Hacker News Reader

Comment by ugjka | Hacker News Reader

No, Xiaomi is crazier, they send something every 5 seconds once the phone is awake and every app of their built in app suite will do the same. I've observed this with a dns filter app. I've owned many phones and I've never seen anything this crazy

View on HN

"Both iOS and Android...transmit telemetry data to their motherships even when a user hasn’t logged in or has explicitly configured privacy settings to opt out of such collection. Both OSes also send data to Apple and Google when a user does simple things such as inserting a SIM card or browsing the handset settings screen. Even when idle, each device connects to its back-end server on average every 4.5 minutes...In the US alone, Android collectively gathers about 1.3TB of data every 12 hours. During the same period, iOS collects about 5.8GB."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/android-sends-20x-mo...

1.3TB? Their research seems flawed because I'd notice this on my phone bill.

The quote above made it a bit unclear, they measured it at 1MB vs 52kB per device:

> When idle, Android sends roughly 1MB of data to Google every 12 hours, compared with iOS sending Apple about 52KB over the same period. In the US alone, Android collectively gathers about 1.3TB of data every 12 hours. During the same period, iOS collects about 5.8GB.

They said collectively, meaning across the entire fleet of phones deployed.

Yeah their android skin is literal malware (and I don't say that lightly, it is impossible to get rid of most of the apps, it installs random stuff constantly, will stop some features from working if you disable unrelated stuff, and is filled with ads). It also has that weird "chinese sales app" aesthetic that is common to banggood, AliExpress and even creality cloud. But you can't beat the price for the hardware, and it's super straight forward to just wipe out the OEM ROM since they allow for bootloader unlocking.

The funny thing you can't block the requests unless you want to drain the battery because ...behold... there is no backoff logic when the connection fails so it goes into an infinite loop lol

The custom roms were not an option since i needed google's safety net feature but i got a different phone eventually

fake news

Right, buy a Xiaomi phone and install this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dnsfilter.andr...

thanks

Reply on news.ycombinator.com