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My internal fight over what device to buy
(lemmy.kde.social)
A place to ask your questions and seek help related to your Android device and the Android ecosystem.
Whether you're looking for app recommendations, phone buying advice, or want to explore rooting and tutorials, this is the place for you!
Usually. If you want a new phone, your best bet is Google's Pixels, OnePlus (although recently, it's been weird), Nothing probably too. Google's phones in particular have a long history of being really easy to develop for, you can pretty much just build AOSP and it just works. They're community supported for a really long time.
Most other brands make unlocking their bootloaders either hard or impossible, and to even just root, you need to unlock the bootloader anyway, at least the way without exploits. Since unlocking the bootloader is the big hurdle, root and custom roms tend to come together. So a phone you can root to debloat as your second option would probably also be suitable for option 1.
Sure, it's in the pricier range, but if you value the ability to control your operating system as much as I do, it's worth the price. Plus, I think my OnePlus 8T will hold up great for the foreseeable future. It's way more powerful than I need, so I'm sure it'll take a few more versions of Android. I'm using 4-5GB out of the 12 it's got on average, they'd have to seriously bloat up AOSP to use all that. I've dealt with cheaper devices and they just kinda suck, stock or not.
thanks for the answer!
Not always, because LineageOS for example has many unofficial builds (which I'd rather not use), meaning that the bootloader is unlockable but no official LOS image is available... right?
If you stick to official builds, then yeah it's indeed pretty limited. Maybe building the unofficial ones yourself would alleviate your concerns?
It's... probably still easier than trying to debloat and put microG on a stock ROM.
Depends on the manufacturer whether I'd rather use the stock ROM or an XDA special I guess.
So you're suggesting using an unofficial build? How do updates work? The unofficial developer has to rebuild it in order for me to install the update? I have really no idea how all of this work
thanks for your help!