When they took away the candy names and nerfed multitasking.

I gotta get away from Google and Apple.

What's your plan?

About a decade ago they really started

I’m going to use graphene in 2028 then Sailfish after the pixel 8 is no longer supported.

did [...] started

Downhill indeed

Nice! I have a Pixel 6a with grapheneos which will lose support next summer iirc. Meanwhile I got my hands on an old Oneplus Nord for free so I'm trying out /e/os on it. Still undecided what I'll do next summer. I'm curious about how you decided on Sailfish?

Sailfish is the most secure mobile linux os and is more independent from android than Graphene. It also has the best mobile UI.

Where are you getting your stats? How user friendly is it? Are all device features supported?

I have read a few articles on the os.

kitkat? they blocked direct sdcard access and introduced SAF

I miss the true gestures, like where I could play and pause media by simply drawing a pause symbol with two fingers on the locked screen.

For me it happened whenever that got shitcanned.

Then when they took away the one touch toggle WiFi or Bluetooth from the Quick Settings panel. Ain't quick anymore.

Or when they stopped allowing me to have full control on the color palette of the accent colors.

I hate getting OS major release updates now too because they needlessly shift and futz with so many UI/UX stuff in the OS.

I want to say around Android 5, when custom ROMs became much less popular.

Google felt less threatened.

Maybe consider Nura (formerly known as postmarketOS) over Sailfish. Sailfish has a proprietary userspace, and I'm fairly sure they rely on an Android kernel, meaning once the LTS kernel stops being supported, it will no longer be updated.

Meanwhile, Nura uses mainline or close to mainline kernels, much like Linux desktop computers, and the DEs are fully open source. I personally like GNOME Mobile the best with Plasma Mobile coming in second (Plasma Mobile basically being a clone of the Android UI). The Fairphone 5 is close to being feature complete, and if you don't mind using AI-assisted code, the Fairphone 6 and 6+ is even closer to being feature complete when using TheMightyCat's build of Nura (Nura doesn't allow LLM code in their repos, so the userspace tools and the non-mainlined kernel code cannot be included in the Nura repos and are kept in separate repos).

When they switched from Nexus to Pixel.

We will see the state of Nura in 2028.