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Comment by grapheneos | Hacker News Reader

The last Pixel with a 3.5mm jack was the Pixel 5a launched in August 2021. The 3rd/4th/5th gen Pixel 'a' series headphone jacks had horrible audio quality far worse than using the decent USB-C DAC included with the Pixel 2 and Pixel 3. They stopped bundling that with the Pixel 4.

Extendable storage is usually provided via the SIM tray. Physical SIMs are being phased out which is not good news for the feature you want. Realistically, you'll still need to use USB-C for headphones or an external drive.

You can look at the Motorola Signature (2026) for an idea of the initial device which will be a successor to it. Their high end devices don't have 3.5mm audio or microSD. They have devices with those but they're nowhere near our requirements.

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I have been using Sony Xperia's since the Pixel 1 phased out the headphone jack, and the Xperias have had better 3.5mm jacks than even many dedicated DACs.

Physical SIMs being phased out seems to be primarily a US thing right now, but if that happens I'm just gonna stop using phones entirely.

If you want to glue a usb hub, DAC and card reader to your phone, go ahead, but I'd consider that a little bit inconvenient.

Seriously, the latency on wireless and usb-c headphones is so unpredictable that for lecture recording at hacker conferences they've now been banned for both live video/audio production and for video editing, with 3.5mm as the only option going forward.

For what it's worth, Apple's cheap (<$10) 3.5" adapters tend to have excellent audio quality and should work with Android devices.

They're still significantly worse than the builtin 3.5mm ports Sony provides, and they're obviously still a major inconvenience.

There is no significant latency on usb-c DAC's. In fact most internal DAC's are just the same chip connected to an internal USB bus.

Bluetooth absolutely has a noticeable delay depending on the codec/profile.

USB DACs themselves are fine, but many wireless headphones that also support USB-C run active processing with unpredictable latency.

There are a lot of high quality tiny USB-C DACs available and also a decent set of direct USB-C headphone options.

Great, could you tell me which headphones I can use without adapter on Zoom F6, Yamaha DM3, Behringer Wing panels, Focusrite Scarlett interfaces and smartphones?

Currently we're using Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro and some MDR-7506.

They'd also need to be fully passive, as any active processing introduces unpredictable delays of up to 16ms, which is unacceptable when the goal is to check sync on audio and video signals.

It sounds to me like you only see everything as consumer devices for media consumption, ignoring the needs of people using computing devices to create things professionally.

If you know any top level mobile division people at Sony you could encourage them to reach out and commit to meeting GrapheneOS's requirements.

Please consider trying to bring Graphene to the Moto G. Security is not the only reason someone might want to use Graphene - some of us just want to untangle ourselves from Google.

The option to have supported Graphene as well as an SD card slot and headphone port would be wonderful.

> Security is not the only reason someone might want to use Graphene

I was thinking about this and am curious if the Graphene team are specifically treating 'more secure than stock Android' as a non-negotiable for the purpose of having a strong pipe to swing at Google should Google ever play the 'third party distributions need to be shut down... because security' card.

If you just want to get away from Google, there are other operating systems that don't use as many Google services: see [1] and [2]

I didn't realized when I started writing this, but apparently even so-called "degoogled"* operating systems use some Google services. For example, LineageOS still talks to Google in order to check DNS connectivity and for Widevine DRM, among other things listed in the table.

GrapheneOS seems to be the only Android-based operating system that really doesn't communicate with Google at all by default, but if your main goal is to avoid Google Play Services, then there are other options.

*"degoogled" seems to be a term people use to describe operating systems even if the operating system page does not describe the OS that way.

[1] https://fsfe.org/activities/android/liberate.en.html#OS [2] https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

There are other options, yes, but I like the idea of having a non-google option that's a supported option by the device manufacturer.

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