Leaving the Apple Ecosystem: One Fairphone Instead of Two iPhones

For the better part of a decade I carried two phones. A personal iPhone 12 in one pocket and a work iPhone SE (2nd gen) in the other, the SE being a pure work device and nothing else. It worked, in the sense that two separate slabs of glass technically do the job. But it never felt right, and it never felt like mine. The problem was not that the iPhones were bad phones. They were fine. The problem is that everything else I touch runs Linux or BSD, and an iPhone is a polite guest in that world at best. It does not really want to talk to a KDE desktop. It does not want you poking at its filesystem over USB. It assumes you live inside iCloud and treats every attempt to live outside it as a minor act of rebellion. I never used iCloud for anything serious, so I was permanently swimming against the current. So I did the thing I had been circling for a long time: I collapsed two iPhones into a single Android phone, and I picked the most stubbornly un-Apple device I could justify. A Fairphone…