bad-actors don't get to browse the code for vulnerabilities, but I think that's heavily outweighed by the fact one has to take some company's word for it that their software works correctly and safely. Particularly with anything involving security and cryptography, I think most security experts would consider code they can't inspect as a non-starter - how can we be sure they've implemented the algorithms correctly, or that there's no back doors, etc?

With regard to corrupt contributors, there's nothing about open-source that says you have to accept any code contribution offered - many projects are very restrictive. And when it comes to state-level actors trying to weaken code, they are most certainly conducting industrial espionage within the major corporations. And if any funny business occurs in those closed-source products, we might never know about it.
 
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What do you mean by
My singular largest complaint with android is that the system is not fully realized because the only manufacturer large enough to take full advantage of it is Samsung and their design scope and objective is somewhat narrow or where they push the envelope (i.e, flip phone); is in a direction that does not interest myself.

Beyond Samsung no one has achieved the benefit of scale (other than apple of course). Google has the resources but they don't make (or sell) phones to scale; and it does not appear to be their objective.
Which direction would you like them to take?

There are a few other significant Android-based manufacturers like Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo, ... (yes, they're all coming from the same part of the world, sadly)

I wonder if alternative solutions like Pinephone / Manjaro and other Linux-based phones will ever be successful. I suppose it would take years before catching, and since only one group at a time is proposing them, unlike Android, it's more difficult.
 
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I'd say that open-source is far preferred by most security folks. The transparency and open contributions to addressing weaknesses I think are a much better bet than trusting the secrecy (and unknown exploits) of closed-source proprietary software.

By security folk, sure. I also prefer open source in a PC environment because I like to tinker but I don’t much care about mobile. Open source obviously allows a lot more freedom and if your knowledgeable can be made quite secure but for the average user a closed source environment will give them less rope to hang themselves with, so to speak.:)
 
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By security folk, sure. I also prefer open source in a PC environment because I like to tinker but I don’t much care about mobile. Open source obviously allows a lot more freedom and if your knowledgeable can be made quite secure but for the average user a closed source environment will give them less rope to hang themselves with, so to speak.:)

Well, I'm not just talking about security folks as end-users. I think if you listen to the guys that really know their stuff, like the folks behind Signal, they consider that it has to be open-source.

And that's also a good example of where open-source doesn't have to mean too much rope to hang yourself - their system is actually extremely locked down, and they resist calls to federate the system, allow more flexibility, etc. Their position is that if you want the best security they can offer - stick with their code, and their streamlined system.

At the moment I'm testing Fedora Silverblue, which is an immutable OS version of Linux. The entire OS portion of the disk is locked down, read-only, and the same across every system. Software is meant to be in Flatpak form, which is sandboxed. That's much more restrictive, but also much more reliable and secure. So, I don't think open vs closed software has to dictate the degree of freedom provided to the end user, at the point of use.
 
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Yes, Fedora seems to be very good for that. I remember it was one of the earliest distributions to propose SELinux at the installation. There's a large panel of other security features too.
 
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My priority are long battery life, good reception, sd slot. We see that many of the phones today have limited battery life and of course most are removing the sd slot.

Huawei makes interesting hardware but with today's paranoia (perhaps justified) in the US their phones are not an option.

I think if vendors are unhappy with base android they would be better off modifying android rather than start with linux itself. You can in fact use android without google's ecosystem though for many it is the ecosystem that provides the most benefit.

google services are pretty nice (if you can ignore the tracking and potential invasion of privacy which is an issue). After all for many look at how google search engine and google map has impacted your life (if you use either). It would be nice if we could get these features without the negatives... but that is another topic perhaps.

What do you mean by

Which direction would you like them to take?

There are a few other significant Android-based manufacturers like Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo, … (yes, they're all coming from the same part of the world, sadly)

I wonder if alternative solutions like Pinephone / Manjaro and other Linux-based phones will ever be successful. I suppose it would take years before catching, and since only one group at a time is proposing them, unlike Android, it's more difficult.
 
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My priority are long battery life, good reception, sd slot. We see that many of the phones today have limited battery life and of course most are removing the sd slot.

Huawei makes interesting hardware but with today's paranoia (perhaps justified) in the US their phones are not an option.
I have the impression many are removing this slot so their phone can swim underwater. It's apparently a big concern since many people are trying to teach their phones how to swim. I never understood that. ;)

Huawei was banned in the US last year, wasn't it? It went as far as pressuring TSMC to refuse orders from them, or it was about to happen. The US used its influence to put pressure on most countries and companies in order to ban them (including my country, even though there was no evidence of wrongdoing). I was expecting a post-Trump 'detente' but I didn't follow that story.
 
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I do not believe that is the case; we can see that for example note ultra 20 has no issue with sd slot and ip68. The reason I have heard is that 8k video will not work on most sd cards and vendors do not want to deal with service cases due to people expecting to record directly to slow sd cards. I then again i could be mistaken...

I have the impression many are removing this slot so their phone can swim underwater. It's apparently a big concern since many people are trying to teach their phones how to swim. I never understood that. ;)

Huawei was banned in the US last year, wasn't it? It went as far as pressuring TSMC to refuse orders from them, or it was about to happen. The US used its influence to put pressure on most countries and companies in order to ban them (including my country, even though there was no evidence of wrongdoing). I was expecting a post-Trump 'detente' but I didn't follow that story.
 
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