Hands-on: The Punkt MC03 might be the first privacy Android phone I’d actually try [Gallery]

Privacy often feels like an impossibility in the modern age of the internet, as your data is constantly tracked and shared by just about everything you do. That’s why privacy smartphones and privacy-focused forks of Android keep popping up. With the new Punkt MC03, though, I just found the first privacy Android phone I might be willing to try out.

Punkt is a brand based in Germany that makes smartphones based on AphyOS, a privacy-focused fork of Android that’s actually based on a subscription. “If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product” is the tagline of the software, with a $10 monthly subscripton going towards funding continued development and software updates of AphyOS over the lifetime of your phone.

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Admittedly, I’m a little iffy on this model, but the software itself makes a better pitch than I thought.

If you head over to Punkt’s website, the MC03 just sounds a lot like another “De-Googled” Android phone. That may appeal to some, but the thought of buying an Android smartphone that has no way to access Google apps and services sounds a bit awful to me, personally. And that’s where I think Punkt buried the lede a bit. In a hands-on demo at CES 2026, Punkt showed us how the MC03 actually has a simple toggle during the setup process that allows users to install the Play Store and limited Google services. There’s a lengthy explanation for, from a privacy standpoint, the user might not want to do that, but the option is there.

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Whether or not you choose to install the Play Store is up to you, but Punkt has a very clever take on how privacy should work.

The homescreen is split into two sections. The “Vault” is a list of apps that Punkt itself has vetted and can be installed from the company’s app store. Apps included here include Threema, a privacy-focused messaging app, as well as the suite of Proton apps. On the latter, Proton and Punkt have actually partnered on this device, which includes making specific versions of the Proton apps for MC03 which don’t require access to Google’s Firebase for notifications, meaning they’ll work just fine whether you’re using Google services on the device or not.

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The other half of the homescreen is the “Wild Web,” which visually distinguishes itself with an off-white color palette. This is to tell the user that, from this point on, your privacy is on you. Within the “Vault,” your data is considered secure and private, but everything else is based on what apps and services you install outside of the “Vault.”

Any apps in the “Wild Web” also integrate with AphyOS’ “Ledger,” which is a dashboard that quickly lets you control what an app has access to. Instead of ripping away permissions and access one by one, sliders let you quickly swap back and forth between giving apps access or cutting them off. Whether you strip away an app’s access or not, Punkt says everything is sandboxed beyond the typical Android standard, so you’re still getting an experience that’s fundamentally more private than a typical Android phone.

Privacy is a hard thing to achieve as we enter 2026, but the Punkt MC03 impressed me not because it’s creating an infallible digital “vault” for you to live within, but because it’s giving you the tools to choose how private you want your experience to be. I’ve never been so bullish on the idea of a privacy fork of Android, but there’s certainly something here.

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Helping matters here is that the Punkt MC03 as a phone seems pretty decent. The hardware isn’t particularly remarkable, but it’s good enough. The 6.67-inch 120Hz OLED display looks way better than the 60Hz IPS panel from MC02, and the fork of Android 16 ran quite well on the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 chip with 8GB of RAM. With so much less going on in the background, those specs go a pretty long way.

Whether or not this phone would be worth $700 comes down to you and your values, but I am very glad to see that there’s finally a good privacy-focused phone that isn’t an all-or-nothing play.

Would you get one?

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