T

Traitor_Force867

iPhone is a great choice and is definitely better than most Android options. I have always used an iPhone and Mac, so I am very familiar with how they work. Even though switching to GOS wasn't difficult, I still have my iPhone just in case I do need to switch back to it.

Advanced Data Protection (ADP) definitely makes the iPhone and Apple a lot more enticing than Google. The fact that a Big Tech company actually offers the option to end-to-end encrypt most of your data on their servers is great, and I hope more Big Tech like Google and Microsoft imitate that. The same can be said with Lockdown Mode; if Google and Microsoft had a similar feature, it would make their devices much more secure.

The iPhone was always recommended to journalists and others who needed strong security because of their jobs for many years. While the iPhone is much better than most Android OEMs, the differences between it and stock Google Pixel in terms of security aren't that much as Android has improved a lot. But I'd probably still recommend the iPhone because of ADP and Lockdown Mode. My recommendations from best to least in terms of security:

1. GrapheneOS (best security)
2. iPhone (great security + option to harden via Lockdown Mode + ADP)
3. Stock Pixel (great security)
4. All other Android OEMs

I do recommend an iPhone or stock Pixel to everyone I know. I know not everyone would want to flash an aftermarket OS onto their phone, so these two are the next best options for a secure phone.

The only way to prevent cellular tracking is by putting your phone into Aeroplane mode. This will stop all communications to cell towers. This allows you to carry your phone with you everywhere you go in case you need to use it but without worrying about being tracked every step of the way.

joeconny Is this true or is there a way to prevent this without removing the SIM card from the phone?

Even if you take the SIM card out of the phone, your phone will still connect to cell towers. That's why you can still call emergency services without a SIM in the phone. The SIM is used to determine what services the device can use and other stuff. For example, my plan only allows me to connect to 4G/LTE and below. Not that 5G matters anyway as it isn't available where I live.

Ironjically To my dismay, however, that would force me to go with a P8P, an inferior device by every metric.

Not really. It was Samsung that shipped 100 million phones with broken encryption.

Ironjically I'm someone who does value my privacy/security...

I'd avoid Samsung and any other phone manufacturer that isn't Apple or Google. They do make the most secure devices.

I switched from iOS to Android and been loving it ever since. I did switch straight to GOS though, so I'm not sure what a Stock Pixel would be like. I never had many apps on my iPhone and didn't use all the features, so the switch was easy. I only have six apps that I installed, all the rest come with GOS.

I was just now having the Camera and Auditor apps crash when trying to use the Camera app on its own and Auditor to set up remote verification. But I just did a restart and that fixed it for me.

For contacts, if you do have a Mac you can easily export all of them as a vCard, and then you can copy it over to your Android either via Android File Transfer (Made by Google) which allows you to transfer files from Mac to Android and vice versa, or you can copy it to a USB stick and insert that into the phone.