If you want a full control over any device, you are gonna get the best experience flashing a custom firmware. But manufacturers don’t like it, they lose the telemetry data and revenue so they do their best to impede that.

Thats why I use a Thinkpad T440p with Libreboot, sadly some proprietary blobs are still present. Hopefully my next laptop will be completely open source and running on Risc-V.

AOSP is the way android phones should be sold I disagree, security is absolutely horrific. I use a pixel 7 with graphics and tbh for a phone the privacy downsides are well worth it for security. Sadly thats a compromise that must be made (at least until a phone brand can offer both security and privacy).