GrapheneOS

I cant speak to the storage or specifically the 8a as I went with the 8.

GrapheneOS is snappy though. Never had a hang or experienced any lag outside of a segfault one time that crashed the phone. There was an update pushed out the next day and haven't had any issues since.

GOS is under constant development and fixes for things seem to be fixed pretty damn quick.

GOS also tells you when an application has memory issues like buffer overflow which could be a security risk.

GOS puts you in control of your device in so many ways, sandboxing apps and user profiles, installing google play services to a user or not, restricting app permissions.

It is hands down the best phone OS i have ever used and i have done a fair bit of custom rom installs on my galaxyS4 back in the day. The best part is you dont even have to root it.

Ive been using GOS with pixel 8a for a month or so. Coming from 12 mini. The biggest differences i notice is battery. I had to charge twice a day in the morning and evening with 12 mini. With P8a, once before i sleep and it still has around 60% average. 40% if i really use it and 80% if it's a busy day.

Cant help about swipe keyboard. I personnaly use floris KB. Just normal touch typing. No autocorrect and suggestion. So far, no problem with responsiveness. 120hz is an eye opening.

I got the 128GB version. As of this moment, im using 15% with 109GB left. I got 25 third party apps. But most of them is Fossify apps. Im not much of an apps guy. I only install what i need.

Safe to say, ill probably gonna stay with GOS for good. All my apps are from fdroid, except a couple of apps like signal. I have private space set up for my banking app since it needs sandboxed play store. I have aurora store in there too. Owner profile is strictly FOSS apps.

i actually tried GOS awhile ago but i cant do it since tried to do it in one go. Big mistakes in my part. End of last year, i bought a server for nextcloud. I moved my files, photos, contact etc into nextcloud plus setting up a reverse proxy for it. Had to migrate my email to custom domain. I did it bit by bit until im no longer tied to icloud. Best decision so far.

I'm still on the 7a with no plans of upgrading until it breaks, or is no longer supported.

Pixel 5 is cheap. It really depends on your use case. I like the 7 for the cost point and size.

As for storage, there's not really an easy comparison as they do things differently. I hammer on phones, move a lot of files around all the time, take music and movies with me, and find 128gb is fine. But I also use Media Monkey as an iTunes-like media sync (you can use iTunes, I just don't like it). I also use Syncthing and Resilio to access my own media.

Edit: Also Android handles storage a little differently, by having dedicated partitions for things like system and user. For example, my "128 GB" phone actually has 117 GB usable space due to formatting, native apps/user config data and such (apps and config data are stored in the user partition). The space used for the operating system is a different partition, inaccessible to us users so not worth worrying about.

running fine on my 7a as of last night!

If you got money get 9 series. They have better battery and charging.

Consider used, open box renewed route.

I've had the pixel 3a, 6, and 8. The default OS is not worth the constant glitches. Get a Samsung if you were an iPhone person