i loathe the idea of giving google more money

If you don’t mind used or open-box phones, you could pick up a used (and more critically, carrier unlocked) Pixel off ebay, if you want to deprive them of revenue.

Unfortunately some carriers like verizon will not automatically unlock the bootloader even after unlocking the carrier restriction, so buying a used one that wasn’t factory unlocked from Google could be a slight gamble.

Ah, wasn’t aware they were so far behind, thanks for the heads up.

Hadn’t heard of IodeOS either until seeing that chart. They also seem a bit slower than Lineage for certain updates, but for the more privacy minded, may be the best option for non-pixel folks.

What alternative OS you adopt depends on your phone and needs.

If you just want to mostly degoogle you phone, but aren’t that concerned about privacy or security, LineageOS is basically that. It’s as close to a stock android experience as you can get, minus the pre-installed google apps. It supports a wide range of android phones.

If you want more security and privacy, GrapheneOS is currently king, but the downside is it only works on Google Pixel phones, and it’s possible certain apps won’t work (banking apps can be hit or miss, and the Uber app I believe blocked it). It otherwise functions just like a regular android phone and can install sandboxed google play to use any app you could need, making it just as easy to daily drive. It’s the best choice if you’re an activist, journalist, or fear state actors. But even if you’re not, I’d say it’s the best choice if you already have a pixel phone.

CalyxOS has paused development, so not currently an option.

eOS has a bigger focus on security and privacy than LineageOS, but isn’t as secure as Graphene. The advantage is that it supports more phones than just the google pixel.

PostmarketOS is not based on Android, and instead is a real Linux Distro made for mobile. It’s still very much in an alpha stage, with varying levels of support for different phones, many of which cannot take calls or even use their camera properly. I would only recommend it to developers or people who want to tinker with a project phone.

TL:DW, JPEG is getting old in the tooth, which prompted the creation of JPEG XL, which is a fairly future-proof new compression standard that can compress images to the same file size or smaller than regular JPEG while having massively higher quality.

However, JPEG XL support was removed from Google Chrome based browsers in favor of AVIF, a standalone image compression derived from the AV1 video compression codec that is decidedly not future-proof, having some hard-coded limitations, as well as missing some very nice to have features that JPEG XL offers such as progressive image loading and lower hardware requirements. The result of this is that JPEG XL adoption will be severely hamstrung by Google’s decision, which is ultimately pretty lame.