Google-free /e/ OS is now selling preloaded phones in the US, starting at $380

* China spying will steal your data and identity so the safety of your money and assets will be at risk. Your photos may be sold, your credit cards may be stolen, etc.

* Five Eyes spying will hurt you if you're non-normative. Say you're a casual drug user or perform low scale criminality. Or say you're doing a thing that's legal now but illegal later.

Presumably there's the idea that China could blackmail you but I have a hard time believing anyone would go for that over just letting their naked pics on the Internet.

So the Five Eyes spying is probably harmless to someone totally normative. The China spying is probably harmful to them.

For the non-normative, dark-web peer to peer Bitcoin user who is buying LSD, the China spying is probably better.

Sailfish has a runtime for Android apps, but under the hood it's closer to other mobile Linux projects, and to that end the hardware compatibility is less like Lineage or /e/ and more like UBPorts.

Android's handling of the Linux kernel, until this current version cycle, has involved several forks per device -- patches from Google (the Android Common Kernel), then patches from chipset vendors, then patches from device vendors -- with closed binary drivers inserted at various points in this process. [0] Treble has been exposing generic hardware interfaces to system images since version 8, but the drivers themselves haven't had that kind of uniformity re: how they interface with the kernel itself.

There are projects that will adapt them to run GNU-based systems -- to use UBPorts as an example again, it actually does exist as a GSI -- but since the modifications needed to get them to run depend on a custom kernel, they're still device-specific.

Meanwhile, Android devices are required to run Google's entire test suite using a generic build of AOSP, so while GSI compatibility isn't perfect, the minimum baseline is effectively just the ability to unlock your bootloader.

[0] Generally. In some cases -- most Huawei devices, non-US Samsung models -- the device vendor is the chipset vendor. But that doesn't mean their chipset IP is any more open than, say, Qualcomm's, nor does necessarily alter that of other components like camera sensors.