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Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

Think how bad the market got. Today we have preinstalled garbage apps like LinkedIn, garbage apps mandated to be preinstalled by the government, ads, cloud accounts, notifications spam, telemetry. This is not only Chinese smartphones, for example Samsung also plays this game. I assume there are Chinese backdoors, American backdoors and national government backdoors on almost every phone.

And there seems to be no way to buy a "free" smartphone without Google Services and telemetry below $250. Why 250? Because free OS have multiple bugs and issues and it is not rational to pay more than that.

I am considering two options, one, try to clean up and patch the firmware for a cheap smartphone (remove almost everything proprietary including Google Services, Unrusted Execution Environment, except for basic GUI and launcher), or two, port something like Lineage OS to my phone. Also I need to examine the network traffic and scan for potential weak points like SUID binaries. It is scary to think how much time I will have to waste for this.

Also, it is pretty stupid, in my opinion, to make an OS not based on Android, for example, use Qt for GUI, because there will be no apps for it.

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Not sure what timescale you're referring to when you're talking about "how bad the market got" and "today", but back around 2012 I got my first and last Samsung smartphone, must have been a Galaxy 3 or something, that had all of those problematic things too.

It seems like this starting to happen as soon as apps were installable on phones, even iPhones came (and still comes) with a ton of apps you cannot remove regardless of how little you use them. Android, because of the whole OEM story, of course is much worse, but I don't feel like any of what you share is new, been going on for decades at this point.

And operators preloading questionable stuff is a much older practice than post-iPhone smartphones. If you had a feature phone in the 2000's, the operator would have customised it one way or another. The iPhone was revolutionary in how much Apple forced the network operators to relinquish control.

> The iPhone was revolutionary in how much Apple forced the network operators to relinquish control

And if AT&T wasn't as desperate to gain market share, we could have had a different story. Both Verizon and Sprint refused the iPhone because they didn't want to give up control. The bloatware was an important piece, but Apple also mandated control over OTA updates which the carriers did not want to relinquish either. The carriers were also opposed to the phone being sold in Apple stores.

I can remember Verizon being sued for forcing device makers to disable the ability to transfer files from feature phones to computers over Bluetooth, because they charged a per file fee to transfer files with their own proprietary software.

The funniest thing Verizon did was start their own bank. They wanted to create a new payment option on everyone's phone using NFC. Then bill and process payments via your existing telephone bill. Front runner app before Apple/Samsung/Google Pay services and potentially Visa/MC market disruption for insane profits.

Verizon called it ISIS

My OG moto droid was pretty clean back in ~2009 or so, but even then there was plenty of sketchy carrier installed bloatware. Even my blackberry before that, feature phones even before that, had the carrier crap on it.

Part of why iPhone was such a breath of fresh air at the time it released. There was no carrier bloatware. Apple didn't allow it. Verizon turned down the iPhone because they would not agree to the no carrier branding and did not want to give Apple control over updates.

It's only gotten worse since then, but yeah its always been a thing.

At least with iPhone, there's still no carrier bloat, no facebook/meta, no linkedin, etc.

I'm not sure why Samsung continues to allow it either, they are also big enough to bully the carriers they could just as easily pull an Apple and kick all the spam off their phones, at least for the flagship models.

You can delete almost all apps on iOS except the obviously core apps that are necessary for it to function.

Thanks to the EU! They really fixed a lot of things about the iPhone, a shame not every fix went everywhere like core app removals did though.

You can now. You couldn't do this in the early versions of iOS.

On early versions of Android, you had to give an application every permission it wanted, or you couldn't install it at all.

You can. I’ve removed Apple Music and Apple Maps (seriously, who uses that?) but apple makes extra sure most things are more annoying to use without maps. Calendar app with an address? Default to opening in Apple Maps which is missing so error message (twice). Find my? Also open in apple maps with missing app error message. Even with Google Maps set as default systemwide.

Yup. Even though it requires an explicit user action to make Chrome your default browser, don't worry, next time you click on a link, Apple will pop up a dialog saying that your default has changed, and your options are "Use Safari", or "Keep using Chrome", and guess what the default option is?

> even iPhones came (and still comes) with a ton of apps you cannot remove regardless of how little you use them

You see, the user you replied to spoke in the present tense, and is addressing the “(and still comes with)” portion of the original comment.

And they added this ability a DECADE ago.

Some people want so badly for the iPhone to be bad and only bought by sheep as a fashion accessory to signal to their wealth to their peers.

I wish that was the same for MacOS as well. I don't need the TV app...

> even iPhones came (and still comes) with a ton of apps you cannot remove regardless of how little you use them.

While a lot of the code that apps rely on is part of the OS frameworks, these days you can 'remove' most of the apps on an iPhone if you want.

That said, I would also argue that there's a difference between not being able to remove "Calendar" on iOS and not being able to remove "LinkedIn" on Android.

I can't remember if it was Samsung or something, but one of the providers shipped Android tablets with a custom-but-default keyboard which sent ALL your keystrokes back to the provider. That was a big nail in the Android coffin for me.

Remember the days of Facebook being preinstalled on Android devices with root permissions and being non removable?

You couldn't even revoke permission to access the camera and Mic. It had permission to do literally anything, and you couldn't change it or remove it.

Guess what?

https://x.com/mysk_co/status/1747604112231776364?s=20

And before it was (smart)phones, it was PCs. The New York Times was running items on spyware and nagware on PCs in the early aughts.

PC is easier to fix.

True, however:

1. The game's been played for a long time. Which was my principle point.

2. PCs were then, Smartphones are now. The story's getting worse, not better. As you note, in the case of a PC the problem is easier fix, e.g., now is worse.

3. Unless there is direct and violent pushback, expect to see this shit forever.

4. The best solution during aughts for PC crapware was to wipe and install Linux. Now it's to wipe and install a free mobile OS such as Graphene. In both cases, this is beyond the ken or capabilities of 95%+ of the population.

Apple changed that years ago, what apps can’t you remove from an iPhone?

You can't remove the Phone app from an iPad in iPadOS 26. Even when the iPad in question has no cellular functionality. The best you can do is remove the icon, but you get a dialog telling you it won't be removed.

Which is stupid as I don't want my iPad to be getting every voice mail and imessage and so on that my phone does. They are different devices and serve different purposes. My iPad is totally a media consumption device and I have no interest in it being integrated into my phone's communication functions.

I own both devices, and I turn phone call and text forwarding off in settings on my phone, and shut down iMessage on the iPad. Pretty easy.

You're not my tech support person so I'm not going to get into it deeply, but I don't mean the phone option of "Calls on Other Devices" (which is off on my phone) or the Messages option of "Text Message Forwarding" (which only has my Macs listed.) I mean that whenever I get a voice mail on a call it shows up as an alert on my iPad and Messages receives copies of various text messages, I think via iCloud as this happens when my iPad is at home and I am miles away with my phone at the office.

You should all be aware that Lenovo (the owner of Motorola Mobility) has some dark moments in its past.

https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty...

Asus does this on many of their consumer motherboards now, too.

Asus has been doing it since before that article was written. It's amazing that a "put rootkit here" Windows feature has been around for so long.

The Gigabyte motherboard on my system does this as well. I turned it off immediately, of course.

Although you will have to buy a used phone in order to pay less than 250$, it seems like GrapheneOS is the best solution for that problem. Not optimal, but the best among what we have.

I was thinking the same. But it worries me that these news about Motorola in particular doing shady shit. I was looking forward to the upcoming GrapheneOS/Motorola partnership :(

How about the FairPhone running /e/os (which is de-googled)? You can buy it preinstalled directly from Murena.

Although this is not at your target price point. But /e/os can be used on hundreds of android phones (as opposed to GrapheneOS). So you can probably install it on your current phone

https://doc.e.foundation/devices

Having no GMS implementation at all or using microG introduces compatibility issues for a lot of proprietary software. GrapheneOS is the only ROM which supports running GMS in an isolated manner, without giving it direct access to privileged system APIs such as geolocation (which is sent to Google just because they can).

graphene will still be a separate OS outside of Motorola's control.

GrapheneOS team is helping Motorola build secure phones to spec. but Motorola won't have some special bloated flavor of GrapheneOS installed

Yes but just barely.

The pixel 9a was on offer recently here in Spain for 319€ and that includes 21% tax. At major chain called media markt. That phone is one of the few supported by grapheneos.

Cheap smartphone path is harder and harder. Unfortunately the pixel series is easiest but comes in double they number for unlocking the bootloader and flashing lineage, etc.

Xiaomi has been ironically the pioneer in this field, but their phones are inaccessible in the USA assuming you’re USA based. The mediatek chipset also is more fun for this over Qualcomm.

Besides suid binaries, the radio firmware and subsequent radios for WiFi and Bluetooth do give out a lot of information and are open to exploitation.

The most opaque and privileged attack surface is often the modem/baseband and vendor diagnostic stack and allow carriers to process local side AT commands.

Qualcomm is more documented, though there are fun discoveries on mediatek I’ve made just using binwalk.

> Xiaomi has been ironically the pioneer in this field, but their phones are inaccessible in the USA assuming you’re USA based

Xiaomi has virtually stopped allowing users to unlock their bootloaders. They only allow 2000 device unlocks per day, which resets every day at 00:00 Beijing time. You can set an alarm and press the unlock button exactly at 00:00 Beijing time, only to get frozen out due to the thundering herd effect and fail to secure an unlock quota. Then, when you try again at 00:01, you just get the dreaded "quota limit reached, try again tomorrow" message.

That sucks, before it was a one week countdown timer.

If the modem cannot access main memory and CPU then it's ok.

The paranoia is completely warranted, but there is a solution.

Just root your Android phone and put a custom ROM like LineageOS etc

If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself, I have tried but failed twice now.

I recently spent twenty minutes sitting outside of an MLB stadium because MLB decided they needed the same level of play protection as a foreign banking app and it refused to work on my friend's LineageOS phone.

We only got in by installing the app on my Sony and him signing into his account. They charge a fee now to get paper tickets from the box office.

Brutal. I had a similarly annoying experience recently, where in order to enter my local big arena for a concert, the TicketMaster app was not enough. I had to step out of the entrance line to download the _arena-specific_ TicketMaster app to access my tickets. I hate the ticket systems that dominate the market, we deserve better.

... and you continue to let them abuse you.

Give a solution

Don't give your money to these places? HSBC won't let me use my rooted phone either, so guess who lost my business?

Next time we will go to the professional baseball stadium across the street instead.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want this stop, you gotta stop using these services, even if it means sacrificing a hobby.

If, on the other hand, you care more about your hobby than these quirks annoy you, than by all means, go right ahead.

I'd rather try and get the executives, product managers, and engineers who implemented it fired and elect politicians that will make policies like that illegal.

I could go to a baseball game last year and have been able to for decades. The march to enshittification isn't inevitable. Otherwise there will be no hobbies in the future, and I'll be hoarding my money to just sit in my house doing nothing.

> I'd rather try and get the executives, product managers, and engineers who implemented it fired

How has that been working out for you? Apparently you have some avenue to apply pressure for that, other than the obvious one of not buying the tickets.

Why should anybody fire them, given that their actions have caused no actual harm to the bottom line? Obviously the ticket buyers don't care, so why should management or owners care?

> and elect politicians that will make policies like that illegal.

Sounds great. Who do I vote for?

I agree with you in principle, but reality is far and away from this, unfortunately. These types of companies need an incentive to change their ways, and money is the only language they know how to speak—and in “they” I’m including all the executives, product managers, engineers and, ESPECIALLY, the politicians you spoke about. Money will always trump morals when it comes to companies that voluntarily elect to put such shady deals in practice.

People would quit the sport before to stop. They won't.

Lobby the government for providing basic guarantees for ease of access in digital environment. Some political factions like the Pirate Party in EU is already working on acts like Digital Fairness Act to prevent such monopolies.

You can have (or provide) a phone that's specifically for those use cases and you can turn it off for actual communication.

Boycott.

Lawsuit.

Organise.

Publicise.

Shame.

Stop buying their tickets.

The solution is to not buy the tickets

The solution is to quit frequenting places that abuse you like this.

But it seems you LIKE being abused.

It's not necessarily enjoying it. OP evidently just thinks the trade-off is worth it. Some people like baseball more than researching which phone they can buy, which one has an unlockable bootloader, and which is supported (even unofficially) by LineageOS.

That's fine. They don't have to. Their solution can be calling their local representative and complaining that the stadium their city is paying for, is locking them out.

I had forgotten that we are paying billionaires to own stadia. Cannot find funding for schools or libraries but we can sure pay someone who doesn't need the money so they can build a monument to their own ego.

1) My phone is not officially supported by LineageOS so I will have to port it first.

2) I did not analyze LineageOS yet and how it is different from stock Android, so I need to go through complete diff.

> If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself

My goal is to have an open source system that is under my full control and doesn't play tricks on my by sending telemetry or collecting forensic databases. Because now I cannot even connect the phone to Internet and it is not as useful as it could be.

I’d assume that with such a level of required inspection, you also have quite some security requirements. I’d say at that level nothing works as well as GrapheneOS (though you have to either delay security updates or accept temporarily closed source (they get access to the code only in exchange for not publishing it until X days or something) updates, thanks Google). As that currently requires a Google phone, the only way to get close to your price target would be buying it used.

I wonder if you could ask Opus 4.7 to port LineageOS for your phone. The LLM must’ve had plenty of training data from the gazillion LineageOS ports for other devices, so perhaps it might actually work (or brick your device).

Easier said than done in the US. Even of the phones that allow for rooting (which is few and far between these days) you're at the complete mercy of the carrier for whether or not that ability is actually available to you. Even if the gracious lords may allow it, you have to engage in a long and drawn out Byzantine rite just for the privilege. Currently sitting on a Pixel 10 that will not let me have root.

Give me a Linux phone with halfway decent modem drivers, or give me death.

If you do not update the phone, chances are high that there is some Linux vulnerability you could expoloit. The privileged vendor software also can have vulnerabilities. For example, here [1] researches hacked the phone with Verified Boot using a boot logo parsing error.

My impression that you should treat your phone as something that can be hacked any moment and not store anything important there.

[1] https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2024/SSTIC-actes/when_vendo...

> Currently sitting on a Pixel 10 that will not let me have root.

Stop buying phones from Verizon?

Not a Verizon phone.

That's surprising. Is this after you've paid it off? I thought only Verizon did this after the phone is paid off.

My biggest obstacle to de-Googling is the GBoard keyboard of all things. There's really no good open source alternative that even comes close.

I was in the same boat until a year ago or so. FUTO^[1] finally provided a good text prediction/correction pair + that simply better feeling the Gboard has^[2].

[1]: https://keyboard.futo.org/

[2]: I never investigated this, so I always assumed that GBoard predicted what key I wanted to press when close to two letters. With FOSS keyboards, with a physically identical layout, I tended to make way more mistakes.

I find GBoard to remain superior in multilingual typing, futo just can't seem to be able to switch to other languages consistently, even with the multilingual option enabled,

it's also not as good at "recovering" from typing too many letters (Gboard sometimes adequately completes with likely shorter words)

Have you tried the FUTO keyboard? I actually find I prefer it to gboard now.

https://keyboard.futo.org/

I don't think I ever tried this one. I think I tried every keyboard on F-Droid but apparently FUTO isn't in the main F-Droid repo. I'm liking it so far. I'm a swipe typer and on most keyboards the swipe functionality is much worse than GBoard but this one seems to work pretty well. I'm going to try it for a while, thanks for the suggestion!

Gboard is somehow still the best, the native android keyboard is hardly usable. I use it on GrapheneOS, but with network permissions removed. Haven't had an issue so far

Evidently some disagree, but I'm on your side. Biggest reason I didn't immediately think of "But what would I use for a keyboard" is my Q25 has on built-in.

UnifiedPush, F-Droid, a GMaps webview (arguably cheating, but I'm not RMS), NewPipe or Invidious are all good-enough alternatives, but I remember struggling to find a keyboard that felt right when I was using a Pixel 2 for a fortnight.

I think I went with the oldest Fleksy or Minuum APK I could find (from a reputable source), as they were fine without GApps.

Though I'd also like to call out the fact that AOSP has talkback, the accessibility service built-in, but there's no AOSP TTS engine to use it with. This is especially noticable when trying to use any spoken directions in OSMAnd, as it requires a TTS engine to use that function.

The only reason it's not the dumbest thing about Google's stewardship of AOSP is that I'm not sight impaired - as it stands, the multi-trillion-dollar corporation ripping out the built-in SIP client in their phone OS takes that prize

Heliboard is an option. No gesture typing out of the box but you can install an external library for that and it works good.

I do not type a lot on the phone (I own a laptop), so no worries.

Do the support the razr?

Re: de-Googling yourself:

Goldman Sachs paid $6 million to try to get its [soon-to-be] former chief counsel Kathryn Ruemmler's Google search results highlighting her close friendship and many-years-long association with Jeffrey Epstein off the first few pages of results.

Today, the first result on the first page of a Google search for her is the opening paragraph of her Wikipedia biography:

>Kathryn H. Ruemmler (born April 19, 1971) is an American attorney who was principal deputy White House counsel and then White House Counsel to President Barack Obama.[1] Previously a partner at Latham and Watkins co-chairing its white-collar defense group,[2] Ruemmler joined Goldman Sachs in 2020 and was Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel.[3] She announced her resignation from this position in February 2026, effective at the end of June, over her links to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.[4][5][6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Ruemmler

>How a Secretive Firm Tried (and Failed) to Fix an Epstein Friend’s Tattered Image

https://archive.ph/Biztm

I'm not sure what your point is.

Wrote tomaytotomato 3 hours ago:

>If you want a stretch goal try and de-Google yourself, I have tried but failed twice now.

My point is that even with unlimited resources it's impossible to de-Google yourself.

De-Googling (in this context at least) means not running Google software on your phone. No Google Play Services always running in the background, plus not using Google apps.

Ah. I misinterpreted "de-Googling." It is refreshing, though, to know that the cranky folks of HN still downvote honest mistakes.

Yes as BenjiWiebe said.

I was meaning more removing your reliance on Google in your life for search, photos, entertainment.

You can start small with Duckduckgo etc.

"I assume [...] backdoors" Its more of a frontdoor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_Application_Toolkit

Pinephone is being sold for 200 with included dock.

On that last point, GNOME/Gtk/Adwaita apps generally function really well on small screen sizes. The design language naturally suits it, and in my experience most apps will even make some layout adjustments where they're needed when resized to ~phone screen dimensions.

Anecdotally, out of the ~50 or so I have installed right now on my laptop, which covers the basic calculator/calendar/contacts/etc., and also things like file compression, torrenting, a Mastodon client, RSS reader, and so on, all of them are ready to use on a phone.

Alas, if only there was a (reasonably priced + fully functional) phone that could use them.

I assume the number of GTK apps is even less than the number of apps in F-Droid.

> Think how bad the market got.

How bad it's always been? Go find a Windows Recovery image for a Sony Vaio from the 2000s. Prepackaged shitware has always been a thing. I read this article and thought "wow someone finally matched an old Vaio."

That said, I want to hear a statement from Motorola on this. The GrapheneOS phones they announced a few months ago were going to be my "out" from this kind of nonsense. I want confirmation that I'll be able to trust them when it finally gets released.

I'm on the Pixel GoS for quite a while and I'm confident this Motorola will be a secure device without bloatware in the same way current GoS is.

Their user base wouldn't ever trust them again if anything shady happened - there's enough trolls and French prowling on the perimeter already.

Buddy, there has been an un-removable Facebook app on literally every version of Android right from the very beginning. Not every handheld model for sure, but at least one model in every generation from the very beginning has had Facebook and other apps burned indelibly into the operating system.

Before we even had smartphones, your flip phone came with utterly indelible versions of Facebook and others.

And you'll be shocked to hear this I'm sure, but the very lowest level code that governs the radio in your phone is legally mandated to be managed by your service provider, and essentially always has been.

None of this is new. Not in the slightest. It's not even worse nowadays except that the apps themselves got more malicious. There aren't more baked in apps than before, and they aren't any more un-removable. The most important code on your device isn't yours, it never has been.

In the US DMCA provides "frigate harbor" for the the British consul, etc., etc. IF they've managed to get you to install the "app" instead of utilizing something preinstalled on the phone (a uh errr... web browser?). Potential law migrants banned by law!

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