are non carrier phones not available in USA ? boggle my mind to buy a phone in 2023 with a carrier instead of just paying the phone in full like we do in Europe
Sure they are - you can buy directly from Google if you want. Phones from carriers are subsidized / free to hook you into a contract, but you can also just buy a phone and pop your SIM card into it.
I just learned the hard way that getting a p7 via carrier means it can't be bootloaded, which means I can't install grapheneOS on it. They gave me $800 off the phone if I bought through them, which was a nice discount, but it still sucks because I can't do what I want on the hardware. Lesson learned for next time.
Technically mine is. I reflashed it back from graphene bc no tap to pay was a deal breaker. Though I did just get an update so maybe me reflash fixed my long-standing update timing issue.
I wonder if getting a smartwatch with tap-to-pay, like the Pixel watch could help with that? You could still continue to use GrapheneOS on your phone (assuming the watch has no phone dependencies).
That might be a solution. Once I'm done financing everything else I'm currently financing, I'll reconsider. Would be nice if they could crack compatibility with the backend that tap-to-pay requires. That would be the last element I would need to have a functional Graphene work for me.