I have had 3 Xiaomi phones over the years. Their proprietary bootloader-unlocker tool has always taken a good day or two of work to get the phone unlocked when I don't have adb tools /drivers installed from the get-go. Their utility gives me failures/errors/denials/"your social credit is too low" (i don't live in/near China) dozens and dozens of times before it finally decides to unlock my phone for me. I'm pretty sure my next phone won't be a Xiaomi, though it's hard to find sanely priced non-Chinese phones with good ROM coverage these days.
But why would you have to root and reflash it? Couldn't they, you know, respect their customer instead?
They respect their customer by selling hardware 50% off compared to Samsung and 80% off compared to apple. Having this with custom rom is a bargain imho.
How do you trust the hardware? Granted, how do you trust the hardware in any phone. But the risk may be higher if the entire production chain is in the one country with privacy/surveillance abuses.
Well you don't, but 1) no one can be trusted anyway. 2) one can analyze traffic after flashing to see if it is still phoning home. I won't expect it to, it's just too much hassle compared to doing it with software, just for sake of someone who flashed custom ROM. If you have real reasons to be worried about Chinese spying (like business/government work) then obviously you wouldn't buy any hardware like that anyway.
>Couldn't they, you know, respect their customer instead?
I think the phone vendors that do that are in the vast minority.
I don't know. I agree that it's not a customer friendly policy. But if your already stuck with a Xiaomi phone you have to either return it or bite the bullet, not much else you can do.
They're basically the only company allowing you to root a phone without loosing warranty. And it's not like other manufacturers come without FB installed as system app - yes, they're a bit worse on privacy by default, but it's not like they're the black sheep within a pile of innocents.
Like which other manufacturer of the size and scale of Xiaomi? Every single one of them has locked bootloaders, Samsung even bundles ads, and all of them without fail use Google Play Services and all kinds of other proprietary nonsense that can and maybe should be categorized as spyware.
Unfortunately Google is making it much harder to run ROMs now due to the new Safety-Net bootloader checks. You'll no longer to be able to use many bank apps (or even the McDonalds app!).
You can never be sure what's hiding in the hardware, if you already don't trust the software.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to do but the power button doesn't work anymore so if I turn it off, there's no way to bring it back to life.