My debloating experience with Poco F3 • Hacker News Board

Re: My debloating experience with Poco F3

#11

Post by 2Gkashmiri » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 6:21 AM UTC

dude. i bought moto g30 yesterday with "near stock android" and this is the best android experience i have ever had. i can disable EVERY frigging thing including multiple facebook apps, installer, service and some other facebook crap. i had an old Mi pad 1 and i broke its bootloader from some crappy image.

i had made a point to not buy realme or xiaomi or oneplus or oppo or samsung because of their "custom ui" are ladden with crap.

i do not own a google account so i use aurora store and f-droid store to get mah apps. i use pi-hole at my home and i generally see around 80% blocked requests.

edit: i disabled google assistant so the dedicated assitant button doesnt work. i dont know if it can be reused somehow?

Re: My debloating experience with Poco F3

#12

Post by lostmsu » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 6:33 AM UTC

morsch wrote: post #8

lostmsu wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had lots of luck with https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/wiki on Mi Max 3. In general any recent phone should work with these ROMs. On Mi Max 3 it works perfectly with only a few tweaks after flashing. https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/issues/1... This one, and one more for Bluetooth audio

Fingerprint reader: Works Broken on Always on Display (turn screen on first) Kind of a big deal. Do you still need to apply to unlock your own device and hope they let you?

Last time I checked it still was required.

Re: My debloating experience with Poco F3

#13

Post by mcraiha » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 6:36 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #2

Does debloating using this method actually eliminate the phone-home/telemetry functionality? Or is there still some left from the packages that can't be disabled (eg. telemetry code is in frameworks-base)? Personally I don't trust xiaomi enough to settle for a bunch of pm disable commands. It has to be a clean install (eg. lineageos).

Most phone manufacturers can force update certain components. So even if you would uninstall all additional "phone home" packages, the system could still install more https://www.hexnode.com/mobile-device-management/help/how-to...

Re: My debloating experience with Poco F3

#14

Post by Haemm0r » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 6:37 AM UTC

unnouinceput wrote: post #7

Quote: "It was funny because I was removing these applications to stop sharing my personal data" and goes later to Quote: "Here is the list of apps that I deleted from my phone. com.android.chrome Alternative: Microsoft Edge" Really? How about Firefox instead!!? I mean if you really want to stop sharing your personal data why you'd go to the other evil dude across the street, huh?

or Bromite.

Re: My debloating experience with Poco F3

#15

Post by slim » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 6:54 AM UTC

unnouinceput wrote: post #7

Quote: "It was funny because I was removing these applications to stop sharing my personal data" and goes later to Quote: "Here is the list of apps that I deleted from my phone. com.android.chrome Alternative: Microsoft Edge" Really? How about Firefox instead!!? I mean if you really want to stop sharing your personal data why you'd go to the other evil dude across the street, huh?

He seems to be a MS fan. He replaced everything Google with MS

Re: My debloating experience with Poco F3

#16

Post by AniseAbyss » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 7:00 AM UTC

DanAtC wrote: post #10

For £80 more you can get a Pixel 4a that runs GrapheneOS

Giving money to Google is not an option. Ever. Hell half the reason why I love Xiaomi is they're threatening the status quo of the tech industry! As long as I'm not seeing any ads and not giving money to software developers I'm satisfied privacy be damned.

Re: My debloating experience with Poco F3

#17

Post by paulcarroty » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 7:05 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #2

Does debloating using this method actually eliminate the phone-home/telemetry functionality? Or is there still some left from the packages that can't be disabled (eg. telemetry code is in frameworks-base)? Personally I don't trust xiaomi enough to settle for a bunch of pm disable commands. It has to be a clean install (eg. lineageos).

It doesn't, Android telemetry hidden deeply inside. You can't disable it with build flags or packages removing.

Xiaomi caught many times on stealing user data: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Xiaomi+browser

Re: My debloating experience with Poco F3

#18

Post by greatgib » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 7:23 AM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #5

Xiaomi makes great hardware for the price but the software is simply terrible. I would not recommend buying their hardware if you come from a high end Samsung or iPhone and expect to be able to debloat it easily without wiping the entire thing and installing something like LineageOS. I've bought a Mi 9 which had a similar price to features ratio in the hope the it'd become popular with the LineageOS community so I co…

The sad thing is that, a big interest of the first Xiaomi (MIUI) phones was that you had a kind of bloat free and feature full OS. But it all changed when they started to offer android one.

Re: My debloating experience with Poco F3

#19

Post by dave_sullivan » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 7:27 AM UTC

jeswin wrote: post #4

The best way to debloat and prevent phones from calling home servers in China is simply by running LineageOS; don't even bother with anything else. I use Lineage on multiple devices (OnePlus, Poco F1), and it's at least as good as plain Android on a Pixel. Warning: Poco F3 is different from the Poco F3 GT available in some regions - GT uses Mediatek Dimensity 1200 instead of Snapdragon 870. Mediatek SoCs don't work w…

I ended up on Havoc but I agree the experience is much better than stock.

2 things that make me much less excited about how much control I have:

There is still a xiaomi boot rom running under Havoc or Lineage, I can only assume xiaomi can put anything they want in that, so my phone isn't more secure, it's just less bloated.

Also, once you unlock you can now get access to the phone with a computer, bypassing the password. It becomes physically less secure. I believe there are some full storage encryption options but they seemed very finicky.

Please correct me if I'm wrong with any of the terminology, I last messed with this months ago. Sad that these are our options (walled garden and/or wiretap ourselves).

Re: My debloating experience with Poco F3

#20

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 8:01 AM UTC

lostmsu wrote: post #12

morsch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fingerprint reader: Works Broken on Always on Display (turn screen on first) Kind of a big deal. Do you still need to apply to unlock your own device and hope they let you?

Last time I checked it still was required.

It's not required on A-series devices (A1, A2, A2-Lite, A3). But the latest device in that line is the Mi A3 from mid-2019, and there's no official news of further releases so far.