As the title says, I want to finally degoogle (completely) my life. I’ve found a Pixel 7 8/128 for ~270€ (or pixel 8? ~470€ but no white :c) it’s refurbished so google doesn’t get a shit from me.
I’m curious to know if:
- You can change the default icons color (black and gray-ish in the image) or is based on the wallpaper
- The camera app is good. Not going to make professional pics or videos but I still want to use it to take pics and a good quality is important. Tried their camera on a phone and the bottom menu to switch mode (picture/video/night mode/etc) was buggy
- Battery life is better/worse than stock Android (if anyone tried that)
- How the sandboxed play services work
- Anything else that I should know about. Some people say it’s good, some it’s bad so I’m curious to know.
I’m still looking for a good maps replacement, Organic Map is not the best because it’s missing a lot of places where I live. I wish there was a google wallet Foss alternative… I needed it to use my card with the phone (rare but still possible!)
Help a new user to fully leave shitty phone companies
Literally who outside of samsung and Huawei? I guess xiaomi is a bit annoying with the wait time but pretty much all other phones are dead simple.
Oneplus, Nothing phone: literally the same process as on a pixel, no code required to unlock bootloader or anything like that. Just fastboot flashing unlock
Vivo: The exact same thing, just get vivo’s binary for fastboot since the unlocl command is different
Motorola, Sony: Just go to the website and you get the unlock code instantly, then just run a fastboot command and you’re done
Realme: Download their app, apply for unlock, gets approved within an hour. Unlock with a fastboot command
Xiaomi, poco: Get their app, wait a couple of days for the code, unlock bootloader with fastboot command.
Honor and huawie are a pita, but there is an open source unlocking tool for certain devices which makes it deadsimple.
So there are still plenty of options if the goal is unlocking bootloader and rooting a phone, all of these brands offer phones with oled 120hz screens, with cameras ranging from decent to some of the best on the market depending on the model. There are probably some brends I missed, but you get the point.
Never had a oneplus or nothing, so can’t judge at all. But great they’re allowing it.
Don’t remember sony being cool about it. But also good to know they seem to have changed their stance, i always liked their phones hardware-wise.
But ok, phone market is full of phones, and i gave up on non-pixels a long while ago. Cool to hear they mostly are simpler now.
But besides, being able to unlock bootloader is great (even though root is way more important to me), but if there is no really well working daily-driver-alternative to truly de-google (or at least working googled roms), what’s the point to unlock other than making your own rom?
@Dyskolos @Saizaku I had a couple.of OnePlusses…they were great. Especially the 1st one, the original OnePlus One…$300 worked great.
I did root the 1 and a 6T and recall it being very easy.
My bad I thought you were generally up to date with how rooting basically works nowadays. The defacto rooting method today is systemless root using magisk, which works by patching your boot.img. So on 99% of phones today if you can unlock the bootloader, rooting is as simple as installing the magisk, patching the boot img from the app and the flashing itl. You can also just flash magisk from recovery too. That’s why I focused on bootloader unlocking in my previous post.
Now I can’t claim that every device from these manufacturers works flawlessly with magisk, but most do. And a quick glance at the xda page of the specific model would be an easy way to find out before buying.
I do the magisk way. But yes, you’re right of course. Unlocking hence means root. At least since magisk. As said my last experiences with non-pixels is a while ago, but it surely had a reason to go to the devil to un-devil it. And at that point some rooted xiaomi et al wouldn’t help anyway.
Perfectly fair take tbh, in terms of security on android phones grapheneOS is as good as it gets and has been for a couple of years. I personally refuse to use pixels due to no sdcard, but more importantly no 3.5mm jack. The slight hiss/hum noise present on every bluetooth headset I’ve tried (and I’ve tired my friends bluetooth sennheiser that’s like $600) bothers me way too much for w/e reason. I find crdroid for example gets me 90% of the way there with a bit of work through various magisk modules and it’s good enough for me. But things have definitely gotten better on nonpixel phones over the years, I’m for example running a poco x3 nfc that was $250 4 years ago when I bought it and I still get monthly security updates through crdroid anf battery life is still great cause it came with a 5300mAh battery.
Oh yes, the sdcard. How i hated how they just removed it. To me it was super important. Save pictures there, everything personal there and only keep the pure apps on the phone itself. If the phone breaks or the screen, pull out the card and send the phone in. But now? I need to backup everything to the cloud (selfhosted ofc) and instantly wipe it from the device. Absolutely stupid. AFAIK Sony still has them, so I think whenever my pixel breaks (3rd year now) I’ll try a non googly one maybe.
Yeah the 3.5mm jack sucks equally, but at least that didn’t phase me as much. For that little where i would use headphones with my phone bluetooth does its job, for everything else i prefer my audiophile set at home. But yeah, if you use it more often and are picky, bluetooth just sucks. Would prefer card+jack over any stupid selfie-cam. Thanks crapple for always paving the way of stupidity and samsung bootlicking it. And then everyone else :(
Absolutely agree with everything you said. For music I absolutely prefer my speaker setup over any headphones or IEMs. But I go running pretty much every day for like an hour and I also walk a lot. So I need music during all that and like I said the slight noise present with bluetooth headphones bothers me an unreasonable amount.
I’ll most likely go for a sony phone next too case they’re pretty much the only flagship phone offering both an sdcard slot and a 3.5mm jack.