Never heard of NovaCustom before, but if all is true, it's very dope!

A good sustainable privacy-centered device.

Does NovaCustom just buy phones and installs iodeOS on them? Or are they involved in development of either?

This is the manufacturer, SHIFT: https://www.shift.eco/en/shiftphone-8/ Hardware does look easy to access, and should support custom OSes.

This is iodeOS: https://iode.tech/iodeos/, which looks like LineageOS + additional features and privacy-as-a-service kind of deal.

Looks nice, and good to learn about more phones that are repairable. Since they don't mention it (or at least I didn't see it), I am guessing they don't have an IP protection for liquid/dust.

I already don't like to trust my Galaxy S24 (or previous models that have had submersion ratings) enough to just jump into a pool or tubing. Though I do like knowing it would likely be fine if I get pushed/fall in (recently went to a GWAR show and didn't have to worry every time I got sprayed). But wouldn't mind some amount of adhesive (some versions aren't very hard to deal with) to handle sudden heavy rain or a large drink/pitcher gets knocked over (or getting sprayed like the show above) onto my phone.

Would also be cool if they had an aux jack with a good DAC to at least be a solid option for a audio player. I got an LG V30 last year after seeing how much love they have by users, and have been using it solely as an offline music/audiobook/podcast player. All the physical kill switches and being able to easily remove stuff like cameras or other bits I don't need would be kind of cool.

Not quite sure what the point of this is. Shift literally offers a degoogled version of their OS (which is already about as close to stock android as you can get) for pretty much every device they sell.

957 USD, lol I'm out. The iodéOS thing (whatever it is) is also a turn off. I'd want a standard OS, uncustomized and untouched by the hardware vendor to the extent possible. If they think up a new name and try to make it sound special, it's already suspicious.

I did misread the name as SHTFphone for a moment and that was kind of fun.

Am I missing something here? The phone can be bought from the manufacturer for €650 and this company is trying to flip that same phone, but with a custom rom pre-installed for €950? So it's essentially a €300 upcharge to have someone else flash the custom ROM for you. There's also an automatic installer available for download on the ROMs website, so people wouldn't have to mess around with ADB or anything if they wanted to do it themself. Most of what's mentioned about graphene is also BS and the whole write up is just riddled with misinformation.

Please tell me I'm missing something bc if I'm not then no one should buy a single thing from this company.

Edit: OP has a business relationship with this company

Reminder that the IodeOS and such are simply LinaegeOS forks with a bunch of propriatery shitty subscription services thrown in, and literally hinder the progress on costum Roms VS if they simply just made a PR to add the phone to Linaege.

Am I just old or is > 800EUR for a phone still just wild?

They mention they went with iodeOS because it is more minimal than others and then bloat it with the whole Proton suite (including useless Lumo LLM), crypto browser Brave and 2 authenticator apps for no reason.

STOP RELEASING PHONES THAT ARE ALREADY OUTDATED SPECS-WISE THE DAY THEY ARE OUT

I am not dyslexic, but for some reason I keep reading SHIFTphone as SHTFphone (which for me stands for Shit Hits The Fan), and that works even better in my brain. Does anyone know this tech, this company, anything? They are unfamiliar to me.