The mobile device market is a duopoly with a thin layer of decoration on top. Apple owns one half. Google owns the other half through Android, even when you’re using a phone with a Samsung sticker on it. Almost everything you can buy in a phone shop in 2026 ships with one of those two operating systems and pours your data back to one of those two companies, often both, by default.
This wasn’t inevitable, and it isn’t permanent. There are people still building phones that respect the person carrying them. This post is a short tour of the ones I think are worth knowing about — both the ones I’ve used myself, and the ones I keep meaning to try.
How I got here
I’ll keep this part brief. My phone history, in order:
- A Sony Xperia. Perfectly fine. I had no opinions yet.
- A Samsung S21. Bigger, sharper, more locked-down. Samsung had bolted their own version of half the apps Google already provides on top of Google’s apps, so the home screen had two messaging apps, two galleries, two assistants, two stores. I deleted what I could and disabled the rest. They came back after updates. Then I dropped it in the toilet, and in the panic of trying to back up “my” data I realised how little of it I actually owned.
- A Furilabs FLX1s. A real Linux phone:
apt, a real terminal, the indie-mobile dream. I loved it. It broke after a single drop. The OS was wonderful. The chassis was not. - A Fairphone 5 running /e/OS. Where I live now. This part deserves its own section.
Each step taught me roughly the same lesson, in increasing volume: the phone in your pocket has opinions about who it works for, and the default answer is usually “not you.”
Brands worth your attention
These are not the only ones. They’re the ones that have genuinely made me think oh, someone is still trying.
Fairphone
Fairphone is the one I bought. The Fairphone 5 is built to be repaired. The battery comes out in thirty seconds with a single screw. The modules — camera, USB port, screen — come apart and can be swapped at home with a screwdriver you already own. They guarantee software updates for the better part of a decade. The supply chain is, by smartphone standards, mildly responsible.
I run /e/OS on mine, which is a deGoogled Android: no Play Services running invisibly in the background, no silent telemetry, F-Droid for most apps and the Aurora Store for the rest when I really need something proprietary. My phone, for the first time in years, feels like it’s actually mine.
My banking apps worked out of the box, but your mileage may vary.
Furilabs
I’ve already covered the Furilabs FLX1s . It’s a phone that runs an actual Linux OS — not “Linux underneath Android.” If you’re the kind of person who already has strong opinions about your laptop’s distro, this one is genuinely thrilling. If you’re the kind of person who needs the phone to just work on day one with whatever app your country’s tax office shipped, it’s not the right tool yet.
I wish them well. The next hardware revision can’t come soon enough.
BraX3
The BraX3 is a privacy-focused Android phone aimed squarely at the deGoogled crowd. I haven’t used it personally. I include it because the people I trust to have opinions about this stuff keep mentioning it favourably, and because the more options exist in this space, the healthier the space is.
Gigaset GX6 PRO
The Gigaset GX6 PRO is, as far as I can tell, one of the very last German-built smartphones still being made. It’s openly repairable, rugged, and feels like a deliberate statement against the planned-obsolescence model. Same caveat as above: I haven’t owned one. I’m glad it exists.
Jolla / Sailfish OS
Jolla keeps releasing phones running Sailfish OS: a non-Android lineage that, against all odds, refuses to die. It’s been kicking around for over a decade, surviving on a small dedicated community and the stubbornness of its makers. That alone is worth a nod. If you ever wanted to see what mobile computing looks like outside the iOS/Android binary, this is one of the few places it still exists.
What you can actually do
Buying any one of these is a small vote, but it’s a real one. So is choosing to run a deGoogled Android (/e/OS, GrapheneOS, CalyxOS) on hardware you already own. So is uninstalling the apps that monetise your attention and replacing them with ones that don’t. So is letting your battery die at 8pm and not panicking.
The mobile market won’t be saved by personal choices alone. But it can absolutely be killed by them, in either direction. Every Fairphone sold is a slightly bigger Fairphone. Every Sailfish device shipped is one more year that lineage survives. Every person who installs /e/OS on a perfectly good five-year-old handset and gets two more good years out of it is a small protest against the assumption that phones must be replaced every two years and must report home in between.
Freedom in this market is fading, but it’s not gone. There are still people building the alternatives. The least we can do is know they exist.