I considered buying a used Xperia 5 V (released in 2023), but when I looked on eBay, they were about 50% more expensive than a used Pixel 8 Pro, and Sony no longer provides software support for the phone.
Sony was one of the best manufacturers, since it provided build instructions and all the code to build AOSP for its phones. It was the only manufacturer that actually provided kernel upgrades for its phones, but it only did that twice. Google and Qualcomm now say that they will provide kernel upgrades in the future, which will be a big improvement. If this happens, Android phones will become more like Linux phones, where kernel upgrades are normal.
Sadly, Sony Xperia sales keep declining. Sony is estimated to have only sold 400,000 phones in 2025, so I can’t see it continuing to sell Xperias in the long term. I also noticed that their web site doesn’t have build instructions for AOSP 16 and AOSP 17.
At this point, the only Android phone manufacturers left that make phones good for modding are Lenovo/Motorola (60M), Google (12M), OnePlus (11.6M), Nothing (2M), GigaSet (1+M), Sony (400k), Fairphone (145k), SHIFT (10k), Teracube, Volla and Brax. Together, those brands sold an estimated 87 million phones in 2025, which is 7% of the 1245.5 million total smartphones sold in 2025. However, that is an overestimate, because the majority of Motorola phones have MediaTek or UniSOC processors and no custom ROMs will ever be made for them. A good portion of Motorola and Google phones are sold through carriers, and many carriers like Verizon don’t allow their phones to ever be unlocked, even if they are no longer under contract. That means that probably only 30 million phones are sold worldwide per year that are good for modding.
That number is about to get much smaller now that OnePlus is about to disappear, since OnePlus will only be sold in China and India in the future, and in China, you need a Chinese ID card and face verification to get the unlock code. Maybe Nothing will survive and maybe it won’t, but it doesn’t look good at this point. I doubt Sony will survive long term. Yes, if you do weird tricks you will be able to get unlock codes from Xiaomi and OPPO/OnePlus, but I doubt that anyone will bother making custom ROMs for them in the future. In other words, I doubt that more than 20 million phones will be sold per year which are good for modding in the future, which would represent about 1.5% of the global smartphone market. However, in most of Africa, Latin America (outside of Mexico) and Asia (outside of India, Taiwan, Singapore and Japan), you won’t be able to buy a good phone for modding.
Given how grim it is going to become for custom ROMs in the future, I think that there will be a market for a good Linux phone, but it has to have a decent processor and camera. Sadly, Rockchip, NXP, Amlogic, etc. simply aren’t interested in making decent mobile processors. I think that some company could make a very compelling Linux phone with the Qualcomm QCM8550 with 16GB RAM and 512GB eMMC that has Waydroid preinstalled to run Android apps and has good video out so it can be marketed as a convergent desktop phone. Of course, using a Qualcomm processor means proprietary blobs, so it wouldn’t appeal to me, but I think that kind of phone could attract a lot of tech enthusiasts, and sell between 30k and 50k units per year if programmers were hired to work on the software.
