No, this isn't a review for the Pixel 3a.
If you've met me in real life, you've seen me with my tiny phone the 12 mini, and as much as I like the phone itself the battery degradation has gotten me frustrated from using the phone more than once and so as always I carry a backup phone. The backup phone has been the Nokia 5310 (2020) version which is a very powerful dumbphone for what it costs but it is no longer a viable option since the 2G towers in India have started to shut down as well and the 3G towers were never that great anyway.
Anyway, that's part of the reason but I would need a new backup phone sooner or later and I saw a listing on Amazon for Pixel 3a for a price of 13k INR and that's all it took.
You saw that coming, didn't you?
Back to topic, Pixels are one of the few phones where installing a Custom ROM doesn't take too much work and it's fairly documented and I didn't need another device tracking the shit out of me so I had to do this. First, we browsed through GrapheneOS to see that it no longer supported Pixel 3a so the next option was to check out CalyxOS and I got lucky.
I'm not going to write the entire process of installing the ROM since their website does a really good job of explaining everything. Also, not responsible if you end up bricking your device.
We now have a device that doesn't have any software from Google and instead provides various ways to install things that you might need and play store is the only way to get it.
In my case, here's the apps I ended up installing which were totally FOSS
And nothing else, that's all that's on that device from the Play Store (Aurora Store), and here's a short experience of using this for over 2 months.
Surprisingly lasts more than 2 days on idling and light usage for the above mentioned apps. It's been the perfect phone to just have in the pocket and since the charging is done with USB C, and my macbook charges with USB C I didn't add another cable to the bag ( I already carry, 3 USB C cables and a Lightning Adapter for the phone).
Calyx adds open alternatives to most things so while Waze works, there's glitches where the location data doesn't update and the same is with Uber and Uber Lite where the directional data of the app isn't updated properly so it ended up being a problem so this might be a bit of an issue. The default OpenStreet based maps is good enough to help you around if you can navigate using a map but if you are very dependent on apps like Google Maps then you might have to rethink using this.
Just to re-iterate, waze does work but there might be certain glitches, it's easy to just close the app and open it again to get it sorted but it's there and might not be convenient for everyone else.
It's a 4G LTE compatible phone so there's no problem with the bands and connectivity wherever I was going and I wasn't worried about having to figure out a harder way to get in touch with people if needed. The LTE speeds are not as good since the frequencies have had some changes since the device was originally released. It also has ESIM support if you wish to use that instead.
Manually archiving music into the phone has definitely been fun but then it doesn't have extendable storage so that's still a limitation you have deal with.
De-googling to this extent is probably not for all and becomes rather inconvenient for most but I guess I've lived it with for most of my life so it wasn't that hard. Do I recommend someone else doing this? Not really. You might thing there's too much initial effort for very low ROI and if you aren't worried about that then do go for it!
I still think the ideal phone for me would be something that looked similar to a Blackberry and came with basic AOSP android. Android itself is customisable enough at the base level that you don't have to spend money creating a custom OS and then charging the crowd for that custom OS.
Anyway, it's an ideal one but let's see if I get frustrated enough to build one at some point in life
That's all for now, Adios