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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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 McAafs
feey 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.
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 love librewolf too but there is no mobile version. And don’t say mull because that refresh rate makes it unusable.
Oh yes I’m sorry I meant mull! Didn’t realise there was a refresh rate issue until you said it. Is there any alternative you recommend?
I would use mull if they only increased that refresh rate. But as it is now, I use Firefox on mobile in the strictest tracking protection mode and UBO.
So it turns out you can fix the refresh rate if you disable resist fingerprinting. However, mull advises you not to do that, and not knowing much about it I learnt online the following details and now I prefer a lower refresh rate to disabling it -
“Resist Fingerprinting” is a privacy feature that can be found in various web browsers, including Mull Browser, which is a fork of Firefox focused on privacy. This feature aims to make users less identifiable and trackable across websites by minimizing the amount of information browsers reveal about users and their devices.
Web fingerprinting involves collecting details about a user’s browser and device, such as screen resolution, operating system, installed fonts, and browser extensions, to create a unique identifier for tracking purposes. Each piece of information might seem benign on its own, but collectively, they can create a detailed profile that can uniquely identify a user, even in the absence of cookies or traditional tracking methods.
When “Resist Fingerprinting” is enabled, the browser attempts to reduce this uniqueness by:
- Providing websites with less detailed information or more generic information about the browser and the device.
- Limiting or altering the behavior of web APIs that can be used to gather unique information about the device or its user.
- Adjusting the content of HTTP headers to be less revealing or more uniform across users.
By doing so, Mull Browser and other browsers that offer this feature help protect users’ privacy and make it more difficult for advertisers, analytics companies, and other third parties to track users across the web without their consent. However, it’s important to note that while “Resist Fingerprinting” enhances privacy, it may also cause some websites to behave differently or break certain functionalities that rely on the information it restricts.
Thank you for your effort, but I honestly already knew all this. What I want to know is why one couldn’t simply report 60hz to fingerprinters while, in reality, maintaining the highest possible rate in the browser.
I don’t want to turn off resist fingerprinting but that refresh rate ruins the browser for me.
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?
Sorry, as I was corrected in another comment, I meant Mull not Librewolf. Librewolf is on my PC and Mull on android. I also use an iPhone in which case I have the Orion browser from Kagi…
I think techtinium is a self hosted solution if I’m not mistaken? Not really heard much of it so if it fits your needs then great. I like nextdns because I don’t want to self host my private dns and it is easy to setup and monitor for all my devices and provides a lot of lists to easily choose what I want to block on what devices. For example I have a different profile for my kids with parental control. Medium for the wife so that her internet browsing isnt distupted and strict tracker blocking for myself because I don’t mind things not working.
Oh okay, that’s pretty cool. I don’t think Techtinium can do per-device settings at all, and (obviously) only works on my home WiFi. And the bulk of the DNS requests are just passed to cloudflare, so it’s better than using my ISP, but only by a bit.
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 😎
But it’s standard in other countries and legal in most states. It should just come with a warning on legality and give you the choice. It’s legal to buy a Ford that’s able to do 120 down a residential street, but Ford won’t get in trouble if I plaster a 10 year old when I do it.
Yeah… this is where the  “play one on TV” part comes in. This is the standard explanation for why they don’t support call recording, but it’s always felt like it was missing something to me 🤔
I wasn’t aware that it was standard functionality everywhere else… now I like my country even less! There have even been a handful of (usually paid) services that try to get around it; running the speakerphone and audio recorder simultaneously was my favorite, but there were subscription VoIP solutions with call recording, $80 Bluetooth answering device with onboard recording.
Either Samsung has a compelling legal reason, a clearly identified financial incentive, or they would just rather make more bloat nobody wants? Is it Google? Have they locked all US phones… can’t be because people import them occasionally.
IDK… I’d love to hear theories. 
Too old to know what a telemarketer is?
The nice lady who plugs the connections at the post office would give a telemarketer a stern talking-to and that’s that.
I’ve been happily running cheap Nokia phones for the last couple of years. It’s vanilla Android with very little bloat, no ads and years of security updates.
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-playYep, 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:
-
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.
-
Not officially sold in my country, only available rarelly in resellers for 200+ euro more than normally.
-
I have the Xiaomi 13T Pro, and I haven’t noticed any ads. You can buy wallpapers and ringtones, but there are also tons of free ones, and it doesn’t pop up advertisements for it except once to show the function is there. The new HyperOS although it looks the same and has similar functionality on the surface as MIUI, is way way better IMO.
Security and game center are gone, 2 of the top annoyances with MIUI IMO. HyperOS feels way snappier too. With MIUI the 13T Pro was slower than my old Motorola to turn pages in an e-book quickly. Now it’s super snappy. HyperOS just feels better somehow.
I installed Firefox with uBlock Origin, and chose it as default browser. I also uninstalled “Community Center” I think it was called. An app to use various Xiaomi services.
There are a couple preinstalled apps, I don’t recall if Facebook was among them, but they are easy to uninstall, it literally just takes a minute to uninstall.But maybe Motorola would be more to your liking, they use almost completely vanilla Android, with only an app to configure Motorola specific features. I did get some ads for printing services on my Motorola, but it seemed to be more a Google thing than Motorola. (Haven’t seen any such things on my Xiaomi 13T Pro)
And AFAIK you can still remove the search widget from the desktop on Motorola, something that apparently is no longer possible in completely vanilla Android. Reason enough for me to completely avoid Google Pixel phones. Why would they even want to do such a stupid thing?I don’t see any ads on a non-rooted Samsung.
If you’re seeing ads, its because you’re using apps that deliver ads.
Google services still work on Graphene, Lineage and DivestOS. With Graphene they run in a sandbox, with DivestOS they run in a user context.
I’ve done all of them. My google stuff works fine.
I don’t see any ads on a non-rooted Samsung.
If you’re seeing ads, its because you’re using apps that deliver ads.Wow, that’s interesting, I’ve actually been avoiding Samsung, because I’d heard there were sooo many ads even on top models.
I can see you have a decent amount of upvotes, so I guess that means it’s probably true.But does no ads include not nagging about Samsung services? AFAIK Samsung has many Google equivalent services they advertise.
Where’d you hear about flagship Samsung phones having ads?
As far as I know, the only Samsung models that feature ads tend to be the lower end series that get sold in markets like India.
Their ads are mostly self promotion and bloatware apps. In my device I had to turn off notifications for most of the pre installed apps.
A pre-installed app is not an ad, though.
Plus pretty much of of them can easily be disabled.
What if the pre installed app is netflix, hulu and bunch of useless things i do not use? Its not a bloatware for you but for me it is. Yes, i can disabled but not all of them. Some just outright disable the disable button. Bunch of services running in the background. Samsung is notorious for this kind of behaviour.
I received a budget galaxy tab from a lucky draw. Shit is disgusting with how many useless stuff in there. Planned to give it to my mother but i cant stomach how laggy it is with android 13. It is not a good experience at all. I had to use adb to remove all of them.
I’m still pissed my Google TV has a Netflix button and I pay for and use Netflix… and that shit is “integrated” so deeply it still loads up in the background even… anyway.
Do people really rationalize this crap away?
Can’t you remove Netflix on CCwGTv? The Play Store let me, and it doesn’t seem to reinstall.
No idea what a CCeGTv… oh, no, this is an NVSwGTv ;-) But that’s a super solid point! I was actually paying for it up until they got greedy, just objected to the button. But now that I can uninstall it there’s a 95% chance it won’t be able to launch in the background.
Now I just need to sharpie over the logo, and my mind will be at peace 🤤
Try using Button Mapper to remap the button if you want to, worth a try!
Pixel 6 Pro+GrapheneOS is my choice. Finding apps that dont need google play services is tough, but doable. Its insane how much of the android app ecosystem relies on google play services, especially for push notifications.
The easiest way to get rid of ads it’s a DNS level AdBlock, you can simply use the private DNS option of Android(with AdGuard or Mullvad free DNS resolvers), next step use alternative frontends for YouTube(NewPipe x SponsorBlock) and Music like Spotify and YT Music(xManager or ReVanced), there will be some apps what will keep showing ads like Facebook but at least it will be a minor amount.
If you want to be more sophisticated about Android AdBlocks I will suggest you to root your phone, but with these non-root options 90% of people will do pretty fine.
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).
Google Pixel with GrapheneOS.
If you are actually, really, honestly low on money, you may get something with DivestOS or LineageOS.
GrapheneOS is the gold standard, every Google certified Android is full of tracking and will show ads in places
Is this a US thing? I’ve never seen any ads within Android itself, or any Google app.
No me neither. But if you use ISP DNS, Google Chrome, Youtube, Google blablabla you might see ads.
This is not the biggest problem though, as all apps will gather data in you to improve those ads, no matter if you block them or not.
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).
Just taking the YouTube app off my home screen and replacing it with a Firefox shortcut has done wonders for my sanity. It’s really disorienting now, when I follow a YouTube link that opens up the app. All of a sudden it’s all ads and shorts and sponsors.
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.
Got it, that makes sense. Just wasn’t sure if Android had an option to only update per radio/device/adapter like you can in Windows and Linux.
For now, I’ll just switch it when I’m on the go. Thank you!
They will hate me but iPhone has BSD/XNU/openSTEP. Of course it may feel like a prison after Android. Either that or a Linux phone with Waydroid
I currently own a S23+ and had a OnePlus 6T before that and Nexus 5X before that. I wouldn’t be bothered by the Samsung bloat. You can uninstall nearly everything. Set the default apps you want to use and hide the rest. You have this configured quickly and then you will never be bothered by it again.
The default Pixel 8 launcher doesnt even allow you to remove the huge Google search widget, which bothers me a lot more. I find One UI pretty vanilla feeling to be honest. Don’t notice that much difference from my OnePlus 6T which had a fairly vanilla OS.
The S23+ is my dream. Big screen and flagship Snapdragon. The S23 ultra is overkill for me. Of course, if 1 needs the features that only the Ultra has, he should buy the Ultra.
I’m excited re the upcoming big phones but I won’t be :o if the S24 ultra will be the best big phone of 2024. It seems Samsung knows how to make 👍 big phones.
No ads on my Samsung a70 but there are preinstalled 3rd-party apps. I just disabled those that I haven’t needed.
There are some Samsung apps that I haven’t needed like Radio and Tips. There’s a not-so-easy way to remove those. But those never annoyed me so I won’t bother to remove those.
That one does seem to be getting a lot of attention lately. I just wish more phones offered on-device subtitles for phone calls and anything played through the device. Until another phone offers that I’m sticking with Pixel.
