Ive been using google’s services since 2017-2018, now its time to finally depart from that. I just got it in the mail yesterday and I’m already in love with it. So much lighter and easier to carry than my samsung galaxy. Gonna transfer everything over in a sim card, switch to Tmobile and ill be good to go. 😁
If I had a job I’d buy a One Plus direct from China and put LineageOS on it. I don’t need to relock the bootloader since my phone is mainly for browsing and text/calls (no important private stuff). I don’t even log into Lemmy on my phone because the PC experience is superior.
Recently I got rid of WhatsApp (now fully deleted my account) plus I removed Signal. My battery life is incredible now. I don’t even fast-charge cos I’m too poor and my phone doesn’t support any worth-while fast charger anyway! Next step is to get LineageOS and get rid of Google Play Services. Even more performance and battery saving.
That was actually my first choice I was gonna do as well. I got myself the Nord N200 5g but I unfortunately received the wrong model from Back Market. I returned it and ended up getting this phone for less of a headache to try to find the exact model of a phone in order to install LineageOS. That’s my only problem with them.
Back Market? You don’t just order off the One Plus website and ship anywhere in the world?
For the US Market, the only phones they have that are available online and even in store are the 15 and 15R.(Really expensive phones BTW) If you want any other model, you gotta go to either Amazon, Back Market, or Best Buy (sometimes you can get an older model from here).
The models for OnePlus are very limited, it used to never be like that.
The NSA does not want Americans to be under Chinese surveillance? Is that it :)
the american carriers are pre-complying rather than having to be told; they’ve seen how much doing so benefited the telecom provider’s bottom lines in the decades prior w things like the patriot act so they’re tripping over themselves to get their share from the epstein oligarchy.
they’ve turned the nicest phones i’ve had in a long time into the most expensive paperweight i’ve ever had because of it.
It’s extrmely easy to degoogle xiaomi phones too, but they’re a bit more expensive.
my xiaomi has been a pain in the ass. i need a phone number to request an unlock from xiaomi, but none of the us carriers will let it on the network anymore; or at least long enough to let it have a number that i can use for xiaomi registration.
Dang that’s unfortunate. I thought t-mobile and atnt network bring your own phone type services will work, as long as they provide a microsim or esim.
It used to work, but T-Mobile made a huge update to thier blacklist and it was clear that it was targeted at Chinese branded phones, but not the ones that share hardware w other brands like Oppo.
Everyone in the comments talking about which provider is bad.
Name one good one, I’ll wait.
Oof, you’re in a world of hurt with that phone’s band support. Especially on T-Mobile which is majority 5G now.
4G supported bands B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B7, B12, B17, B20, B66
T-Mobile has a sliver of band 12 in most markets, so that helps for indoor/low-band coverage. No band 71 support means you miss out on their nationwide 600MHz low band, however. No band 25, which means you can’t use T-Satellite. No band 41, so you can’t use T-Mobile’s high speed data band (although in most markets it is all 5G now so you wouldn’t be using it anyway.)
On T-Mobile you’re using B2/B66/B12 in markets that still have LTE running on those bands, and it will continue to reduce as they shift further to 5G.
May want to start planning your next phone move now and/or return it if you still can.
Dang, are you serious? My current phone even though a year older gets way more 4G bands than that when I just use 4G. im looking it over know and that freaking sucks.Good news, I can return the phone, I just got it a couple of days ago. I might just return that and just degoogle my samsung cause this is freaking ridiculous.
What is the fascination with degoogling?
Just get a pixel and install graphene on it. You can choose to install sandboxed Google play or not. You can also install it in a guest profile if you need it for things like banking apps and stuff.
Or just use aurora in your main profile
Your literally doing the same thing with Graphene. Its a degoogled os system (if you choose it to be that way) same with all of these other OS systems available
Plus, not only those phones are not repairable with the lack of an SD card, but long term support for those phones are heavily questionable now since Google is working on locking out Graphene users. Along with that Im not interested in buying one
Then suffer I guess. Phone is for phoning. Get usbc SD card reader?
Pixel has better US band support. All the open phones simultaneously never have US or that entire hemisphere’s band support for some terrible reason.
Pixel has all the US 4G and 5G bands. Ironic, although Pixel 9 was likely the last to have such freedoms.
Cause we got a crazy list of blacklisted phones that these mobile providers refuse to support to decrease competition and diversity. Anything google is heavily pushed in the US market, especially in the workplace and schools. I get the 4g/5g but im more worried about their privacy issues than the bands.
Even beyond that, most non-US phones don’t support western hemisphere bands. The EU makes some fantastic handsets, but they use modems that limit function on the other side of the pond.
So it is purely a function of “won’t connect”.
Although, to your privacy point, perhaps not getting signal is actually the bold move that wins.
Lol, interesting situation over there. My 4G connection is literally 4 times the speed of my wifi (or even 7 times in upload). Reception is great, 4G isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
I was thinking that too, cause its still heavily used here. But can this teracube phone I have be used with T-Mobile or used with another affiliate of theirs?
I just bought a pixel10 that I intend to override with grapheneOS.
I thought thats an easy way to de-google. Isn’t it?
It is (so far) but I wanted a phone with a SD card slot. Pixels don’t have that and also I just don’t want a pixel.
Jolla phone
If your in the US unfortunately we don’t have access to those
True
Ok, then that makes total sense. :)
I was just worried there was something undesirable about my choice.
T-Mobile isn’t the place to switch to. They went evil.
The US is evil.
You’re not wrong, but also, T-Mobile is still evil, and majority-owned by Deutsche Telekom, with plans to merge it and Telekom into a full German-owned property. Which by itself is pretty evil. All while also still making T-Mobile evil.
Nice, a USAian that gets that foreign companies can’t have an essential service. Now don’t be evil to others.
Unfortunately, they’re the only phone company that we have in the states that accept phones like this. Even with what’s going on with the dumbphone and Linux phones market, only choice you have is Tmobile or a carrier that is own by T-Mobile.
I’ve had good luck with US Mobile so far
They use a combination of ATT, Verizon and T-Mobile networks. Will still look into them of course and see if its worth it.
Not trying to shill, but I just switched FROM T-Mobile to Mint. Unlimited data, $15/mo. Same GSM network as T-Mobile with same speeds pretty much.
Works perfectly in my FairPhone 6 with /e/OS.
Mint is owned by T-Mobile I’m pretty sure, but at least for now it is a LOT more affordable. It’ll probably be enshittified in the future though :(
I love mint. They’re owned by T-Mobile but interestingly while I was paying $15/m for mint and my wife was paying $90/m for T-Mobile I often got better reception, especially when we were somewhere spotty like up a mountain. I assumed it was just a difference in phones, but since she switched to mint she says she gets better reception. Completely anecdotal but interesting.
I’m dreading the day they go to shit.
@beneeney@lemmy.zip @Ripley_Tripley@lemmus.org @SalmonTractor@discuss.tchncs.de $15/mo from jmp.chat is a workers cooperative and so has a smaller likelihood of enshitifying.
US Mobile is terrible. You can’t even change your e-mail without contacting chat, and then they don’t even always do it. Changing SIMs can result in their “migrating” you to another plan that costs more with no way back. Getting your port-out PIN, you again have to chat with their chat people. It’s suuuuper-grifty. Plus you’re putting an MVNO between you and your cellular services. US Mobile has had outages in the past where their customers lose cellular but the main carrier was fine because there wasn’t a third party injected in the middle.
One will find USM has shills all over the web trying to plug their mediocre service when one could go to Visible, Cricket, or even the prepaids of the tier-1 carriers.
Yeah, they’re such a pain I indeed wasted that many words describing why they should be avoided.
They’re a Verizon mvno
What carrier isn’t evil?
Peace be with you🌹🌹🌹🌹
That’s wonderful. I’ve also deGoogled myself and bought a Fairphone with e/os. I hope many others will also disconnect from Google.
Erm, I hope you didn’t know that someone literally just ran a few commands on an off the shelf phone and increased the price tag.
If you go to Teracubes website, getting the degoogled version of this phone was only 50 USD more then the regular android version they have, which is nothing in comparison of how much these Linux phones, preinstalled degoogled phones and even dumphones are being sold for. And that too, the tinkering is not easy like most make it out to be, unless you get a Pixel to install Graphene OS (which is what im realizing that most use on here)
Getting this phone lessened the headache by a landslide, and it’s the most affordable without spending an arm and leg on a dam phone that might not even work properly (Linux phones) , a phone that is just to expensive (dumbphone), or finding out your tinkering with the wrong model device or completely brick a phone ( I can personally say this is what happened to me when I tried to degoogled my Unihertz Jelly Star)
Again, like I had to tell someone else, not everyone on here is super tech savy. And there’s gonna be more people like that coming here, especially with what’s going on with Reddit.
50 USD
That’s 2 weeks worth of groceries (at least where I am from), what the hell man.
Linux phones
You are probably thinking of the devkits. The community has mostly moved on to getting existing devices to run their favorite distribution. Which is mostly for fun’s sake, since pretty much everyone has a desktop computer with the same (although IIRC someone installed PostmarketOS from a public use PC, that was nice). The community is tiny since it’s right in between “modern day smartphones are a necessity” and “Android isn’t open enough”, anywhere below and above (incl. spectrums) are unlikely to think of getting (and daily using) desktop Linux on a phone.
dumbphone
(??)
I keep stating this and I will state it again. An MT62xxx nugget costs ~10 USD new online OR ~4 USD old new stock at the closest to me bazaar. OR ask relatives if they have a keypad phone in a drawer somewhere, you will probably get it for FREE and it will have quite a lot more functionality and homebrew (not exactly a “dumbphone”, more like a “smartphone” but by 2000s definitions).
not everyone on here is super tech savy
Well, I personally wouldn’t consider it difficult. If you happen to get a phone that allows proper bootloader lock of course (bypassing gets more complicated, not end of the world most of the time). See here and there.
Ask friends. If you don’t have any, I can volunteer to remote into your computer and do the thing, actually.
bricked (…) Unihertz Jelly Star
Do you still have it? Should be relatively easy to unbrick that nugget.
Unihertz Jelly Star
I still have it but don’t use it. After going through that with Canta and Shizuku, I factory reset the whole thing. There’s this weird glitch on Canta where you can’t download the apps you uninstalled, which was what I needed to do to get it working again, but I couldn’t do it.
Now the dumbphone community is interesting, it teaters on the line of the period before smartphones and let’s get away from the addiction of smartphones. Basically modernized flip phones, T9 phones and even some bringing back the Blackberry. But most are to limited in their features and are very pricy.
And that link, with the “dumb phones” that has to do with Nokia’s I believe?? They’re unfortunately unusable in the US because we got rid of 2G between 2017-2020 and 3G in 2022; with the 4G model, you can’t even buy them here. So all of those phones are basically collectables. Yes cheap but once again, unavailable. The phone market here is heavily monopolized.
What about the FuriOS phone?
I think that market is slowly changing cause you can find some phones that actually are build to run like a phone but the problems that have appeared are compatibility issues like calling/texting or running apps that are needed for some (banking apps).
Canta
Don’t bother, there’s still Unihertz’s spyware in there. LineageOS and derivatives are buildable as generic images that use the OEM drivers, reported working on that specific device. It’s a complete pain to build but some random people publish premade files, see here (get the first “Vanilla EXT4”) and here. More options there.
There’s a manual specifically for the Unihertz Jelly Star here. Although the download link there is outdated and the MicroG instructions are also outdated (follow the official ones instead).
If you don’t want to use the phone, may as well give it to a comrade locally that wants it.
in the US (…) we got rid of 2G
Sad. Although there should be modern bricks with 4G that aren’t too expensive, usually marketed as “for grandparents”.
There are other phone manufacturers than Nokia. Always have been. Shocking, I know.
EDIT: looked around and the ones with reasonable prices are usually the carrier contract ones from the carrier store and carrier prepaid ones from literal grocery stores :/
FuriOS
Never heard of it.
Some people just don’t like tinkering, or trust themselves enough to do that, and that’s okay.
Brax phone? 🙂
I strongly disencourage buying those.
My friend ordered one but then it had to be refunded because they couldn’t get enough phones to the customers. Very small operation I suspect.
brax is a grifter selling insecure hardware and software https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114825638504244405
Ewwww
No, Teracube
Which phone?
This is the Teracube 2s running e/OS
