I think you did out-Luddite me! Hahah! I have to commend you on that! 
Your explanation of your reasoning makes a lot of sense, too.
Due to concerns that even the flipphones may have more tracking/privacy issues than De-Googled smartphones, I’m now leaning more towards buying Rob Braxman’s De-Googled Motorala Moto G7 Plus. It uses Lineage OS. My only question is if anyone knows if this phone WITH the OS, will work on VoLTE? I believe the phone does (when its factory default with normal OS) but I want to make sure that the OS change wont interfere with VoLTE since thats pretty much the whole reason I’m considering the phone.
Dangit, I thought of that like 3 hours later. I’ll know for next time.
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A quick search reveals two things:
- Volte support is based upon modem and firmware, not so much OS
- Lineage OS was dealing with volte support 3-4 years ago.
So if Braxman sells modern phones, I would surmise that there will be no issues.
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Just ask Braxman.
BTW, VoLTE-capability doesn’t depend on the OS, per se.
Be aware that a phone may get VoLTE on one network, but not another. For my Android, the VoLTE setting is present in the menu when I have a T-Mobile SIM inserted (or a T-Mobile-based MVNO), but not when I have an AT&T (or MVNO) SIM inserted. That’s either because the OEM vetted for T-Mobile’s network, but not for AT&T’s, or because AT&T would demand to whitelist my device first… I don’t know which.
The device’s regional firmware can also affect the presence of VoLTE; if you buy a phone produced for Europe, it may not have the same modem (EDIT: or firmware), and it may not be approved for VoLTE on a U.S. network. And vice versa. (In some cases, you can replace the firmware with a different version, which I imagine Braxman can do, too.)
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@BrentMpls and others:
One thing to note about calyxos - its a bit heavy on battery usage. It won’t die in a day’s use, but it does drain faster than normal android. I use my phone pretty relatively conservatively compared to what I consider the average phone user, and I get to something like 55% when my old S9 would be at ~70%. Not a big deal, just FYI because you will see it if you go with calyx.
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@Gavaudan, thanks for the heads-up. Any chance that your current device battery life could instead be due to the modest battery life of the 4a itself and not the Calyx OS? According to this revue, weaker battery life is an issue with all the Pixels in the 4 family.
Plus, the Calyx site extols the virtues of the microG replacement for GMS including “reduces battery, memory, and CPU usage”.
https://calyxos.org/features/microg/
It very well could be. I’d seen somewhere else when I was doing my research that calyx was a little more battery intensive. But either way, my experience with my setup is that it doesn’t last quite as long. Noticeable, but not concerning.
Motorola’s store on Amazon advertises VoLTE support for the Moto G7 Plus. It looks like a good choice.
I think that you will be happy with LineageOS. I find it much easier to use than most of the versions of Android which the manufacturers preinstall. After I installed LineageOS on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 7, I found it much easier to use than MIUI which came preinstalled on the phone.
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Its done!
I finally got through Red Pocket by using someone else’s card to purchase (Thanks @bed for the suggestion and saving me from spending weeks going back n forth with them. Weirdly, the cards that wouldn’t work for me were Mastercards and the one that did work was AmEx! Clearly Red Pocket has an issue.)
And… I bought Rob Braxman’s De-Googled Moto G7 Plus! It will be my first smart phone!! I’m so excited!! I’m most looking forward to being able to take pictures that you can actually see things with!
Hopefully I dont run into any issues getting the above set up. I’m still really looking forward to getting the Librem 5 (and parading it around like a lamborghini) but until then, I can have a functioning phone that aligns with my values and enjoy some crisp pics (crisp compared to the 2MP fuzzy dark camera I’ve had for years)!
Huge huge thank you to everyone in this chat, especially @amosbatto @amarok for helping me make sense of this crazy world!! Seriously everyone here has been amazingly generous with their time, information and resources. I have so much respect for this community and am so relieved to have found others who value privacy as much as I do. <3
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Likely moot now, but I said I’d offer my experiences. I’ve flashed the phone with lineageos (that was an adventure!).
Flashing the oneplus phone to lineageos was an adventure. Issues I ran into:
- Had to figure out how to get udev rules for adb for my linux system
- Phone didn’t come with a usbc to usbc adapter (so I needed to buy one)
- Needed to wait a week for oneplus to give me an unlock code to unlock the bootloader
- Once flashed to lineageos, it could no longer see the cellular modem. Attempted to flash it back to old os and that just created a reboot loop. Deciding to flash back to lineageos and somehow that fixed it.
I now have a functioning phone with lineageos (took me about 12 hours total of effort for a novice).
Experiences using it:
- I set up the phone with the f-droid package manager and was able to figure out the basics (though I had opened ~50 windows before I figured out how to close them.
- in comparison to the stock os, I found it much easier to close windows. the whole finger on bottom of the screen and throw the window out tended to cause me to inadvertently hit wrong buttons often. No issues with lineageos once I figured out the windows manager button
- I was pleased that f-droid at least for the moment seems to offer everything I wanted: weather(Weather (Privacy Friendly)), and navigation(OsmAnd~).
- fdroid seems to lack a good way to list the installed programs. Thus if you want to uninstall something, you need to search for it in it’s full pacakge list, find the one you installed and remove it.
Took a bit of time, but I figured out how to get root on the system (you need to do it via adb). Although the cli interface is about as sparse as you’d expect from an embedded device, I was surprised at how much was there.
- It has vim! but not less (really…?) and had sshd installed and fairly easy to start up and use. I just can’t figure out how to get it to start at boot.
- It has iptables on it, so I was able to make my own firewall settings fairly easily (which I want to firewall off my sshd process)
- I was able to get my rsync backups to work over the network, backing up /data (not sure if restoring that directory over rsync will not break things though).
- I can’t seem to find a cli interface for any of the programs, which is annoying from a scripting/configuration management point of view. Not even for the package manager.
- System seems to lack any form of development environment or tools. No python, c compilers, etc. It does have bash though so you can script with that.
I’m continuing to mess with it. Mainly still trying to figure out it’s init system, so I can start sshd and the firewall on boot. If there’s anything you want me to try out, let me know.
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If you mean “installed F-Droid apps,” if you install F-Droid Classic, which emulates the old F-Droid UI, you will have 3 tabs: Available, Installed, and Updates. I prefer this easy-to-navigate, concise UI to their new one. (I’ve only briefly checked out the new UI, so I don’t know if it has an Installed list somewhere.) You can have both versions of the store on the same phone, so it’s easy to compare them and see which one you like better.
There’s also an app available in F-Droid called List My Apps, which can produce a text file of everything installed on your phone, not just F-Droid apps.
If you ever find that you absolutely need an app that’s available only from Google’s store, and not in F-Droid (or even Amazon, if you’re cool with that), then you might want to install the Aurora app from F-Droid. It can grab packages from Google’s store using its own account, so you never have to sign up to Google.
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Yeah, I was meaning what f-droid had installed. The classic layout is much better thanks!
Not sure if I’ll ever use anything from google’s store, but I’ll keep that in mind thanks!
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Aurora Droid is an F-Droid frontend much like Aurora is a google play frontend (made by the same dev). I find it easier to look at and it does list your installed apps.
Also, if Osmand~ isn’t doing it for you, give Magic Earth a look. I find I much prefer it myself.
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Kudos to you. Many would have given up.
It’s a little bit scary as there is always a concern about producing a brick - that is not even usable as a brick 
Maybe continue the discussion in some other topic as this is neither a Librem 5 nor running PureOS.
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Thank you to @Rae for starting this thread, which is basically about how non-tech saavy and non-GNU/Linux users, who need a working device now, can find a relatively privacy-focused interim smartphone solution while waiting for the Librem 5 to eventually become both orderable from stock and fully functional upon delivery, maybe by the end of 2021 or maybe not.
Users gave many great suggestions. I took @Gavaudan’s suggestion to flash Calyx OS onto an unlocked Google Pixel.
To minimize e-waste and expense, I purchased a refurbished 2019 Pixel 3a for $146 from Back Market. With a little challenge and some great coaching from @Gavaudan, I successfully flashed Calyx OS and de-Googled my first smartphone.
I’ve added a SIM from Black Wireless, an AT&T MVNO offering some of the least expensive and most flexible monthly service plans on the market, which I expect to functionally transfer to an L5 running the BM818-A1 modem at some point.
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It looks like it were easier to just order a Pinephone. Bonus: if you install Mobian on it, you get the almost the same software and feeling as Librem 5. When L5 arrives you will already know how to use it well.
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I do wonder, though, how Google-free a phone designed by/built by (?) Google itself can ever be? I would always wonder what spying-firmware is built in to it…but then I’m paranoid like that. 
It would be interesting if you monitored all internet connections for a while to see if it connects to nefarious or unknown sites.
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@eugenr, from everything I’ve seen about the hardware, software, development and support of the Pinephone, it’s even more of a unpolished developer phone at this point than the L5 Evergreen and doesn’t support VoLTE. As a non-techno, non-GNU/Linux, novice smartphone user, I needed something reasonably private but with complete, standard mobile features out of the box and working VoLTE. For some other types of users, maybe even on this thread, your suggestion seems like really good advice.
@amarok, how de-Googled a Google phone can really be seems like a worthy question, which I would be curious to try to answer. Unless you want to get into it in this thread, I’ve DM’d you for some advice on how to monitor for background connectivity that may be taking place on a Pixel 3a, even when running Calyx OS.
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