Privacy guides for the 10 most popular Android phones in the US

Most people don’t buy a privacy phone. They buy whatever is popular, on sale, or offered by their carrier, and then wonder how much of their life it reports back. This series starts from what Americans actually buy. We took the 10 most popular Android phones on sale new in the US in October 2026 and wrote a privacy guide for each one, built from the maker’s own support pages and Google’s documentation.

Each guide covers the same ground for its phone: the settings that cut tracking, the maker’s own data collection and how to switch it off, ads, permissions, theft protection, the bloat you can disable, your carrier’s ad program, and whether the phone can run a private operating system at all.

The 10 phones, and where each guide starts

How we picked the 10 most popular phones

There’s no public, complete top-10 list of Android phones for the US. Counterpoint Research publishes a US top 5 by sales each quarter, and in Q2 2026 Apple held three of those spots. So the list combines three kinds of evidence:

1. Sales rankings: Counterpoint’s US data puts the Galaxy A17 5G as the best-selling Android phone in the country in Q2 2026 (#4 among all phones, with about 9% of sales). Its global data puts the Galaxy S26 Ultra as the best-selling Android phone worldwide, and the regular S26 in the global top 10.
2. Brand share: Motorola holds about 11% of the US market and was the only major brand still growing early this year, mostly through its moto g phones sold at carriers, prepaid stores and Amazon. Pixel’s US share is small, around 3%, but rising, led by the Pixel 10a.
3. Amazon sales estimates: third-party estimates of monthly Amazon sales helped us place the moto g models, the Galaxy A37 5G and the Pixels.

Positions 1 to 3 rest on sales rankings. Positions 4 to 10 are a group rather than a strict order, because no published data separates them precisely.

We left out the Galaxy A16 5G even though it was still the second-best-selling Android phone in Q2. Samsung is winding it down: its Samsung.com page is gone and it now sells mostly as a prepaid carrier phone. OnePlus is missing because it has ended new phone launches in North America. iPhones aren’t on the list because this is an Android series.

The privacy picture in one table

The single biggest difference between these phones is whether you can replace the operating system. On a phone that can run GrapheneOS, the guide offers a path to a phone with no Google services at all. On the others, the best you can do is harden the stock software, which still removes a lot of tracking.

Two notes on that table. Motorola runs an official bootloader unlock program, so its phones aren’t locked like US Samsungs, but no private operating system supports the 2026 moto g models yet. And the Pixel 11 can be unlocked, but GrapheneOS has said it won’t support the Pixel 11 unless Google ships working memory tagging; see why GrapheneOS skipped the Pixel 11.

If you haven’t bought yet

• For the most privacy: a Pixel 10a or Pixel 10 running GrapheneOS. Buy the unlocked model, not a Verizon one, whose bootloader can’t be unlocked.
• For a Samsung: any of the four is fine for a hardened setup. The S26 and S26 Ultra get monthly security patches; the A17 5G and A37 5G get quarterly ones.
• For the lowest price: the moto g play 2026 or moto g 2026, with the shortest update runway on this list (to late 2028).
• For something not on this list: our degoogled phone catalog covers phones bought specifically for privacy, including ones that ship with a private OS installed.

What every guide has in common

Some steps apply to every phone on this list, whatever the brand:

• Your Google account collects more than the phone does. Turning off Web & App Activity and YouTube history, deleting your advertising ID, and switching off personalized ads in My Ad Center help on all 10 phones.
• Your carrier runs its own ad program. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile all have one switched on by default, and each guide links the opt-out.
• Private DNS blocks a lot of tracking for every app at once. Our Private DNS and settings lockdown walkthrough explains how to choose a provider.
• A firewall finishes what settings can’t: none of the 10 phones can cut an app off the internet on its own. Each guide sets up Rethink, a free no-root firewall, with Always-on VPN so nothing slips past it.
• Anonymity has a hard limit. Your carrier knows where a switched-on phone is. Each guide covers what you can still cut: device name, Quick Share, Wi-Fi MAC address, photo location, Find Hub’s crowd network, prepaid and Wi-Fi calling records, Tor and VPNs that need no email.
• Bloat can usually be disabled, and on Samsung and Motorola phones much more can be switched off from a computer: see removing preinstalled apps with ADB.

Already own one of these phones? Pick it from the list above. If yours isn’t on the list, the general no-flashing privacy guide for any Android phone covers the same steps for any model.

Prices and rankings change often. These guides were researched on October 14, 2026, and the Amazon links are affiliate links; we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, and it doesn’t change which phones are on the list.