So, I just learned about this the very, very hard way. After buying a second hand S10 and finding american ones can’t be unlocked, traveling 4 hours to buy another one after much research, much annoyances to unlock it (samsung requires you to be online, which I didn’t know) and testing multiple ROMs, I finally read this page more properly https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/beyond1lte/ which says “known quirks: IMS”. I thought it was just something like dolby sound.
What it means is that it doesn’t suport VoLTE and most currently used phone systems. Samsung made their proprietary mess, unlike most other developers, which means it will probably never have an open source version.
And that applies to ALL modern samsung phones. I had samsung phone before with a custom OS, but didn’t realize because VoLTE wasn’t mandatory back then. Now it is here in Australia, and many countries. So if you ever plan to buy a samsung phone to degoogle it, know that it won’t make phone calls. SMS and mobile data also doesn’t work.
I don’t know how I missed this. It should be talked more often given how popular samsung is. There should always be a warning “YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO MAKE PHONE CALLS IN THE FUTURE IF YOU CONTINUE”.
S10 was the last decent phone ever made (for me). Not too big, SD card, headphone jack (one of the most important things for me), good camera, etc, etc… That’s why I was so persistent to find one to degoogle.
So I’m stuck with my amazingly shitty pixel 5 (and other ones are even worse for me). And considering the possibility of a life without smartphones at all, since this is a losing battle. Mainstream doesn’t care and evil companies have every incentive to kill freedom. It has been getting really bad and it will just get worse. But anyway… this post is not about this.
Be warned, if you care about freedom don’t ever buy samsung again. Not because they are evil (they are), but because you won’t be able to make phone calls on your “phone”.
A better link for Jolla is probably their store: https://commerce.jolla.com/
I have pre-ordered the Jolla Phone and am hoping everything is working out (won’t see it for another 4 months at the very least I suppose). I am very excited getting to know a completely new mobile OS to me and the actual successor of Nokia’s Meego. Like with any alternative system, and to some extend also with degoogled Androids it is advisable to inform oneself first before jumping ship.
Who makes phe calls anyways nowadays?
But yes: The best phones for degoogling are the Google phones.
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.
Have you dismissed Fairphone for some reason?
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 bought a fairphone 3 last year for £100 with e/os pre installed which works fine for me. I changed to the Lime booter for a better interface. It’s not very fast if you want to game & the speaker isn’t very good, but otherwise does all the basics I need or find handy asides from internet banking. Could be good if you want a basic smart phone for occasional use?
Instead of whatsapp, I use signal. I explained to my friends that I moved to it. Some installed the app for me. Others didn’t. I accept that.
Pixels are “loved” because they can run grapheneos and others. Not because they’re technically superior phones.
They’re the opposite of fucking samsung. In that one single regard though.
Attach phone, click install, wait, google gone. All others are getting harder and harder to even root.
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.
Technically, the brands that offer already degoogled android (fairphone) or Linux directly (jolla) are better.
Ethically, yes.
Technologically, no. By magnitudes.
For security and privacy (by extension), Graphene is king.
For freedom, Graphene has some lacking things.
what are the fairphone and Jolla phones lacking?
GrapheneOS hardware requirements, for starters.
Please never reccomend google phones for de googling ever again
Get a used one if you don’t feel comfortable giving your money to Google (a good idea IMO)
And by buying used Google gear You increase the value of used market making them a better deal for people looking to buy new because they will keep in value more than other phones
I call my wife everyday on my way home from work.
Also I have to make phone calls to get ahold of doctors and such
I vowed my Last Samsung phone would be A55 (or A56 if you also count my house hold)
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)
Thanks for letting us know. I was thinking of getting a used Galaxy S9 or S10 for a degoogled Lineage OS phone. Now, it looks like the Pixels are the only modern phones that are compatible with this. That’s a pretty sad state of affairs, I’d say.
Motorola is coming in soon, fortunately
fairphones also support it, and a few other relatively popular ROMs
This right here is how i knew about my nothing phone to be relockable, good stuff
deleted by creator
New hosts/adblock/pihole/adguard filter/rule:
#GOOGLE=============================== 0.0.0.0 google.com 0.0.0.0 googleusercontent.com 0.0.0.0 googleapis.com 0.0.0.0 gstatic.com 0.0.0.0 android.com 0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com 0.0.0.0 googlehosted.com 0.0.0.0 googletagmanager.com 0.0.0.0 googleadservices.com 0.0.0.0 pki.googPhone now degoogled.
You don’t sign in to your phone, like straight lineage with no microg?
Not OP, but for me, yeah
Almost all apps come from F-Droid, with two apps from Aurora that I needed for work
Why would I sign into a proprietary network for a computing device?
I was just checking, I think a lot of ppl forget how tightly integrated the google+android thing is.
Do you use this yourself? I wonder how much stuff breaks if you use it.
Also YouTube URLs are conspicuously missing…
As someone that has a similar list but not exactly that… A lot. A lot of stuff breaks but! You don’t see ads in shitty mobile games anymore.
Another thing you find is how many links go through a google analytics or seems to be sponsored
In addition to this, anything on One UI 8 and above does not allow the bootloader to be unlocked, regardless of region. Fortunately, I had already rooted my S23 and have stayed on One UI 7 ever since.
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.
Sorry man, I feel for you.
And honour to them for sharing the knowledge here others won’t fall for this shit.
It was so miserable I just gave up and bought a Fairphone. Much happier.
How’s the phone performing so far and what was your previous phone? I’ve got my eye on Fairphone whenever it’s finally time to upgrade (hopefully not for another few years)
S25 Ultra was my last. The Samsung is a nicer phone, but my battery has never died. I got a notice recently in the evening that it was under 20%. Before I went to bed at about 10pm I checked it and it was still 19%. Battery is great without all that bloatware.
It’s also a good peace of mind. All those trackers are not on my phone. How much did the mediocre hardware bother me? Not really at all. I love it.
I hope mine lasts me at least another 7 years before I have to buy a new phone, but yeah, this will be my last Samsung phone. Hopefully, by the time I have to switch to something new, there will have been enough changes made that I can get a non-american phone and still be able to use important apps without having to use Google play. Cautiously optimistic.
I had a A53 5G which only outdated Android ROMs like TrebleDroid support.
Samsung has always been hostile af
An One UI 8.5 locks down the bootloader
I’ve always loved Notes and Ultra flagships, but I don’t want to rep such a lousy OEM
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.
And the new UI sucks hard. I hate it. But at least it’s a work phone paid for by work and but my problem after hours…
I had a Note 3, Note 4, S9+, S21u, S24u, My wife/kids have Note 3, s9+, s23u, A series and a tab 4.
I’ve had Samsung 360 cameras, tv’s, galaxy watches
It stops here.
The biggest thing i’m going to miss is a decent camera. I don’t feel like carying around a 5x camera everywhere I go and most of the phones i’m looking at are kinda crap for cameras
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.
It really is time for serious linux phones
it’s been the time for years, I highly doubt that it will ever happen. it’s been a lot of friction to get desktop users to switch, it’s gonna be 5x more difficult, considering mobile users are less tech-savvy and typically do things on their phone (rather than a computer which most people can get away with just a web browser).
Surely all or most of those linux PC users also have phones, and people already using linux should be easier to convert?
The thing that trips me up is that Android forks support most Android phones out of the box (with the obvious exception of GrapheneOS which ia a deliberate choice), while Linux Phone OSs each have very short lists of supported models.
I have four different phone models available to me, from Pixel to Samsung to OnePlus. None are supported by any Linux Phone OS I’ve seen.
Reading this on my Linux phone right now! (Furilabs FLX1s). It definitely has work to do in terms of having a polished user experience, but I’m loving it!!
I am seriously hoping to be able to ditch Android entirely for something like post-market OS, Linux, in the future. And we’ll be taking a look at what phones are supported when buying my next one.
