Meet google’s rainbow in 2026, Or nothing’s approach that went into nothingness with each edition.
There’s a long list of features that feel essential or simply amazing at making life easier yet the OEMs find excuses to ditch them and instead add weird Ai features or redundant things that nobody uses and has no impact on the quality of experience of a user.
The device is always awake in a way, but it has to power the full display pipeline yes, even though a low powered version of this already exists in the form of “always on display”"
AOD can be customized btw. There are third party apps or if your OEM has some basic customization.
Yes it also drains power and a static group of pixels acting as an emulated LED notification light would result in a screen burn in although AOD shifts pixels and it can be used for that as well But from my experience it was the brightness of the LED that brought my attention and instead of a constant AOD, which is very distracting, I wouldn’t find it convenient even if they managed to added something similar.
I found
HoleyLight and Epoch which seem to be very nice FOSS tools. The former is similar to a notification ring and the latter should be more along the lines of a AOD thing. I don’t use them so can’t share experience.
Playstore is full of adware…
Just bought a Fairphone 6, typing on it now.
Smashed my phone and thought it would be easy buying a second hand cheap Android phone as I’ve done since my nokia N900 retired.
The phone is not important to me but I need a smartphone for some id, payment and banking apps that are basically required in Sweden.
Been researching for days and gave up. Every time I thought I’d found a new or second hand phone that fit the bill I discovered some insane crippling or stopped updates.
Figuring out which available models had lineage os support was a nightmare as there are billions of models and limited availability on the second hand market.
I’m apparently now old and rich enough to buy myself out of the situation. I even ordered the official protective case, a thing I’ve never used before. Aah old age…
My cheapo Realme phone can be set to blink the LED it uses for torch/“flash” functions. It appears to do this at a much lower power compared to those functions, so it is just noticeable, and does not illuminate the whole room. I thought all android phones did this.
I am not using it though, as random apps I use once in a blue moon keep notifying me about their ostensibly amazing deals or whatever, I disable these but it is a game of whack-a-mole. Maybe I could filter what blinks and what doesn’t, but as a rule I don’t customize devices which are incapable of running Emacs, sorry. So my policy is that my phone should not notify me about anything, I will look at it when I have time for it, and it should just shup up in the meantime.
My experience with new phones. They notify you about EVERYTHING, like “oh there are new fonts available exclusively for you!” or a bazillion “<thing> has been updated” notifications…
You guys really need a fairphone, lineage io, and fdroid. 
I think we may all agree that stock Android phones just suck. I am definitely not debating that. However, there are two responses to this:
Get a phone that is better. I am 100% willing to believe that a Fairphone with Lineage OS or whatever custom ROM that is the thing these days is better. However, the main use for my phone is as a nuisance device various banking and government digital services require for login verification these days, even if you conduct your business on the desktop. Some airlines (eg Ryanair) now require an electronic boarding pass that shows up in their app. I can work around some of these with a bit of work, some of these with more work, but some would require that I keep a stock Android phone for this very purpose, so, two phones. For me, personally, down that path lies madness.
I can go in the other direction: downsize my activity on the phone to the very limit. It runs the above apps, can do navigation in a pinch, and even take pictures. Good for me! For the rest, I have these old-fashioned things called computers, with an actual keyboard, and a large screen. They have an another advantage: I don’t actually carry them with me all the time, definitely not routinely inside the house. Which contributes to my digital wellbeing. I also have an ebook reader, and a camera. They have one job and they do that job well.
I like Android’s notification system. In particular, how you can disable notifications by app and by category, and how you have fine grained control over the type of notifications they show.
Essentially, I only allow Signal and FairEmail to show notification, and no app at all to make notification sounds.
I will check for updates when I want, goshdarnit. That’s not up to some stupid piece of corporate technology. If I’m not looking at my phone, it had better leave me alone.
I actually like the Fairphone’s big slider thing, which I’ve set to toggle do-not-disturb mode. (Although the “moments” feature feels a bit useless to me and the button is a bit too big)
Maybe I should spend some time on understanding this… what I dislike about tweaking Android is that settings can subtly different based on the manufacturer/device (could just be some item being in a different place, or renamed), and there is no real device-specific manual. [OTOH, my camera has such a thing, and I don’t even read that.]
Dunno what phones you have or had in the past, but as long as you stick to Motorolla, Google, Fairphone, etc, the interface won’t really vary as they all use base android. AFAIK only Samsung and Xiaomi ship with heavily customized interface nowadays.
My Xiaomi’s software is stuck in 2021 so I don’t really know what the interface looks like, but even this one is quite customized.
When you get a notification you don’t want, don’t swipe it away. Long tap the notification, and disable all notifications of this type, or of this app.
On a related note, I hereby propose that every email that includes an “unsubscribe” link, is unnecessary, and should be unsubscribed. If ever there is some genuine need to share a piece of information via email, it won’t have an “unsubscribe” link. Or it should use RSS instead. (I do subscribe to some email newsletters via an RSS bridge, but i don’t ever want them in my email inbox).
I wasn’t aware of this option but now found it in the settings. I gave it a quick test but I think that’s too bright/annoying for my taste.
What I like about the status LED is, that I could check for new messages (e.g. when waiting for a reply) without really engaging with my phone. Without it, I have to take it in my hand and turn it on much more often.
I’ll just add two more app suggestions…
I have used Buzzkill a lot (it’s a paid app) and it is probably the best app I have tried that can do practically everything I’d want.
I recently found a FOSS alternative which doesn’t have some of the features which I used the most but here’s Notifilter .
About customisation, I’d say anything I do is Android Skin agnostic so except for the OEM quirks, I can have pretty much the same experience accross android devices.
Using a no fluff minimal launcher like Niagara or whatever suits your taste, a few apps to manager notifications and other clutter and you’ll have a much better time with a phone that is actually smart enough to do what it is supposed to do for you.