/1 is an open source privacy and security focused mobile OS. It is designed to defend from Google's intrusive privacy invasions on your phone. The point is to start de-Googling. If you're thinking about switching, here are some considerations to take into account.
Conversation
A way cheaper alternative to Pixels is to flash on almost any Android phone: wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
I use a dedicated de-googled old phone to connect only through a Torbox:
github.com/radio24/TorBox
It can connect to Tor Hidden Services even without Orbot.
1
2
21
The security trade-off with that it has no ability to relock the bootloader after flashing so physical theft can get it easily compromised.
2
1
11
One of the huge benefits you get with the Pixel is the Titan M chip too. It’s obviously more expensive than the cheapest androids but the Pixel 3a devices can be picked up for a very reasonable price on Amazon.
2
8
It provides an HSM-based implementation of the keystore (StrongBox) used by various apps including Auditor. It's also integrated into the bootloader and used to enforce the bootloader lock state, verified boot key and verified boot rollback index. GrapheneOS key is flashed to it.
1
1
2
It also provides an implementation of Weaver, which is an HSM-based enhancement for encryption. In addition to the unlock method being used as an input for deriving the per-profile encryption keys, an authentication token derived from it needs to be passed to the TItan M.
1
2
If the correct authentication token for the profile (slot) is passed, the Titan M will return the secret token for that profile, which is needed as an additional key derivation input. It uses a secure internal timer to provide exponentially increasing throttling for attempts.
1
1
The Titan M also provides 'insider attack protection' which means that the Titan M firmware can only be upgraded after the owner account has successfully authenticated. These are all things we'd still to make sure we'd still have if we moved to custom hardware, among others.
1
3
grapheneos.org/faq#future-dev has an overview of what we expect from hardware but doesn't go into detail about any of it. It doesn't mention the security chip among other things, but that is functionality that we expect. Qualcomm SPU is an alternative to the Titan M but isn't as good.