I see some core team on this thread, so just wanted to say THANK YOU! Awesome job! Keep fighting for the users!
I'm totally the wrong person to offer recommendations on mobile, but so far it works very well for me, but then, I use almost no third party apps, and none of them are Play store only. My only complaint is the hardware (outside of their control).
It all seems like a security theater with the consequence that, ooops, we just vendor locked in all our customers to run a less secure OS by a company whose business it is to collect personal data and show ads that people don't want to see.