I am planning to buy a new phone since my current 6-year-old one’s screen is getting problematic.
I don’t live on the European or American continents, and my country is rather short on choices—we only have Samsung, Apple, Huawei and other Chinese brands.
Importing is not an option because the prices rise to five to tenfold, and I cannot afford that since the already available ones are more expensive than the rest of the world here.
Which available brands and models can I easily DeGoogle and dodge other big corporation bulls?
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Whatever you do, don’t buy
Huawei orHonor for degoogling. I wasted a whole day trying and failing to unlock the bootloader on mine.edit: modern Huawei phones don’t include Google services. Still nigh impossible to unlock the bootloader on them if you want a ROM without Huawei’s equivalent of Gapps.
Oof you’ve gotta read the wiki for that stuff it’s hard being a FOSS hardliner & a China fan while they’re speedrunning thru the past few decades of western chip + device + telecom + software development
I couldn’t find the wiki’s link about that. Can you please send the section?
idk why i was so vague my bad https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
Np and thx!
Understood! What about other Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Reeder, Oppo?
From what I’ve read, Xiaomi is decent, just make sure people have documented the bootloader unlocking process (often on XDA forums) for the model you are looking to buy. Granted, I’ve yet to use a Xiaomi phone myself.
Xiaomi is rather consumer-friendly compared to Samsung and Apple here—better customer service, frequent discounts, etc. I think I’ll stick to them.
None of the “Proceed with caution” and “Safe for now” phones are sold here unfortunately.
Xiaomi has unlockable bootloaders after 14 days i think. And Oneplus too without any wait.
If you don’t want to completely degoogle, you can use adb to disable all the google related apps. it works on nearly all phones.
I tried to disable Play Store on my current phone, but the banking apps refused to work after a while.
I heard Xiaomi made the unlocking harder for Chinese roms. Idk if it’s also applicable for global roms though.
Yea, that’s an unfortunate trade off, I would suggest GrapheneOS, but it’s only on Pixels (and some Moto phones?). It has an isolated mode for banking apps.
Unfortunately, we have neither Pixel nor Moto here. Only the Chinese phones, Samsung, and Apple stuff exist.
I can open the banks’ websites on browsers, but idk if that would be wise to do.
Its fine to open bank in browser. Issue is many banks don’t have a phone mode for their website so it’s not very easy to use.
Eh, that’s something I’m willing to trade.
The two main ones I know are Pixel (GrapheneOS) and Fairphone (Murena OS).
I can understand that your country doesn’t have Fairphone, but I would be really surprised if it doesn’t have Pixel also.
Then get ready to be surprised! I hate where I live but even trying to leave would cost me too much.
