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Comment by Youden | Hacker News Reader

I think this looks like a better deal when you compare it to the flagships but you have to remember that flagship prices have been exploding and midrange has thriving competition.

For $280, right this second, you can buy a Pocophone F1 from Amazon which has essentially the same size screen as the Pixel 3 XL, 6GB RAM, an SD845, an SD card slot and decent support from Xiaomi so far. Hell, the beastly Razer Phone 2 is only $499 right now and has some crazy specs relative to the 3a XL.

I know I'm dreaming but Google needs to get back to what made it great in the first place: Put flagship specs into midrange priced phones.

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That said, a lot of people (myself included) buy Google flagship phones because they get Android OS and Google Service upgrades (like Assistant) the fastest. Many of us have been burned by other Android vendors who put a layer of turd on top of stock Android.

That's a good point, but there are other vendors, like the reborn Nokia, that use stock Android One, no crap on top. And these come with the latest stock Google Android OS, (oreo, milkshake, fries, whatever the latest one is) and upgrades.

Pocophone F1?

Sure, if you want to trust all your most personal info to Xiaomi. I don't know any security folks who consider that a rational choice anymore. I don't want Beijing having that info on me, plus the ability to surveil me at any time.

It is supported by LineageOS, at least[1]. I have been using one as a daily driver for the past week, and though the hardware is nice otherwise, the band support in the US is poor.

1: https://download.lineageos.org/beryllium

Here's how I look at it:

Google - Wants my data, willing to play the long game, has the scale to properly support security updates

Third party US manufacturers - Wants my data, playing the short game, suspect UI choices

Chinese manufacturers - Wants my data, suspect UI choices, unknown motives with regard to data privacy

Open source OSs - High data privacy, absolutely controllable OS

Weighting between the 4, my threat model prefers a Google phone, despite the privacy downside. Google does creepy things, but ultimately they don't really care if a power user turns off tracking: they only care if everyone turns off tracking.

There's also this company called "Apple" you might want to look into, if privacy is relevant to you. ;)

You have to trust them, though.

They sayy they care about privacy and yes, they make most money on selling devices and not on advertisement, but who guarantees that is not to change any moment?

And aren't they allready in the advertisement buisness as well? So also have a motive for getting and evaluating all your data?

No root. I prefer owning things to leasing them.

Is there actual evidence of wrongdoing on Xiaomi's part? If they're abusing my data it should be trivial to verify by MITMing my device. Can you point to someone who has done this and found something?

Forgive me if I don't take your word for it. There's been a lot of anti-anything-that-isnt-america news going around lately.

Anyhow, as another poster points out, it has LineageOS support, which is what I use.

You essentially pay for the software upgrade gurrantee by Google.

The point of a flagship phone is to push the envelope, not compete with midrange devices. If someone else is filling the midrange niche better than Google I don't really see a problem, buy that phone instead. Google can better differentiate with a flagship and by doing so pushes the rest of the industry forward on features. These features that were costly to develop will later propagate to midrange.

The Pixel camera is the one feature that's not available in other mid-range devices.

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