Interesting, how do you install microg on its own? I couldn't find a guide that worked for my phone, so I opted for this ROM since it's baked in. But would be nice to understand how to mod a ROM with it.

People keep getting this wrong, Samsung hardware does indeed come close to matching Pixels and could be supported, however, when you unlock the bootloaders knox trips and blows efuses that break that hardware indefinitely as well as hobbling other features, regardless of if their stock OS is reinstalled.

Also comes down to SoC choice etc and how well their firmware driver support works, level of updates, regularity and how fast each OEM is to push them.

Only Pixels as it stands provide regular monthly updates and even then only GrapheneOS is able to ensure those come at our desired time as we often ship them before Google such as this months (September Security Patch) which Google postponed to include in a broader OS update.

As and when other OEMs step up their level of alternate OS support, hardware choices based on longevity of firmware/driver support and meet the regularity of providing security updates could we do so and we WOULD be happy to do just that.

However security and privacy actually matter to us, and your security matters to GrapheneOS, these terms are more than marketing buzzwords to us. We're not going to lower that standard for broader device support. More complete explanation can be found here:

https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-support

For those who want that, DivestOS is likely the next best choice if their ideological position on Google devices requires compromise elsewhere.

https://privsec.dev/posts/android/choosing-your-android-based-operating-system/#divestos

For everything else while you may choose not to use Google hardware be aware that the OSes you use all use Google by default and also bake it back into the system regardless of if you opt in. The implementation maybe open source but what is being implemented isn't. It's still propreiatry Google code.

Such Google services are: microG as mentioned above, connectivity checks, network time, attestation key provisioning, SUPL, DNS fallback (LineageOS only), PSDS (Pixel 6 and 7), eSIM activation and more.