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Comment by pkrefta | Hacker News Reader

Holy moly O_o.

Those kind of stories are keeping me back from buying any Android devices in nearest future. Somebody might say that I can flash it with clean Android ROM but that's great for people who have too much time :-)

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What other options do you have if you want a smartphone? I severely doubt that other devices (most notably Apple) are any better. I think that if you don't want this to happen you have to buy a dumbphone, which may or may not be an option for some people.

The Librem 5 just passed its crowd-funding goal[1]. That's what I'm getting for my next phone.

[1]: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

I'd settle for a dumbphone with WhatsApp and a solid browser. I miss having to only recharge once a week.

To get a solid browser with a decent experience though you're going to pretty much need most of a smart phone's performance anyways and most of the power drain because you'll probably want a good screen and decent performance on the browser so a good processor too. Dumb phones lasted so long because they had really low power processors and beyond texting and calls there was no reason to constantly interact with them so they could be in a really low power state 90% of the time.

While I agree that noone should need to flash their device just to have basic sane privacy, I think saying "for people who have too much time" is pretty insulting for us that do care about our privacy and invested that time.

Again it shouldn't be necessary to do this and I won't expect anyone to do this, but I don't see why you have to insinuate that only people with too much time would do this...

You could make the "too much time" argument about reinstalling Windows or installing Linux when you get a device. Flashing may take some extra time, but it's not harder than normal expected device maintenance usually.

"expected device maintenance" by whom?

Anecdata, but 90% of people I know have never installed Linux (and the few times I've had to try and find recovery discs, going to bet reinstalling Windows is at about the same percentage), and not sure I know anyone who's flashed a new ROM on Android.

I'm genuinely curious as to where this expectation that everyone should be au fait with OS tinkering comes from?

I didn't say everyone, the audience on HN is far from 'everyone.'

My everyone could easily encompass the HN audience too - there's this stock assumption (especially if you're a developer or tech inclined) that other techies are always tinkering and optimising. Buying a consumer electronics product and not having to mess around with it should be the standard (with an option to tinker if you so wish), whether you read HN or not.

It doesn't take that long to flash a ROM though.

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