I am greatly displeased at the smartphone industry. I think it's time for a heavy handed crackdown about all the spying they're doing. The smartphone industry and in particular the company qualcomm I find an intolerable company in their practice, I believe they should be smashed, their equiment liquidated and their intellectual property destroyed.
The smartphone industry is a festering cancer on general computing, a persistent and pernicious assault on human rights. An invasion of our private spaces. A colonization of our lives.
I think it is past the point of reform, not that there are any regulator with to intelligence figure out what is wrong let alone the wherewithal to do anything about.
For those reasons, I think global thermonuclear war is our only realistic option for setting back the clock on this travesty.
I am willing to hear your alternative, I don't believe anything short of that has a snowball's chance in hell to change anything about this.
There's a reason pixels are preferred, it's not some kind of malicious conspiracy. The most common sense reason being that there's a lot of overlap and cross-pollination of devs in the android world. between Google and graphene os in particular.
Pixels are also targeted because it's a mass-produced flagship with decent specs that is the closest thing to being already rooted off the shelf. It's the path of least resistance. Plus the used market is robust. A used carrier unlocked pixel 1 or 2 models behind the latest one can be obtained for several hundred dollars cheaper than it originally retailed for.
It takes effort to support additional brands/models.
Most brands lock their bootloaders and make "owning" the device difficult.
That answer is at best only partially right.
The real answer is that Pixels were, until very recently, Google's officially supported reference hardware in AOSP while everything else is a community port of some GPL compliance source code dump.
Community ROMs are Pixel first because Pixels just work.
It'll change now that Google decided to no longer release Pixel adaptions directly as AOSP and the community will have to port that the same way as for any other vendor, especially if a vendor decides to maintain their adaptions in LineageOS.
Hey, that makes total sense. And thanks for filling in what I missed! Really too bad about those changes, too. Google set out to create an open mobile ecosystem in opposition to Apple (and, at the time, and to a lesser extent, M$oft). It was such an incredible success at the start. Lately though, it seems they want to run in the opposite direction by tightening their grip - not the best thing for the community of Android users at all.
Of course, the minority group of nerdy, early adopting users who are a dedicated bunch will bear the brunt of it (as always). It's no surprise they'll be facing backlash from those groups, which in part explains the surges in demand for better (yet somewhat adjacent) alternatives. I was all in when Google said "don't be evil". Now they seem to have abandoned that ethos. I'm still stuck in their ecosystem, have started looking for the exits and I'm definitely not alone in feeling that way.
To add to this, the phones are consistent. With many other brands, it is common for two phones with the same advertised name (like "Galaxy Note 7") to be actually different depending on where you bought them. This makes supporting each model challenging. Also it is closest to AOSP.
I have a bunch of old Samsung tablets that are all the same model, but they're all running slightly different hardware. As a result a couple are running Lineage while a couple are stuck on the stock Samsung/Android because I just can't root them.
I mean, sure but, the absurdity of buying a google device to degoogle, to escape google ?
I just can't !
But that's the thing: GrapheneOS doesn't exist to "escape google," it exists to give people privacy.
If it were designed to escape google, they wouldn't create a re-implementation of Google Play Services that you can optionally install for apps that need it and regularly maintain it with every OS update.
GrapheneOS doesn't remove Google services because "Google specifically bad," they remove Google services because they spy on you without consent, and GrapheneOS is meant to prevent spying.
Hell, if any ROM wanted to get away from Google, basing itself on Android, the thing developed by Google would then be the problem, and they would be better off trying to make an independent Linux distro.
It fundamentally makes sense for GrapheneOS to work on Google hardware first, because Google controls not just the hardware supply chain of the phones, but also the software supply chain. (AOSP)
Supporting, say, Samsung phones, would then mean not just, to a degree, relying on Google via AOSP, but also Samsung's hardware. Android-based ROMs can't really benefit from trying to get away from a particular company, because it's either Google, or Google + Phone Manufacturer that they then have to deal with. (not to mention the fact that Pixels run the best with stock android and are simply the most feasible device for a small development team to support with the lowest possible costs)
Amazing responses, well written. Thank you!