I wouldn’t say that removing a wifi chip would be realistic or even cost-effective unless you already know HOW to do that and plan to do it yourself. I would expect it might cause errors and make the phone unstable. It’s not the same thing as a GOS phone. Also, if your phone is pinging towers, what’s the point of no wifi? You actually trust the telco companies?
Not sure why you mention form factor, then threat actors later.
Not sure how you think you’ll put maps on a phone with no wifi connection, as even CoMaps might not let you upload map files to the device and recognize them. So you already need to connect the phone to a device anyway. So, at that point, you’re already making a strong case for sticking with a dumb phone.
Then I really still think grapheneOS is the best option here, especially given how strongly you feel. I’d say to try using it for 3 months and see how much of an issue the size really is. You will have to compromise on something and the vast majority of people adjusted from the smaller phones to the larger ones without issue.
You could be the exception, but you’ve never had a full sized smartphone before from what I can tell. There’s only one way to find out for sure.
I consider my hands average and my pixel is not fully usable with one hand.
While I agree graphene/pixel is the best choice to reccomend, there’s nothing wrong with people having non-privacy requirements. We all have different needs and phone size is one I can sympathize with myself. It just needs to be clear what the trade offs are, because some of the suggestions in this thread a big privacy/security downgrades in comparison to GrapheneOS
When WiFi is turned off in the settings, only a process with high privileges can turn it back on without your consent.
There are two types of apps having enough privileges :
the ones to which you gave such privileges (for example, a WiFi manager or so) because it requested it at install time and you accepted.
The Google services, which are preinstalled with all privilege, except in GrapheneOS (and maybe other custom ROMs like LineageOS or /e/, I don’t remember). They might silently activate WiFi for network scanning or localisation, or maybe some other stuff I ignore.
As far as I know, there is no way to have an iOS where the Apple services are not privileged. Maybe someone here knows of more recent hacks to achieve that?
An EOL phone with regular Android still has Google services with all privileges, so WiFi may be silently re-enabled. Plus, there will be unpatched vulnerabilities.
Removing the WiFi chip doesn’t seem feasible to me. First, most smartphones are extremely difficult to open without breaking them, nowadays. Chances are you would break something else. And even if that’s not the case, chances are some boot module will do some hardware check and crash when not detecting the WiFi chip. So it’s likely that your phone will never boot.
I paid my Pixel 6 around USD 200, 3 years ago, installed GOS on it and it still receives updates (Android 17 a couple of weeks ago) and patches.
About the form factor : it’s possible to keep the phone in the pocket and have a headset to make calls, but if you want to avoid bluetooth, you’ll need a USB-C - jack adapter.