I’ve always had a bad feeling about them since I read a pretty damning critique years and years ago (I can’t really recall what it was about now but I think it was privacy fuckups, devs not communicating very well and they included apps from rather shady sources from then internet that could potentially to not very tech-savy people installing malware through their official apps store).

That they somehow managed to fuck up their own cloud infrastructure recently (as others have hinted had) doesn’t really make me hopefull that they changed much from back then. Mind you I now next to nothing about this incedent but if you have a service that potentially thousands of people rely on with their data you should have working backups and rollbacks in place.

(Personally I also just can’t deal with the fucking branding, it just looks pretentious, unsearchable and weird.)

I would (and have) just always gone for Lineage and MicroG with F-Droid/Optanium for FOSS apps and Aurora for the few Google Play Store apps I need. Plus Netguard as a firewall.

Here’s a very in-depth German review of a pretty well-respected security researcher on the not-so-stellar privacy aspects of that ROM:

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/e-datenschutzfreundlich-bedeutet-nicht-zwangslaeufig-sicher-custom-roms-teil6/

I’m pretty that Lineage does not fare much better, though. If you’re into privacy the only real option seems to be GrapheneOS which only runs on Pixel Devices 👌