So, I just learned about this the very, very hard way. After buying a second hand S10 and finding american ones can’t be unlocked, traveling 4 hours to buy another one after much research, much annoyances to unlock it (samsung requires you to be online, which I didn’t know) and testing multiple ROMs, I finally read this page more properly https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/beyond1lte/ which says “known quirks: IMS”. I thought it was just something like dolby sound.
What it means is that it doesn’t suport VoLTE and most currently used phone systems. Samsung made their proprietary mess, unlike most other developers, which means it will probably never have an open source version.
And that applies to ALL modern samsung phones. I had samsung phone before with a custom OS, but didn’t realize because VoLTE wasn’t mandatory back then. Now it is here in Australia, and many countries. So if you ever plan to buy a samsung phone to degoogle it, know that it won’t make phone calls. SMS and mobile data also doesn’t work.
I don’t know how I missed this. It should be talked more often given how popular samsung is. There should always be a warning “YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO MAKE PHONE CALLS IN THE FUTURE IF YOU CONTINUE”.
S10 was the last decent phone ever made (for me). Not too big, SD card, headphone jack (one of the most important things for me), good camera, etc, etc… That’s why I was so persistent to find one to degoogle.
So I’m stuck with my amazingly shitty pixel 5 (and other ones are even worse for me). And considering the possibility of a life without smartphones at all, since this is a losing battle. Mainstream doesn’t care and evil companies have every incentive to kill freedom. It has been getting really bad and it will just get worse. But anyway… this post is not about this.
Be warned, if you care about freedom don’t ever buy samsung again. Not because they are evil (they are), but because you won’t be able to make phone calls on your “phone”.
Samsung has always been hostile af
An One UI 8.5 locks down the bootloader
I’ve always loved Notes and Ultra flagships, but I don’t want to rep such a lousy OEM
They were always hostile, but it was possible. And once you finish the long and stressful fight with samsung for the control of your phone, you are left with a great phone in your hands. Depending who you ask, it was worthy.
But now they finally made it impossible. They always wanted to do this, and finally succeeded. They “won” the battle.
Back in the day we used to argue that the dream phone was Samsung hardware running AOSP, as with the S4 Google Play Edition.
And the new UI sucks hard. I hate it. But at least it’s a work phone paid for by work and but my problem after hours…
It really is time for serious linux phones
I had a Note 3, Note 4, S9+, S21u, S24u, My wife/kids have Note 3, s9+, s23u, A series and a tab 4.
I’ve had Samsung 360 cameras, tv’s, galaxy watches
It stops here.
The biggest thing i’m going to miss is a decent camera. I don’t feel like carying around a 5x camera everywhere I go and most of the phones i’m looking at are kinda crap for cameras
Yup. I bought a camera after google play killing my s21 ultra.
Paid 800 dollars for the camera. It’s inferior to the old s21 in almost every way, and I could get one for 300 dollars. Inferior as in a camera, not even considering how the s21 is great as a gaming phone, computer, etc. Plus the camera is fragile and bigger, so I never carry it, so it’s never there when I need to capture something nice.
It’s weird how hardware wise we reached such an amazing point, but the software has enshitified to levels I would never even imagine.
We have to choose between being a slave of samsung/google or let go of amazing hardware. But they can only afford to make such amazing stuff precisely because of their evil practices. So it will get worse. Hardware will become more amazing, the more evil these companies get.
I used to have a Pentax that would fit in an Altoids tin. Absolutely inferior to anything I have now, but I kinda miss it now.
My brother in christ, if you cannot control the software, then you never truly had the hardware in the first place.
Yes and no. If you never connect the ultra series to the internet, you still have some great cameras and a great (offline) video game, and even a great gps and other things.
You don’t have a “phone” as samsung sold. But phones are nowadays much more than that.
Like the old film cameras. It didn’t matter how the company wanted you to use them. But yeah, it’s still something we should fight against. In may case for instance I need connection, so for the main purpose, being a phone, I don’t have the hardware because I don’t control the software.
Yeah, technology enshittification as a whole has definitely picked up the last few years, and I find myself compromising more and more as the field of reasonable options gets narrower.
Like you, I used to only go for phones with SD card and headphone jack support. Now, I’m on a (new but not bought from Google) Pixel 9 Fold with GrapheneOS using a DAC adapter to still have wired audio and a more deliberate storage management system to compensate for not having SD cards. (Unlike you, I need a big screen for spreadsheets and such.)
I purposely bought the newest phone I could within my budget, because I’m planning for Android to be completely unviable the next time I need to upgrade, and I want to give Linux phones as much time to mature as possible before I inevitably migrate.
It seems offline tech is going to be the last bastion of safety sooner rather than later, so I’m in various stages of migrating my digital life offline. Linux over Windows. Keepass, LibreOffice, Obsidian, etc. + Syncthing over cloud options. Keeping off-site backups with friends and family instead of in the cloud. Keeping local DRM-free media. It’s time-consuming but rewarding. I should have done it all way sooner.
I have been on the offline open source route for many years. I don’t even see it as time consuming. It’s so much better than relying on cloud services that it pays off. I lost count of the situations where needing cloud would have been bad. But maybe I trained myself that way, because I never liked the “cloud” idea, my data out of my control.
But the hardware to run that and the options to do that will become more and more impossible. At least on mobiles.
There will come a day when Syncthing won’t work anymore on android, because of “security” (the terrorists could send files to your phone and kill children!).
Funnily enough, I’ve thought of the cloud as “someone else’s computer” from the beginning and shun using it more than everyone else I know, but I was just getting into the space when Gmail and Chrome were the hot new things, each gradual step into the ecosystem didn’t feel like a big concession, and I was too young to know to question the convenience.
In case it wasn’t clear, reversing those two decades of inertia and tech debt is what I was referring to as the time-consuming bit. So far, what I’ve finished switching over is actually quite nice to use.
And yes, I dread the day even the fallback options start getting killed off. It’s always one bad law away.
Kind of similar. Yeah, replacing everything took me a long time too and a lot of research. And I was one of the first gmail users, had dropbox account when no one knew what it was, etc etc, so I was pretty stuck. I was all google when I believed their “do not be evil” lies.
But I started the move very early too, after Snowden leaked the PRISM crimes. Back then I thought everyone would do the same and try to rely less on the cloud or, at least, stop using american companies. And oh boy, was I wrong…
If I had waited I imagine it would be a lot more difficult. I always kept my mp3, movies, porn, etc offline, but it was still easy to rely on gmail, youtube, google maps etc.
Anyway, good on you. You will find it surprising that you ever thought it was difficult after you’ve been detoxed for a while and end up being exposed to google products again. It will make you wonder how anyone actually put up with it.
Thanks! I assume you’re in Australia from your instance. I’m in the US. On top of using American companies just being a given here, let’s just say the coverage of Snowden in 2013 was inadequate in my circles at the time.
Did they even mention it back then in your country?
If they did, I imagine the news were more in the line of “a traitor just put our whole country in the hands of terrorists, what can YOU do to keep your children safe?”
Here in the united states of the south we get a lot of that. “terrorists in the streets protesting against the poor israelis killing people. is YOUR child safe?”. It must be even worse for you.
Although even the rest of the world didn’t comment much on that. I was in Brazil back then, and there was really not much on the media, even though there were emails of the president of the time shown to be spied by the US. I thought the whole world would go crazy and quickly everyone forgot.
Hell, not even an orange menace waging war against enemies and allies all the time is enough for people to do something…
Such a pity. I really enjoyed the first few galaxy notes I had back in the day. S pens were really useful for desktop mode on websites.
Of course this was once the fuckery stock os had been replaced with something better from XDA forums.
But Samsung was dead to me long ago.
Thanks for letting us know. I was thinking of getting a used Galaxy S9 or S10 for a degoogled Lineage OS phone. Now, it looks like the Pixels are the only modern phones that are compatible with this. That’s a pretty sad state of affairs, I’d say.
I am seriously hoping to be able to ditch Android entirely for something like post-market OS, Linux, in the future. And we’ll be taking a look at what phones are supported when buying my next one.
I hope we’ll have next-gen linuxphones before 2G gets fully phased out in the EU…
You are lucky. Here not even 3G or 4G works anymore. If it doesn’t have VoLTE it doesn’t work. It started this year.
New hosts/adblock/pihole/adguard filter/rule:
#GOOGLE=============================== 0.0.0.0 google.com 0.0.0.0 googleusercontent.com 0.0.0.0 googleapis.com 0.0.0.0 gstatic.com 0.0.0.0 android.com 0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com 0.0.0.0 googlehosted.com 0.0.0.0 googletagmanager.com 0.0.0.0 googleadservices.com 0.0.0.0 pki.googPhone now degoogled.
That won’t get rid of the google/samsung crap constantly running on your phone and trying to phone home.
I tried on the american s10. Most unnecessary google and samsung stuff is disabled or blocked. The phone hangs on almost everything. Every time you try to open something, do something, it hangs. It becomes unusable. Spyware is an integral part of modern mainstream systems.
Do you use this yourself? I wonder how much stuff breaks if you use it.
Also YouTube URLs are conspicuously missing…
Indeed it breaks everything. I’ve only it tried it for a couple of days. It’s just an extreme example of degoogling. But if you wish to really degoogle, this would be a small part of the effort. The list is mostly what I picked up of google apps calling home in the background in my phone. I didn’t include youtube because I don’t have the youtube app installed on my phone, so it’s not calling home.
Dumbphones are just better IMO
Who makes phe calls anyways nowadays?
But yes: The best phones for degoogling are the Google phones.
Technically, the brands that offer already degoogled android (fairphone) or Linux directly (jolla) are better.
Ethically, yes.
Technologically, no. By magnitudes.
For security and privacy (by extension), Graphene is king.
For freedom, Graphene has some lacking things.
what are the fairphone and Jolla phones lacking?
And how do you people talk to other people? Whatsapp? Apparently that’s how it is in brazil, even to call companies or support.
About the second line, “best” is being generous. I guess you mean better supported. Although for some very odd reason the internet seems to love pixels. While they are the worse phones I’ve used for the price after apple phones (for similar reasons).
But above all, the fact that other phones support for open source is even worse than google is why I’m considering to learn to live without smartphones. If we have to rely on google for our freedom and privacy, we are well and truly fucked. And we deserve to be if that’s the case.
Pixels are “loved” because they can run grapheneos and others. Not because they’re technically superior phones.
They’re the opposite of fucking samsung. In that one single regard though.
Attach phone, click install, wait, google gone. All others are getting harder and harder to even root.
That’s the only reason why I bought the pixel 5. It’s easy to remove google stuff. But I see people praising the phones, as if, once you have installed your custom software (ignoring graphene), it’s better than the alternatives.
Once/if you do manage do install something else on other phones, almost every other option of similar price is better than a pixel. But it seems that most things I read disagree with that.
But yeah, getting to the point of installing something the pixels are easier. But there are others like fairphones here that match that from what I’m told.
I’m surely no pixel fanboy. I bought the 6 pro when it came out only because it was ironically more open than the others. I’m actually still pissed at how incredibly bad the fingerprint sensor is for a 1200,- flagship (of that time). My 100 bucks banking-phone beats that by a large margin.
And I would really say that “is better” is very subjective. To me? Openness, large good oled screen, modern WiFi and good camera. In that order. Is my old pixel good? Yes. Is it better than others of the same class? Yes. For me. But it looses in pure numbers and benchmarks. I just couldn’t care less, personally.
And jup, my next one (whenever this sucker dies, it’s still running solid) will be Linux. Or whatever semi decent alternative will be current then. I’m done with big tech
Instead of whatsapp, I use signal. I explained to my friends that I moved to it. Some installed the app for me. Others didn’t. I accept that.
Please never reccomend google phones for de googling ever again
Get a used one if you don’t feel comfortable giving your money to Google (a good idea IMO)
And by buying used Google gear You increase the value of used market making them a better deal for people looking to buy new because they will keep in value more than other phones
I vowed my Last Samsung phone would be A55 (or A56 if you also count my house hold)
Good on you! Let’s spread the word and help samsung die! (It won’t make any difference, but I want to pretend it will)
Dunno how it is over Australia, but in my country, finding information is hard if the problem it solves isn’t on the nose of the population already. So if Australia’s anything like that, your failed quest may not even be your fault to begin with.
Still, failure is just another form of confirmation, so even if you yourself went through it, sharing it as a cautionary tale is extremely helpful. 🙏
Unlocking instantly and permanently breaks Knox too which destroys any chance of resale without being shady or flat out lying about it. I learned that the hard way, thankfully, with a cheapo A50 I was using as a secondary device back in heavy Pokemon Go days. That was my first Samsung since my Nexus, and my last, ever.
I had a A53 5G which only supported outdated Android ROMs like TrebleDroid support.
