My intention is to buy the cheapest smartphone I can reasonably get as I need to use a phone for professional reasons; the company uses Whatsapp and other applications I do not want to have occupying space in a smartphone I use for my personal life.
I’ve been loading my phones with FOSS applications from F-Droid for years now but I am aware the loop is tightening and continuing to do so is becoming more and more difficult.
Ideally, I would like to keep this phone as much as possible exempt from connecting with Google. This means I don’t intend to load an account on the phone and instead load F-Droid and Aurora to get the software I want to use.
I have a 9 with Graphene, and use a second profile for banking apps. This profile has a burner google account, and aurora store for banking apps which works fine, just no tap. My main profile is all f-droid/obtanium, though I run sandboxed google services for notifications.