Phone and phone OS alternatives

[Dregel]

So, the battery of my LG Nexus 5 phone is starting to act up, pretty much running out of juice after just 10-15 minutes of active usage, and as such, I’m back in the market for a new phone.
Now, I have also recently started to limit my reliance on Google products, after years of almost exclusively using a google services, in one form or another, for pretty much every single thing I do.

I have owned and used almost every iteration of the Google Nexus phones, staring from the first one, and I have no real complaints on the phones or the Android OS it self, but since I’m trying to move away from Google reliance I’m interested in giving an alternative a chance.

So, are there currently any good alternatives to just buying a new Nexus phone and living with Android for the time being?
Are any of the open source phone operating systems usable for every day use, and are there any good phones out there that comes pre-installed with a good, open source OS?

[nshiell]

Depends what you do everyday.
Beyond calls + SMS there are many OSs that have webbrowsers baked in.

Do you need third party apps? Most apps are available for Android and OSX Windows etc, if you do then a phone with an Andoid compatibility layer might be something to look at.

I’m using SailfishOS, which is Linux with some proprietary parts.
It can run Andoid apps although I refuse to install “Google Play Services”. The lack of the services which acts as a lock in to Google’s cloud is a major issue.

The Ubuntu phone looked good when I last saw it, although the control is all around webservices which Cannonical don’t have many of.

@Dregel I don’t know if your a Linux desktop user, but it’s similar to how the desktop was, Windows and nothing else.

(I did install a program called Wine which allowed me to run Windows apps in a Linux desktop though).

Let Us know what you decide to do, my Jolla phone is looking a bit tatty now.

[rodolfo]

Hi Dregel,
genuine question (mostly because I’m curious why the move off Google ? and what have you substituted it with ?

As for the opensource phones, no recommendation there. I think there’s a lot of opensource software but hardware is another matter as it relies more on external forces for volume and such as anyone anywhere can pretty much write software!

[schultzter]

There’s lots of a viable alternatives to individual Google apps/services. But the magic of Google is that they’re all interconnected. And there’s no way, that I’ve found at least, to use one Google service but substitute a non-Google companion service - like using Google search but HERE maps for directions.