For some it might be only compelling argument, for me it’s tinkerability, at least currently SFOS is the only way to have a linux userland with a working phone at the same time, in a couple of years the pinephones/librem5’s will probably catch up. One of the things that lock people in into android is their money investment in the ecosystem, with opengapps this is actually mitigated on sfos as you can have your paid apps working and then be able to degoogle yourself by shutting down app support once you’re done using them (for messaging apps doesn’t work that well, but at least you can reach out to people who are only on closed platforms). The freedom sfos gives is also unmatched on other systems, you want to sacrifice a bit of your privacy to get faster gps by sending imei to google? You can patch in supl agps. You don’t want to send your gps coords when calling emergency numbers, you can disable a service (hardcoded in grapheneos). CalyxOS one of the ‘privacy oriented’ roms got recently reviewed and it’s not looking good CalyxOS: De-Googled geht anders – Custom-ROMs Teil2 ⋆ Kuketz IT-Security Blog (in german)
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