Ask HN: What's the most secure smartphone in 2019?

26 points by egonschiele 7y ago ↗ HN

Apple announced that iphone sales are down. Actually, I have been thinking of getting off the iphone and android ecosystems. Are there other good alternatives? My primary needs are: email, google maps, text, slack, and lyft.

9 comments

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sammygutierrez 7y ago ↗

Librem 5 is coming out sometime this year. https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

You should be able to use all of the services you've listed (some of them through the browser, not sure about Lyft).

hbcondo714 7y ago ↗

I didn't see any mention on price but when I clicked the pre-order now button and added the phone to the cart, the price shows as $599...not bad!

Jitnaught_ 7y ago ↗

Sadly for us that price will be increased to $699 in a few days. https://puri.sm/posts/2018-devkits-are-shipping/

obvsthroway7676 7y ago ↗

As always - it depends on your threat model. But frankly, for most cases - iPhone.

Might not be the answer you want, and it has neither the purity nor auditability of OSS. But sales are down because of pricing model insanity, which is fairly orthogonal to your question, and it's still huge (so you blend in) and from a corporation with incentives generally more aligned towards your security and privacy than most.

So, unless you're doing insane burners and low level hacking to make a more secure device, iPhone is probably the way to go.

gen3 7y ago ↗

I agree with you. Strictly comparing IOS to android, I would say IOS is more secure. Apple is in a position where they are incentivized to give you a secure and private product. They make money off of hardware sales, not ads (They are trying to increase their revenue from services though). They are incentivized to do as much processing on your phone as they can, because it saves server costs. Examples of this would be the facial matching in the camera app (IOS done on phone, android done at Google) and TTS of voicemail (only sent to Apple if you tell it to).

There are still dangers though. Apple still has control of your phone through things like updates and the ability to place in a backdoor if they are legally forced to. As far as I know, they have a good reputation though (see San Bernardino iPhone case).

If your super paranoid, build your own phone https://www.adafruit.com/category/281

aportnoy 7y ago ↗

OT: you have the same first name as Karl Pearson’s son.

diego_moita 7y ago ↗

I suspect it is a reference to the Austrian expressionist painter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egon_Schiele

snazz 7y ago ↗

I'm not going to mention the application software or OS, since I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than me will give you information about that.

What you're probably not thinking about is the baseband processor, which negotiates cellular connections and handles everything related to making the phone an actual phone. The trouble with baseband modems/processors is that none of them are open source and that they oftentimes have direct memory access to the application processor. iPhones and the Purism Librem phone isolate the baseband further from the application processor than the average Android phone.

Even if you find a nice phone and install an open-source, audited, secure operating system, your hardware might compromise you.

tdsamardzhiev 7y ago ↗

And even if you find open-source, audited, secure hardware, your carrier might compromise you. The more I think about it, the more "secure smartphone" sounds like an oxymoron.