three come immediatly to my mind: PinePhone, Librem5, Volla. So if you really want to, you can get a phone that runs linux without android on top.
Apart from that there are multiple custom roms you can choose from for your fairphone. And Fairphone (the company) works with several custom rom devs, providing them with phone samples and source code to make this easier.
So while Fairphone themselves do not provide a degoogled phone out of the box - which from a business perspective is understandable - they work with the community and other companies - like murena - to provide these options.
Is it perfect? No. Could they do better? Of course. And maybe they should (especially regarding security updates and bug fixes, but these are whole other discussion you can find here on the forums …), Shiftphones comes to mind, who have an exemplary record of working with custom rom devs …
As pointed out often, the “Fair” in Fairphone stands for fair working conditions, like in fair trade. While one could argue that as a customer you wanna be treated fairly (which is always a matter of personal perspective …) this is not what the “Fair” in Fairphone stands for. Which also doesn’t mean that they don’t treat their customers fairly.
For me the perfect phone also doesn’t exist. it’s all about compromises. What is most important for you. I want a phone where I can change batteries and the screen, extend storage, escape the big five, lets me run open source OS, that respects the planet and human rights, and has a big screen and a headphone jack (well …). Fairphone and maybe Shiftphones are the only ones I know of that come close to that.
As for the software, I think we are slowly getting there. In the early days there was only AOSP and the derived lineage. Now there are many choices. Want more privacy, more security, more google, less google? You can find a rom for you. If you speak german look for “kuketz blog custom roms”. This guy has an on-going series where he does in-depth analysis of basically all custom roms you can think of. Although some information is already outdated (e.g. Calyx has addressed all of his criticism), it is a great ressource.
Now with sandboxed google play and sandboxed microg getting traction, I hope and wish some devs made a completely degoogled version of AOSP, using only free services but gives the user the option to install sandboxed gplay or microg. How cool would that be. You could in theory even have multiple profiles, one completely degoogled, one with sandboxed microg, one with sandboxed gplay for everything that doesn’t work without it.
A man can dream …
not saying its not good, still Fariphone has quite strong connections to the community developers, maybe in other ways like collaborating to keep the FP2 alive and bring further Android updates to it after QC stopped support.
