skarn

Depending on budget and preferences.

The closest to your Fossil is probably Withings (French)

The two most serious brands for sport watches Polar and Suunto (both Finnish)

Of you want something more affordable that looks reasonable, you can look at Nothing/CMF.

At least some of the Withings and Nothing CMF are compatible with Gadgebridge, an open source alternative to the manufacturer's apps.

tl;dr it works really great for me, but there is no complete guarantee for the future, if that's not acceptable stay away.

So far, yes, at least for me. Telegram, WhatsApp, Netflix, banking, you name it. I have apps from three different banks, and they are perfect. Even the itsme app of the belgian government works a-ok. But there is no guarantee that this will always be the case.

Notably Revolut has embraced enthusiastically the new Play Integrity system, and does not work at all on any third party ROM since late autumn. I was not a customer, but it has pissed many people off.

It is not impossible that this might happen with more banks in the future.

The App of my German mutuality didn't work at the beginning (refused to log me in due to "issues with my device") but after a later update now works fine. Who know how long that will be.

Some Google things you simply loose, such as Google Pay, I also have had very mixed success with Chromecast.

Android Auto works, but refuses to use any other navigation app than GMaps and Waze. I tried installing Mapy, HereWeGo, Organic, Magic Earth... But it doesn't work. I half understand the reason, but I haven't figured out a solution yet.

I also couldn't get Slay the Spire to work, I guess it depends on some Google Play Games feature. That's probably for the better, I already spend too much time playing Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which is an open source roguelike available on F-Droid. Highly recommend.

I use Arch and am fairly familiar with a terminal.

Avoid their Easy Installer, it just doesn't work. And pay a lot of attention to the anti downgrade feature of the Bootloader. It's described in their guide for the FP4.

Outside of that, just follow the guide, it was pretty straightforward.

It was honestly way more work to backup everything I had on the phone...

None of those is nowhere near parity with the big tech alternative.

I actually use mailbox.org, I pay for it, and I really like it. But try to convince most people to pay for that over a free Outlook.con account and they'll ask you for their money back.

It's not enough to say "just switch, what's the problem".

All those options are more than fine for me and you, and they're excellent starting points that could become great with the right push.

And you could have pretended to read the link, it's actually interesting, by someone who spent a little more time working with and thinking about these things than either me and you.

GOS's security is very cool, but my threat model does not justify buying more disposable tech just for that.

It's a useful comparison, but biased. The fact that it gives "all green" to the GrapheneOS choice of using actual Google Play though sandboxed, while MicroG is all red... Is hard to defend. So you have to actually read the whole thing instead of just looking at the colors.

Also, it's somewhat outdated.

The /e/OS I'm writing from now has an alternarive network location provider, built in UnifiedPush support, and it passes Basic Integrity, at least since December last year.

Reposting what I said below:

They're OK. They used to suck ass on a cosmic level, until a firmware update made it actually just fine.

Noone is going to be amazed, but they're fine.

My wife has a Pixel 8 with stock firmware which is supposed to be oh-so-great as a camera...

But the whatever built in AI Google put in that thing keeps messing with the colours worse than a Netflix show. So half the times I end up prefering the pictures I take.

According to Fairphone the cameras in the FP5 are actually much better, but I have yet to see an FP5 in the wild so...

Except they're Dutch so they're all drinking Heineken.

(Dutch craft beer is really great, the big names like Amstel and Heineken are piss)

I am honestly willing to have patience and cut some slack to someone that I feel is working with me, whereas I have zero patience for companies who tries to bullshit me all the time.

To put it differently, I prefer to put in some effort to use my tech, then to put in effort to defend myself from my tech. So that's my bias.

Commenting more in detail.

There have been bugs that have come and gone. Once, two years ago, they screwed up real bad and for a month the phone would randomly reboot a couple times a week. That sucked, until it got fixes. Otherwise it seemed just fine. The occasional issue was no worse than the Huawei I had two phones ago, and people seemed to think those were fine.

The camera was truly awful, but now after an update it's also OK. Not amazing, not wowing anybody, but just fine. My wife's Pixel 8a in the meantime keeps screwing up the color balance of the pictures so not all that shines is gold.

When I had the stock rom I used Android Auto on several cars, and all of them have been fine, but it's only been Volkswagens (and Skoda, Seat etc.) and one Opel, my sample is biased. With /e/OS (which I have since January) I'm actually very happy that Android Auto works at all, so far I only tried in my car.

I have 256GB of flash and that seems plenty. I honestly have no idea how anyone fills that up, but if it ever happens I can indeed add a SD card. Also it's dual SIM which, for somebody who moved around Europe a bit, is very very handy.

They're OK. They used to suck ass on a cosmic level, until a firmware update made it actually just fine.

Noone is going to be amazed, but they're fine.

My wife has a Pixel 8 with stock firmware which is supposed to be oh-so-great as a camera...

But the whatever built in AI Google put in that thing keeps messing with the colours worse than a Netflix show. So half the times I end up prefering the pictures I take.

According to Fairphone the cameras in the FP5 are actually much better, but I have yet to see an FP5 in the wild so...

That face is so Dutch I can practically hear the accent.

Nhentai Operators Ordered to Expose Themselves in U.S. Copyright Lawsuit

Phrasing!