TotalSonic

"HRW is zionist organization", this is hilariously mistaken, HRW has been super critical of the Israeli gov, IDF and West Bank settlers for decades now: https://www.hrw.org/middle-east/north-africa/israel/palestine

LOTS of phones other than Pixels come with an unlockable bootloader, just check the list of supported phones for Lineage, Postmarket, Ubuntu Touch, crDroid, etc.and you'll find a multitude of choices - many (most) of which are readily available in the USA as well. (source: me, who has flashed alternative AOSP ROM's and Ubuntu Touch to around a dozen phones & tablets, none of which were Pixel's)

What isn't possible though is relocking the bootloader after flashing an alternative ROM or OS onto nearly all of these, meaning there is minimal security if the phone is stolen, or tampered with while unsupervised. And for those requiring physical security for their devices, that is a big deal.

I'm not missing any point at all, your post is in essential agreement with mine, lol.

Sadly Jolla only offers their products in the EU, for those of us in North America we just have to flash old Sony models, or look on with envy, as far as a phone with Sailfish OS goes. The one thing that bothers me is not all of Sailfish is open source though, but overall I think its a cool project.

"Sideload" is such a dumb name for what is just the act of installing apps of your own choosing.

Graphene, at least in its current state, is dependent on Google continuing to allow Pixel phone bootloader's to be unlocked and relocked after a new OS is installed, and is dependent on Google for receiving timely upstream security update patches as well. Given Google's current direction my guess is that both these things might be threatened in the future.

"Don't be an idiot" - yet the big idiocy I see over & over on the Fediverse are Graphene evangelists that want to knee jerk condemn the multitudes of other mobile libre projects that are doing some good things, with its supposed (and disputable) "perfect".

Graphene is indeed the current best solution towards security hardening for mobile devices, and I would certainly recommend it as first choice especially for anyone working in truly sensitive areas (e.g. journalism, political activism, closed source design, utility maintenance, etc.), or for whom anyone for which security is their primary concern.

However - at this point Graphene is 100% dependent on Google for continuance - both to a large extent the coding of its AOSP base, for the timely security updates Graphene prides itself on, AND in ALL of the hardware it currently supports. As such, given Google's direction, with the next gen Pixel phones likely not to be easily unlockable, and with security updates possibly only provided in a timely way to an insiders list of oem's, until Graphene issues their own devices, or expands beyond only Pixel support, it faces a potential expiry date (similar to what has happened for CalyxOS).

Meanwhile there are TONS of use cases of people with devices from all kinds of oem's, that simply want an experience on these that offers better privacy and more digital sovereignty relative to what Google & Apple offer. As such one can achieve a close to an ad free & data mining free, with much less overall tracking, experience on all of the solutions I listed. And many of these solutions, unlike Graphene, do not depend on Google for their software & hardware. Do some of these solutions have flaws in their security & privacy? Absolutely. For which the thing they need is folks to join in to help fix these flaws. And I've been happy to see increased momentum across lots of these projects to do exactly that recently.

Unfortunately Samsung is making it more difficult to impossible to unlock the bootloaders of their recent devices, but you can reflash some of their older models at least to ROM's like crDroid - https://crdroid.net/