I had the same struggle. Repatching or downloading modded APKs became annoying. But there is a way. Happy to DM about it.

Skimmed the title. Brain registered words “rpi” and “linux” underneath it. Instant reaction: “Not another app package format please”. 😶‍🌫️

I should spend more time reading properly & less time being an old man yelling at tech.

That’s what I was referring to: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/38402246

With Android 16, Google is also royally screwing over the AOSP community. Without proper access to the source, ROMs such as Lineage, Graphene etc. will suffer.

(My advice is not to stay on Stock ROM and accept Google invading your privacy but instead fight back by complaining to Google)

If you were happy with generated voices from ebook files, then this will work nicely: https://github.com/santinic/audiblez

Use “free” Google services so that any pseudo-governmental entity can get full access to your mails, backups, photos, contacts, location … but worry about stuff in device memory. Yes. A sane approach.

I’ve switched fully to a 3" Unihertz Jelly Star in September. It took A LOT of customization to get it to become the “Intent” device that I had wanted it to be. But by now, it makes all unwanted behavior sufficiently difficult while allowing all modern conveniences such as IM, payments, tickets, navigation etc.

I’ll do a proper blogpost series about it some day.

If consuming content is how you want to spend your energy & lifetime, then the bigger & brighter & more-HDR-than-life the better. I hope you find happiness. But if you at some point tire of not-creating and cannot stand spending your time as a targeted money-sack, then tiny phones are a good way out.

POSIX and shell functions can get us very far indeed. At least, not everthing’s an object in Bash. :P

I am also pretty confused about this. Any idea why the usual releases aren’t available?

Long-term custom ROM user here.

Regarding security: as always, it depends on your threat model. If you fear a government actor getting access to your phone, a locked bootloader won’t slow them down.

Regarding privacy: I’ve had both VPN logs and external Wireshark running against traffic going in&out of my custom ROM phones & sometimes I still do it for fun. If you know what you’re getting into (e.g. LoS still using some Google services) then a Custom ROM usually holds far fewer surprises than some questionable OEM ROM (and which is terrifyingly scarce regarding changelogs while still having OTA update power).

tl;dr: stick with well-known ROMs & you get … not the best of both worlds … but a “good enough” of both worlds.