Yeah, I saw that. It has a lot of stuff I don’t know what it is. It’s certainly not for my kind of person where I need them to “hold my hands” like with the Lineage documentation, except for Lineage not making it obvious what IMS is, and that shows the level of mistake I can make and how much money and time I can waste where someone more knowledgeable would have avoided.

Plus, I haven’t seen any success story coming from that, and that from people who knows what they are doing. It’s not worthy to spend god knows how many days or weeks it would take me to properly redo what he did and find out it would not work in my case, if I even get to that point.

He mentions an apk he changed, so initially I thought it would be just that, an apk to install (magic). But I didn’t find it and I guess that’s just one small step in the massive stuff he did, decompiling things and what not.

But thanks anyway. It did make me hopeful when I first saw it, but no big deal. When I thought it was just about my effort, I would spend whatever time it takes. But now that I finally understand that it’s samsung really not wanting me to use their phones (like in an abusive relationship, after years of proof of the abusive partner), then I made peace with the idea. Fuck samsung and fuck google. I’ll use pidgeons to communicate before I trust them again.

Did they even mention it back then in your country?

If they did, I imagine the news were more in the line of “a traitor just put our whole country in the hands of terrorists, what can YOU do to keep your children safe?”

Here in the united states of the south we get a lot of that. “terrorists in the streets protesting against the poor israelis killing people. is YOUR child safe?”. It must be even worse for you.

Although even the rest of the world didn’t comment much on that. I was in Brazil back then, and there was really not much on the media, even though there were emails of the president of the time shown to be spied by the US. I thought the whole world would go crazy and quickly everyone forgot.

Hell, not even an orange menace waging war against enemies and allies all the time is enough for people to do something…

Oh, setup is easy. I actually even enjoy setting up a new phone.

I have all my files and messages synced on syncthing constantly, and contacts and etc on DAVx. Even apps, most from f-droid, are a few clicks from a backup. I can do the whole thing in a few minutes, but I enjoy taking longer.

The issue with finding a phone that I can unlock and installing a working ROM instead, that’s the issue, and it should not have to be like that at all. That’s what is becoming impossible and making dumb phones a better alternative.

Ah, and the money too. Which is why I never buy expensive phones anymore. I know I’ll lose it, drown it, kill it. That’s another good reason for dumb phones.

Yes and no. If you never connect the ultra series to the internet, you still have some great cameras and a great (offline) video game, and even a great gps and other things.

You don’t have a “phone” as samsung sold. But phones are nowadays much more than that.

Like the old film cameras. It didn’t matter how the company wanted you to use them. But yeah, it’s still something we should fight against. In may case for instance I need connection, so for the main purpose, being a phone, I don’t have the hardware because I don’t control the software.

You may be new to this insanity, so I’ll explain; Yes, crazily enough google pixels are (for now) the easiest mainstream phones to install a different system. Almost (as far as phones go) as easy as installing Linux on a pc to get rid of windows.

But note that this is what we mean by degoogling, installing a new system. If you don’t want or can’t do this (and most users wouldn’t know how), it’s as hard, if not harder to degoogle than other phones. All the spyware is deeply integrated and getting rid of it is impossible.

I suppose this is because google is trying to stay true to the initial vision of android, back when they had “don’t be evil” lie as a moto. But I don’t expect it to last.

On my end, pixel5 was my first and last pixel. It’s a shitty line of phones, and I don’t want to rely on google, regardless if they will allow you to install something else for long.

Kind of similar. Yeah, replacing everything took me a long time too and a lot of research. And I was one of the first gmail users, had dropbox account when no one knew what it was, etc etc, so I was pretty stuck. I was all google when I believed their “do not be evil” lies.

But I started the move very early too, after Snowden leaked the PRISM crimes. Back then I thought everyone would do the same and try to rely less on the cloud or, at least, stop using american companies. And oh boy, was I wrong…

If I had waited I imagine it would be a lot more difficult. I always kept my mp3, movies, porn, etc offline, but it was still easy to rely on gmail, youtube, google maps etc.

Anyway, good on you. You will find it surprising that you ever thought it was difficult after you’ve been detoxed for a while and end up being exposed to google products again. It will make you wonder how anyone actually put up with it.

That’s good to know. Although that’s a more difficult, if not impossible, mistake to make. If you search on installing something different on those phones, as most people will do, they will find that it’s impossible before they even start the journey. Buying a phone to degoogle without researching if it’s even possible is a bad mistake.

But the older ones it’s worse, because not only every research will show it’s possible, most reviews I found of the S10 with Lineage were actually very positive, saying everything worked great. Because VoLTE being mandatory is something new, and many countries will still work but not for long.

So it’s really bad because if you don’t pay attention to the IMS thing you will have no reason to think it won’t work. It is possible, it works great, it just doesn’t make calls. Silly detail that isn’t mentioned well enough.

They were always hostile, but it was possible. And once you finish the long and stressful fight with samsung for the control of your phone, you are left with a great phone in your hands. Depending who you ask, it was worthy.

But now they finally made it impossible. They always wanted to do this, and finally succeeded. They “won” the battle.

That’s the only reason why I bought the pixel 5. It’s easy to remove google stuff. But I see people praising the phones, as if, once you have installed your custom software (ignoring graphene), it’s better than the alternatives.

Once/if you do manage do install something else on other phones, almost every other option of similar price is better than a pixel. But it seems that most things I read disagree with that.

But yeah, getting to the point of installing something the pixels are easier. But there are others like fairphones here that match that from what I’m told.

It will be pretty hard to find around here. But yeah, I’m considering. That and Jolla and dumbphones.

The issue is; they will die. Someone will try in their place, and then die too. There will always be rebellion, but always crushed by the empire (and lack of financial support).

I may find something usable now, but I have no guarantee that next phone will be. I often lose phones, and every time it’s being a harder and harder battle to find a replacement.

The only safe way, considering that things are just getting worse, is to learn to not need smartphones.

That won’t get rid of the google/samsung crap constantly running on your phone and trying to phone home.

I tried on the american s10. Most unnecessary google and samsung stuff is disabled or blocked. The phone hangs on almost everything. Every time you try to open something, do something, it hangs. It becomes unusable. Spyware is an integral part of modern mainstream systems.

You are lucky. Here not even 3G or 4G works anymore. If it doesn’t have VoLTE it doesn’t work. It started this year.

I have been on the offline open source route for many years. I don’t even see it as time consuming. It’s so much better than relying on cloud services that it pays off. I lost count of the situations where needing cloud would have been bad. But maybe I trained myself that way, because I never liked the “cloud” idea, my data out of my control.

But the hardware to run that and the options to do that will become more and more impossible. At least on mobiles.

There will come a day when Syncthing won’t work anymore on android, because of “security” (the terrorists could send files to your phone and kill children!).

Yup. I bought a camera after google play killing my s21 ultra.

Paid 800 dollars for the camera. It’s inferior to the old s21 in almost every way, and I could get one for 300 dollars. Inferior as in a camera, not even considering how the s21 is great as a gaming phone, computer, etc. Plus the camera is fragile and bigger, so I never carry it, so it’s never there when I need to capture something nice.

It’s weird how hardware wise we reached such an amazing point, but the software has enshitified to levels I would never even imagine.

We have to choose between being a slave of samsung/google or let go of amazing hardware. But they can only afford to make such amazing stuff precisely because of their evil practices. So it will get worse. Hardware will become more amazing, the more evil these companies get.

Good on you! Let’s spread the word and help samsung die! (It won’t make any difference, but I want to pretend it will)

It’s very, very expensive for what it is. But I guess I just meant “mainstream” androids.

Going on alternative land there are options, like I used to have a phone with sailfishOS. But they will never have the adoption of mainstream phones, and it will probably be less and less with time as google tries to make people’s life harder. And that means they will never have the same finance and support.

It’s nice to support those companies, but like I said, I think it’s a lost battle and I probably should focus my energies on learning to not rely on smartphones. Then it doesn’t matter what feature apple or google remove, it won’t affect me.

I have a pixel5 with Crdroid on it (I had graphene on it but I really really didn’t like it). Crdroid is awesome, makes this horrible phone much more tolerable.

All following pixels are even worse for me. Besides all the nonsense issues of pixel5 (no sd card, no headphone jack), they are all massive, while still being much worse then the competition. I really don’t understand how anyone except apple users like it. It’s almost as limited as an iphone.

Plus, I really don’t want to rely on google hardware, or anything at all. If that’s the best option, then even better is to learn to live without a smartphone.

And how do you people talk to other people? Whatsapp? Apparently that’s how it is in brazil, even to call companies or support.

About the second line, “best” is being generous. I guess you mean better supported. Although for some very odd reason the internet seems to love pixels. While they are the worse phones I’ve used for the price after apple phones (for similar reasons).

But above all, the fact that other phones support for open source is even worse than google is why I’m considering to learn to live without smartphones. If we have to rely on google for our freedom and privacy, we are well and truly fucked. And we deserve to be if that’s the case.