Samsung has longest update policy, A series and M series are highly affordable can it be suggested for someone who has tight budget but needs moderately high security and privacy?
Will there any drawbacks of choosing samsung phone instead of Google pixel in terms of privacy/security. Heard samsung has knox which provides high security for users.
The support cycle for flagship samsung devices does not apply to their budget models.
Yes, Samsung is notorious for forced analytics, and targeted advertising (just check out their privacy policy or Smart TVs). It has never been suggested as a “privacy friendly” option. They also love to push a lot of their own rubbish, Facebook, Bixby, McAfee in their OS as system apps.
currently google pixels are not available in all countries and iphones are pretty costly , is there any good smartphone devices which provide high security and privacy and is affordable for common people.
You really should not be using any phone like this:
ARM reported vulns in their drivers after being informed by Google Project Zero: Mali GPU Driver Vulnerabilities
Last year the same thing happened. Google was the only one providing patches somewhat timely (grapheneOS was faster) .
Samsung never informed their customers of active attacks using a zeroday they didn’t patch: Project Zero: A Very Powerful Clipboard: Analysis of a Samsung in-the-wild exploit chain
Samsung had some large data breach which they did not report: Samsung Fails Consumers in Preventable Back-to-Back Data Breaches According to Federal Lawsuit
Another proof of samsung’s horrible security management: Samsung Left Millions Vulnerable to Hackers Because It Forgot to Renew a Domain, Researchers Say
A detailed study on data collection of Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei and Realme devices by Liu et al. at Trinity College: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/Android_privacy_report.pdf
To add, somethings I forgot.
Samsung Knox does not exist anymore. All of it was integrated in AOSP so any modern Android phone has these protections.
There isn’t really an alternative to Google Pixel or iPhone. If you chose not to get this for perhaps understandable reasons and limitations you will have to deal with the consequences of this. I can’t make it any brighter. You can always try to disable or uninstall as much bloatware but it will never get to a similar level.
The main issue is, unless you buy a flagship, you won’t get long term support, simple as that.
The reason the Pixel is popular, is because of Secure elements, Trusty OS, and Titan M2/Tensor Security Core. Which are superior to other devices.
Part of it is also that GrapheneOS does a lot on the software side in making Android better as well.
If you can’t get a Pixel, then probably something with long term support on the firmware would be the next best, as far as I know thats only going to be comparable to flagship Samsung phones and the iPhone.
Many of the other phones which claim to have more than 2 years of updates, simply don’t have that support on the closed sourced firmware components.
Maybe try Motorola devices.
This is false. The press release for the latest generation of budget Samsung Galaxy phones states “Galaxy A53 5G and Galaxy A33 5G support up to four generations of One UI and Android OS upgrades and up to five years of security updates.”
I was referring more to their J series, though even these seem to be now four years, which is an improvement.