Are there any Android distributions that work on cheap, easily-available smartphones, and that still try to do the best they can to protect the user's privacy and security, without being absolutist about it?
("Cheap" here means "$100 or under", to be clear)
@joepie91 CalyxOS supports some Motorola phones, with one being 70 euros, and the others in the 130 or so range, is an explicitly privacy and tech independence(or well as much as you're going to get with android) focused rom which replaces most google services it reasonably can and offers various tooling to protect against various forms of tracking(and generally is built with an intention of being private by default with no extra fuss or configuration)
Failing that i guess just any phone that works with Lineage With Microg or /e/OS isn't half bad
@tzeentcha I did find CalyxOS, the problem is that they have rather stringent requirements of the hardware to officially support it (bootloader relocking for example) which are very unlikely to be met by anything plentifully available in the global south - their general approach does not inspire me with confidence that they are open to extending their support coverage for the 'weird' brands (ie. those that people in the global north have never heard of)
@joepie91 Yeah that's one of my issues with them as well, they do live up to making a rom that isn't super inconvenient to use or paranoid, but still falls into some obsessions like insisting on bootloader relocking(something something cybersec people sure are obsessed with boots),
so if a motorola is not available realistically would want to go for /e/OS instead, as it has more or less the same pool of available phones as LineageOS but is made to largely work out of the box with good privacy defaults and private replacement services, has had some issues at times but over all seem like pretty okay folks