There’s room for a LOT of personal opinion as personal needs differ, but as my phone isn’t supported, I was wondering… if I was to buy a second hand phone…
At the moment, we are being driven by voting for currently owned devices.
Are there preferred devices for /e/ development?
What hardware is safer/more enduring/more stable/more trustworthy?
Could the number of users be grown by initially focussing user hardware choices on particular handsets that suit the development of /e/?
I bought a Galaxy S3 LTE (i9305) and THEN found /e/. Wish I’d found /e/ first. I’d’ve bought a different phone. I don’t have the skills or necessary hardware to build a ROM, unfortunately.
@Jack there is no recommended phone as such. As you rightly mention all of us have personal reasons behind a phone purchase - availability ,support, price , user reviews, long term software updates … the list can go on and on and the reasons may also not be in that same order. For /e/ we have a list of currently supported devices at https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/wiki/en/wikis/devices-list which you might have seen. The devices supported will increase with more device - maintainers coming forward . User votes and popular choice also plays an important part as you also mentioned.
You can also browse through the forum and filter on the device name tags attached to the user comments for various devices.