My primary phone has been an Android phone for a long time. This is mostly for philosophical reasons as I highly value general purpose computing. The ability to easily execute any code on a device that I have purchased is extremely important. Of course this comes with the potential downside that the device is harder to secure.

Last night I discovered for the first time that I had a piece of malware on my phone. It affected only Chrome and was adding links to page content, for instance taking a word such as “loan”, capitalizing it with the link going to some spammy website via an intermediate redirect site.

I was able to fix the problem relatively easily by re-installing Chrome. But in the process of debugging the problem I discovered that the software installed by LG and T-Mobile on my phone has made it basically impossible to get the phone to show up as a USB device. So I just ordered the Nexus 6P because I can get that quickly and my past experience with clean Android has been great.

There are several other phones though that I am interested in trying out. One is the Fairphone and the other is the OnePlus 2. Both of these to me stand for the promise of what can be done with the more open ecosystem of Android.

In the meantime, I would love to hear recommendations for what I should do with my old smartphones.