I appreciate the thankless job you developers do building a privacy-friendly Android OS for smartphones.
I spend a lot of my residency in West African countries. Unfortunately, most of the smartphones easily obtainable in that market are non-popular brands like Infinix, Tecno, itel, vivo. These are also fairly affordable devices, hence their popularity in this third world region.
But none of these brands are supported by iodéOS or its upstream, LineageOS.
The third world is being consumed by Google and Apple’s surveillance and data abuse because the governtments don’t care to protect its citizens (e.g. EU’s GDPR), the States might benefit from it and the people are too poor and ignorant to even care.
Samsung is too pricey for some Android lovers and brands like Sony and Fairphone have to be bought online and imported since they’re not locally common devices.
If possible could iode developers consider supporting maybe a few devices from these locally popular brands? It could also help any future activism on privacy on this front if an activist could point out that their local device can be flashed with a privacy friendly OS.
The problem lies upstream as you pointed out yourself as iode is 100% dependent upon the lineage sub-system, but you raise an interesting point. The motorola G32, 42 and 52 is similar in nature as it was built in India and was a very big seller for Motorola in India but sold in very few numbers here in Britain with almost no second user market evident at all for the G42 and 52. India or perhaps Bahrat as the indigenous population prefer to call it, is no stranger to custom rom’s so I’m expecting to see some interest over there once the word gets around.
Of the total world population only around 15% live in the West so making sure open source stays in alignment with the developing countries has to be a sure way of making some big gains from new users. Hard to see many ways that we as users can influence that but it really needs to be done IMHO.