HACKER Q&A
📣 badrabbit

What usable mobile phone do you recommend for privacy conscious users?


I looked into pine64 and purism, they both look impractical for day to day use. I have bad luck in the past picking android phones and finding out the custom ROM route was difficult or impractical. I wanted to know if anyone on HN had any success stories with recent phones.

  👤 valuearb Accepted Answer ✓
iPhone SE2, fastest mobile phone CPU in Universe, has all of Apples privacy protection features, and only $399.
👤 speedgoose
The fingerprint of an iPhone is very common. If you use a rare privacy friendly Android operating system on a rare device, your device may have a very unique fingerprint.

So if you don't install many apps, I believe an iPhone is the best solution. You will still be tracked of course.

👤 ffpip
Buy a pixel and flash graphene OS.

Tons of guides on YT

👤 pacamara619
The PinePhone or a Fairphone with LineageOS.

Have a look at the Librem tho, just for shits and giggles if nothing else.

👤 runjake
An un-jailbroken iPhone with the latest software.
👤 abc-xyz
I’ve had success with an iPod. It’s very cheap, the size is perfect, and it’s just as fast as the latest iPhones.

It does everything a normal iPhone does (and I’ve never encountered an app that didn’t work), except you have no SIM so you can’t make regular calls, send/receive SMS, or use data. This can of course be a problem at times, so I still have a cheap backup phone that’s usually powered off, and often left at home unless I’m meeting someone or need to use Google/Apple maps. From a privacy perspective you also benefit from its lack of SIM card since it doesn’t ping cell towers.