Quit letting politics ruin our collective ability to drive by suggesting to people that Volkswagen is now an evil company. They support Hitler because they think his business policies will benefit their company. True or false as that may be their company is still great at making cars and we shouldn’t be infighting about that.

Yeah, that’s a good point. I’m not counting on sideloading bringing any benefit to me, but if it does I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

you are on the privacy lemmy, i hope you realize that

Yes.

iPhones are as anti-privacy as possible

I’m not even sure I know what “as anti-privacy as possible” actually means, but this is a garbage statement, and I say this as someone who thinks that both Android and iOS are flaming piles of shit. Did you see that the OP mentioned that they’d consider switching to an iPhone?

Just my two cents on this topic: I used to use an Android phone with LineageOS (this was before Graphene was a thing), and struggled with similar bugs/issues from time to time.

I got an iPhone and never looked back.

Don’t get me wrong, as you suggested here, iPhones are objectively worse in a lot of ways. But mostly, it. Just. Works. And, rather than fight the OS on things like VPN configs, ad blocking, browser usage, etc, I’ve found that I simply use my phone less, and tether my phone to a real computer more often. Paired with a small chromebook or other laptop running Linux, or (gasp) even MacOS, I just don’t use my phone as much as I used to.

On the plus side, iPhones are supported for a long time, have a secure lockdown mode which you can enable if you’re extra paranoid, and have “don’t need to think about it” full-device encryption including full phone backup support. If your phone ever dies or you want to upgrade, you can load a full backup/image from your old device on to your new one with close to zero fuss (just gotta deal with USB 2.0 speeds on all but the newest phones :)

One final note, you don’t need to sign in to an account to use iOS as far as I’m aware. You lose out on the sync/iCloud stuff that Apple provides, but it sounds like you don’t care much about that anyway.