RIM refused to implement governmental spy functions in their hardware, for that they were, and still are, severely punished.
Agreed. It’s a shame they didn’t continue with it. However, knowing MS, they would probably have ended up making it as bad as the others.
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Why not install LineageOS or one of its forks instead?
See above. Also there’s microG which provides “free-as-in-freedom re-implementation of Google’s proprietary Android user space apps and libraries”.
And here is the problem. There’s always an answer in Linux - if you know where to find it, and if it doesn’t bring other problems with it.
Better by far to have a one-distro solution, and that’s called Haiku.
While i understand your enthusiasm for having a simple solution, i would like to remind you Haiku wasnt meant and developed for phones, at least so far it wasnt in the focus, and i hope it will never attempt a focus shift in that direction. Also i would never trust Haiku on my phone without enormous amount of hardening and lock-down, and frankly Haiku isnt that attractive to use it that way.
For phones i would pick an OS dveloped for security from day-1, like Genode.
I would install LineageOS if it was available,but I couldn’t find a suitable image when I bought the phone,and on the official LineageOS page I still can’t find it today: Devices | LineageOS Wiki
I own a Unihertz Titan.
Removing the Google spyware from the stock image was the best solution available on that phone,and on many that I have ungoogled before.
LineageOS is great and it’s amazing how many different devices from different manufacturers they support as a rather small open-source project,but compared to the masses of different devices out there,it’s still a small number and you need a lot of luck to have one that’s supported.
For microG,that’s only a last ressort solution if some really important app you totally can’t live without absolutely needs Google crap to work.
If that’s the case,then install microG instead of the proprietary Google crap.
If not,don’t install it,it still connects to lots of Google servers and you can avoid that if you don’t really really need it.
I must say at this point,that I hate that microG is preinstalled by default on multiple Custom ROMs,even some that promise more privacy.
It should never be preinstalled,you should always try how far you get without it and only install it after everything else failed.
Windows phone was just as locked down as Apple is though. They eventually allowed some side loading, but it was only a few apps at a time. It was also plagued with probably the lowest quality third party apps ever seen on any platform. Even phones like Jolla (with almost no market share) had better apps because they were more open so people could build the missing apps without jumping through hoops. I have a Windows store account - I think it was like $25 or something like that. And have literally never used it because it was too complicated - and that is saying something because I used to develop for iOS and as an indie it was quite hard to get anything in to the app store without multiple rounds of review. It was, at least, easy to get to the point of submitting the app though.
I still have 2 Windows phones somewhere. I honestly used one exclusively for about a year at one point.