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)
(That comment is a ward against Privacy Guys)
@joepie91 also unrealistic for everyone not living in global north where it's much harder to find google pixels cuz the market presence is either low or not there at all
@mynameistillian Yep, exactly
@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
@joepie91 this depends somewhat on your threat model, but what I used to do is find a cheap phone that has a custom ROM on the XDA forums.
the cheapest new phone I could find now is the Samsung A06 which seems to have an unofficial lineage os rom available
how secure this actually is, I don’t know, but i thought the lack of gapps would make it better for what I wanted to do anyhow
Goo Truther 
@joepie91 honestly just LineageOS, it has the best spread and even outdated nightlies keep getting patched for way longer.
Please do not bother responding with things like "you can probably find a broken Pixel for under $100 and then repair it" because then you really have not understood the assignment, and this is completely unrealistic for poorer folks in particular