I tried to use my old pixel 3 recently as a hotspot. Blows my mind how it’s been broken for a while (according to online) and won’t ever be fixed since there’s no more software support. I ended up buying a used iPhone SE instead.
The experience has been good for me, but I'm in no way an average smartphone user. The apps I use are mainly Whatsapp, Firefox and Spotify Lite.
I think grapheneOS the best choice if you don't tolerate a proprietary OS on your smartphone.
Disclaimer: Pixel 3a support on GrapheneOS is EOL, but you can still download it and install it.
Some observations:
- I have not had any calls dropped.
- I don't remember a case where I couldn't get mobile data while being in an urban area. At least LTE and 3G work well.
- UI is snappy.
- You can install Google Play Services in a sandbox, but some apps, notoriously most banking apps, crash on launch, probably because they implement Play Integrity API.
- If you install Google Play Services in the sandbox, Whatsapp messages arrive instantly. If you don't, they do sometimes, sometimes they take some time, and sometimes you need to launch the app to see the messages.
- The default apps lack a cohesive UI appearance. The photo gallery looks as if it was taken from a 7 year old Android version. The clock app and settings app look up to date. The SMS app looks different from all the other apps mentioned.
- The default app icons are in black and white, which doesn't look bad in itself, but your app list screen looks ugly when you start installing other apps whose icons are not black and white.
- I don't remember a case of system apps crashing or the whole OS getting frozen in the 10 months that I've used it. And I don't remember feeling frustration because of system unresponsiveness.
