I’m using a Pixel 6 Pro right now, and I’m looking around to see if there are any good phones. However, I have heard that there are ads in the newer flagship phones (Samsung, Xiaomi). I am willing to spend around USD$750 on a new phone, but I just don’t want any crazy ads or preinstalled apps like Facebook. Are there phones that don’t suck nowadays? I can buy a phone that is sold in the US, Canada, or EU.
(I don’t want to go through menus to disable ads (Xiaomi), and I’m currently looking at phones other than the Pixel lineup to see if there’s a better option for me)
(I also don’t want to mess around with custom bootloaders/systems, I rely on Google services way too much)
EDIT: If it wasn’t clear enough, I am not looking for things like GrapheneOS or LineageOS or others, I am looking for a phone and judging based on the stock system on it.
Q: what’s a nice phone to buy? I don’t want to go through menus
A: flash graphene os
Cmon lemmy
Sounds pretty sweet to me… got a dialer with built in call recording.
I can install a 3rd party app store without moving to the EU and waiting 4 more years.
You can Dee-Google it by hacking the matrix with some ASOPs and pay $7 a month for a proton mail account while crying into your open office.
Run some McAafsfeey antivirus for that hit of early 90’s nostalgia, or Norton if you’re really old and miss the 80’s ;-)
Firefox with a real uBlock plugin would be pretty sweet? Do they have that working yet?
I’m thinking pay-as-you-go burner but… oh right, android smart phone… I’m old and forgot what I was doing for a second.
I really can’t tell if this is a joke or not (I’m not mad), but don’t third-party app stores have almost all of the features as of the Play Store? F-Droid has the ability to automatically update apps silently, I think.
It’s both, I think we should all have the ability to easily record a phone call on the hardware we pay for.
But I feel like both platforms need to do better with security. Apple pretends their shit doesn’t stink and google says play at your own risk… and Israel says I’ll do that for a dollar 🤑
Try librewolf for browsing it’s a privacy oriented fork of firefox and I have ublock on it also I suggest nextdns for ad and tracker blocking on your whole phone and even router
I’ll give it a look. I generally just use Firefox and uBlock when I have a choice.
I’m running Techtinium right now for DNS privacy, any killer features in NextDNS that made you pick it?
I love librewolf too but there is no mobile version. And don’t say mull because that refresh rate makes it unusable.
Samsung completely blocking the ability to record calls in their US phones really annoys the shit out of me. Outside of rooting and installing a custom rom they just didn’t leave a way to do it.
Same with Apple AFIK, though I think it’s broadly true… I think the legal theory here is that if you make an illegal call regarding that the company has aided your crime and could be culpable… but I’m not a lawyer, I just play one on TV 😎
I live in Canada and screen recording a phone call with audio doesn’t work, and the option that seems to be in the phone app for India isn’t on my phone, even though Canada is a one-person call recording policy country.
Why do you feel the need to change phones? Pixel 6 Pro should still be plenty good enough.
If its stock ROM bothers you, you’re in luck because Pixels are surprisingly hackable and it’s very easy these days.
See i.e.: https://grapheneos.org/
No need to worry about Google services, they work: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play
Yep, Pixel is the best phone to get the most Google free experience for those that seek it.
Depends on your usecase and your country of living. Why do I say so? I will name my 2 points:
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Lack of sd card. Yes I need my sd card, I don’t want to upload stuff online on a 400kbps connection or download on a 16mbps connection. It’s not a good experience.
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Not officially sold in my country, only available rarelly in resellers for 200+ euro more than normally.
Pixel has a Trusted Protection Module like computers with secure boot. No phone hardware in existence is documented at the hardware level. This is how planned obsolescence is created and why you have to buy a new phone every few years.
With a TPM chip it becomes possible to run signed and secured code on top of untrusted hardware and underlying software. Without this, your security is very limited in practice. Graphene OS is verifiably secure and only runs what you put on it.
The entire Android system is designed for people to use when they have no clue how to secure a device themselves and when they are far too incompetent to learn. The way this is done is to delegate a lot of permissions to app developers. This gives a lot of freedom to the apps you run. They can exploit the hell out of you within their little sandbox of vague permissions. Graphene does everything possible to limit what is happening in the background and the exploitations. It is default privacy.
I do not purchase phones as hardware any more. I don’t care what is sold by any of the exploitation clowns. I shop for my ROM and buy a device that is well supported by that project. I’ve owned several Graphene OS devices and am happy with them. I had a Lineage device I liked too awhile back.
I connect my Pixel 8 to my PC with a USB a to USB c cable. Plenty fast.
I bought it from google, off their website. On sale.
Fairphone is also quite hackable. Hard to get in the US, only distributor is Murena. In Europe they’re pretty easy to find from what I hear. Sd exists but you need to power cycle the phone to access it so maybe not your best bet. Still, if I need to transfer stuff quickly USBC is really fast.
I have already said that I don’t want to deal with custom bootloaders/systems. I’m also just looking at phones (and by extension phone companies) to see whether I should stay with Google in the future, or switch to a different brand.
You should keep your phone and install GrapheneOS. It’s not hard, you just have to reboot your phone and press few clicks in your browser. You can install Google Play and every Google service should work (except Android Auto and you can’t use NFC with GPay).
This. People with Google Pixels wanting to switch is something I dont get. You literally own the most secure phone on the planet, with the best OS.
I just want to see if other phones don’t suck nowadays, I’m not switching to a different brand just yet (I own too many Google things).
They do poorly. Securitywise (which also means update lifespan and ease of creating a custom OS with full support) Google Pixels are unbeaten.
Samsung actively prevents custom OS from using many security features.
Most other phones have nonexistent update spans.
Fairphone maybe, they are still worse softwarewise than Google.
I’m on a pixel 6a, I swapped out my DNS server to dns.adguard-dns.com and now I don’t get ads on any app or game I use, excluding YouTube (which I use very rarely).
I’ve got a 6a and I ended up rolling my own DoT server so that it would adblock, but also resolve to servers in my own country.
I also moved to GrapheneOS. The only Google stuff that broke was Google Wallet’s tap payment thing. Reportedly even Android Auto is supported now.
Oh - my kid just got a Motorola G84. It was a very cheap handset for 12GB RAM and no ads so far. Very close to stock Android too.
Is it really? The hold up for me switching to Graphene has definitely been android auto compatibility. That’s huge.
They recently added this functionality. https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/111665498981590978
ELI5 swapping the DNS? (I know what it is, but thought that wasn’t possible on the device.)
I believe you just add that to your network settings for private dns.
Go to settings - network & Internet - scroll down to see Private DNS and add a DNS of your choice like dns.adguard-dns.com.
Worked for me so far as I use pihole on WiFi at home but now not seeing adds on mobile data like I used to.
Update, this will override all DNS settings it seems. Just did a test at home and it now points to this DNS vs my pihole. If someone knows a better way, please lmk otherwise I’ll poke around more.
Unfortunately, there isn’t one, since it’s working as intended, short of pointing the phone DNS and Pihole to the same servers.
You’re overriding the DNS of the phone to point to the new server, and it will prioritise that over asking the router for one, like it might otherwise do if there wasn’t one configured.
Do you use the Stock operating system? If yes, I highly recommend you to check out GrapheneOS.
