My go-to is to grab a used samsung galaxy from Ebay. Usually the best bang for the buck. The reasonably new ones have no headphone jack, but the solid dongles (not the flexible ones) work pretty well for that.

I'm on my second Oppo. Decent specs (I like the 512Gb, double SIM slot, superfast charging) and cheaper than anything comparable.

Now that I think about it, every phone I've owned has had significant issues: lousy camera (HTC), overheating (LG), poor battery life (Samsung, Google, HTC), steadily degrading performance (Samsung), boot looping (LG), weird colour handling on photos (HTC, Google), etc. So I guess they're all bad?

I wouldn't say "favourite". I've bought two Pixels because I like the photos they produce.

My current phone (P8P) has the fewest issues so far. It's only a year old, so I'm sure they'll appear.

Miss my old HTC One M9. That little bastard was a tank

HTC. i still mourn its passing

I'm in the Samsung boat currently and was considering Pixel but with Google being, you know, Google, I was more recently considering OnePlus, the Open in particular.

Any other considerations to sway me either way?

"Just whatever makes sense"

I used to own a Samsung galaxy s6, and that thing was killer. I still miss mine since it's compass was pretty much perfect compared to the wildly inaccurate one on my s21 ultra.

A Pixel with GrapheneOS.

It was OnePlus. The OnePlus 1 was the best phone on the market at the time, and lasted beautifully. The same was true for the OnePlus 6, which lasted up until I got the Pixel 8.

It was the last time that OnePlus and Oppo made great phones without compromise, because right after laughing at Google for ditching the headphone jack they did the same thing! They had some success, and sadly, started compromising.

Even today, I miss features from my OP6. The screen gestures are a feature I would pay extra for on my Pixel. Today, I genuinely cannot think of a good company releasing Android phones. For years, picking an Android phone has been an exercise in calculating how many features you can afford to live without for an extortionate price.

Google Pixel because of GrapheneOS

i also really like Fairphone. In a perfect world the fairphones would have the same or equivalent security chip as the Pixels. I'd really prefer to buy a european smartphone due to privacy and install GrapheneOS.

GrapheneOS is a must for me.

iPhone, it’s not the best phone but Apple has the best ecosystem. Seamless app integration across MacBook, iPad, AppleTv, etc… I have hobby computers I tinker with to scratch that itch of building and customizing OS. The new Mac silicon chips are crazy fast though. I write a lot of Rust and on my intel chip some of my programs can take 15-30 minutes, on Apple silicon they take maybe 2 minutes at most.

Galaxy A71 5G from Samsung. Budget phone that I got a couple years back.

I'd say the roughly $200 A15 5G I bought directly from them less than a few months ago and didn't get warranty, but I accidentally went swimming with it and fried the fucker. It was shaping up to be a pretty good upgrade from my A71 phone, but it can't be much of an upgrade when it's dead.

I loved my Nexus 4. I also liked my Nexus 5X a lot, although it had debilitating hardware faults and eventually destroyed itself.