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”.
https://github.com/jameskdev/android_samsung_imsservice
Not sure if the above helps (as the links are from 2024), but might be useful for the S10 if their efforts are usable. I haven’t messed with custom ROMs on anything in a long time and I don’t know the processes for patching mentioned in the links. The last time was not with intent to actually have a working phone and just messing with my S6 just to try installing Lineage OS on something I had no plan of caring about.
Yeah, I saw that. It has a lot of stuff I don’t know what it is. It’s certainly not for my kind of person where I need them to “hold my hands” like with the Lineage documentation, except for Lineage not making it obvious what IMS is, and that shows the level of mistake I can make and how much money and time I can waste where someone more knowledgeable would have avoided.
Plus, I haven’t seen any success story coming from that, and that from people who knows what they are doing. It’s not worthy to spend god knows how many days or weeks it would take me to properly redo what he did and find out it would not work in my case, if I even get to that point.
He mentions an apk he changed, so initially I thought it would be just that, an apk to install (magic). But I didn’t find it and I guess that’s just one small step in the massive stuff he did, decompiling things and what not.
But thanks anyway. It did make me hopeful when I first saw it, but no big deal. When I thought it was just about my effort, I would spend whatever time it takes. But now that I finally understand that it’s samsung really not wanting me to use their phones (like in an abusive relationship, after years of proof of the abusive partner), then I made peace with the idea. Fuck samsung and fuck google. I’ll use pidgeons to communicate before I trust them again.
It really is time for serious linux phones
it’s been the time for years, I highly doubt that it will ever happen. it’s been a lot of friction to get desktop users to switch, it’s gonna be 5x more difficult, considering mobile users are less tech-savvy and typically do things on their phone (rather than a computer which most people can get away with just a web browser).
Surely all or most of those linux PC users also have phones, and people already using linux should be easier to convert?
The thing that trips me up is that Android forks support most Android phones out of the box (with the obvious exception of GrapheneOS which is a deliberate choice), while Linux Phone OSs each have very short lists of supported models.
I have four different phone models available to me, from Pixel to Samsung to OnePlus. None are supported by any Linux Phone OS I’ve seen.
I think the fact that there’s so few Linux desktop users that use Linux phones is a testament to how much friction there is.
most Linux OS don’t support mainstream phones I think for a few reasons:
- these phones were built for the vendor’s specific flavor of android, and thus already have the drivers for the proprietary hardware and everything.
- custom android ROMs are able to reuse proprietary firmware blobs from the manufacturer’s software and it will work fine with Android. On Linux however, you can’t just plug these blobs in, you’d have to rewrite everything to work with plain Linux.
Let’s not forget the biggest issue, mandatory Apps that don’t work.
I know of a few Banks that require you to use their app for online banking or as 2fa for online banking. Some of these don’t even work while the bootloader is unlocked
It’s happening.gif https://commerce.jolla.com/
These phones should have been a utility to begin with. Like the old land lines. Then there would have at least been a national set of standards developed for the gadget sellers to follow, instead of the wild west it’s become.
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…
This right here is how i knew about my nothing phone to be relockable, good stuff
It was so miserable I just gave up and bought a Fairphone. Much happier.
How’s the phone performing so far and what was your previous phone? I’ve got my eye on Fairphone whenever it’s finally time to upgrade (hopefully not for another few years)
S25 Ultra was my last. The Samsung is a nicer phone, but my battery has never died. I got a notice recently in the evening that it was under 20%. Before I went to bed at about 10pm I checked it and it was still 19%. Battery is great without all that bloatware.
It’s also a good peace of mind. All those trackers are not on my phone. How much did the mediocre hardware bother me? Not really at all. I love it.
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.
Also Pixels are good phones.
A better link for Jolla is probably their store: https://commerce.jolla.com/
I have pre-ordered the Jolla Phone and am hoping everything is working out (won’t see it for another 4 months at the very least I suppose). I am very excited getting to know a completely new mobile OS to me and the actual successor of Nokia’s Meego. Like with any alternative system, and to some extend also with degoogled Androids it is advisable to inform oneself first before jumping ship.
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…
It was mentioned. I remember a “Patriot or Traitor?” headline, so the news was at least charitable enough to throw the first option in. Honestly, it’s probably more that I just wasn’t following the news as much then.
pixel 5
Um, that’s a Google phone. If your objective is de-googling, does de-googling work on your pixel 5?
afaik yes, with grapheneos
Isn’t it odd that a Google phone can be de-googled but a Samsung phone can’t be de-googled?
You may be new to this insanity, so I’ll explain; Yes, crazily enough google pixels are (for now) the easiest mainstream phones to install a different system. Almost (as far as phones go) as easy as installing Linux on a pc to get rid of windows.
But note that this is what we mean by degoogling, installing a new system. If you don’t want or can’t do this (and most users wouldn’t know how), it’s as hard, if not harder to degoogle than other phones. All the spyware is deeply integrated and getting rid of it is impossible.
I suppose this is because google is trying to stay true to the initial vision of android, back when they had “don’t be evil” lie as a moto. But I don’t expect it to last.
On my end, pixel5 was my first and last pixel. It’s a shitty line of phones, and I don’t want to rely on google, regardless if they will allow you to install something else for long.
the writers are throwing everything at the wall these seasons
Hopefully that Motorolla partnership with Graphene goes somewhere soon
Fairphone has an degoogle option as well.
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.
Motorola is coming in soon, fortunately
fairphones also support it, and a few other relatively popular ROMs
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?
GrapheneOS hardware requirements, for starters.
Linux on servers does not have the same hardware requirements as GrapheneOS.
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.
Have you dismissed Fairphone for some reason?
It’s very, very expensive for what it is. But I guess I just meant “mainstream” androids.
Going on alternative land there are options, like I used to have a phone with sailfishOS. But they will never have the adoption of mainstream phones, and it will probably be less and less with time as google tries to make people’s life harder. And that means they will never have the same finance and support.
It’s nice to support those companies, but like I said, I think it’s a lost battle and I probably should focus my energies on learning to not rely on smartphones. Then it doesn’t matter what feature apple or google remove, it won’t affect me.
The trouble in Australia with the Fairphone models is that some/all networks are blocking them due to a perceived/actual risk they may not work reliably on Australian networks, and Fairphone has not done what the networks demand for that approval. (There’s a heightened risk-aversion here at the moment due to a few highly-publicised emergency-call routing/connection/fallback failures).
It’s a work in progress though, and it should work already/eventually:
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/3g-network-closure-australia/109696I bought a fairphone 3 last year for £100 with e/os pre installed which works fine for me. I changed to the Lime booter for a better interface. It’s not very fast if you want to game & the speaker isn’t very good, but otherwise does all the basics I need or find handy asides from internet banking. Could be good if you want a basic smart phone for occasional use?
It will be pretty hard to find around here. But yeah, I’m considering. That and Jolla and dumbphones.
The issue is; they will die. Someone will try in their place, and then die too. There will always be rebellion, but always crushed by the empire (and lack of financial support).
I may find something usable now, but I have no guarantee that next phone will be. I often lose phones, and every time it’s being a harder and harder battle to find a replacement.
The only safe way, considering that things are just getting worse, is to learn to not need smartphones.
Yeah all tech dies at some point, for whatever reason, which can be frustrating, but I would note that FP is increasing in popularity at the moment so has good legs left in it I reckon.
If you lose phones frequently then going ‘dumb’ may be best, it’s a pain to set up new each time. As someone who remembers car phones (but not so old to have my own!) I can say smartphones are very much livable without, though I understand in some places some tasks are much easier.
Oh, setup is easy. I actually even enjoy setting up a new phone.
I have all my files and messages synced on syncthing constantly, and contacts and etc on DAVx. Even apps, most from f-droid, are a few clicks from a backup. I can do the whole thing in a few minutes, but I enjoy taking longer.
The issue with finding a phone that I can unlock and installing a working ROM instead, that’s the issue, and it should not have to be like that at all. That’s what is becoming impossible and making dumb phones a better alternative.
Ah, and the money too. Which is why I never buy expensive phones anymore. I know I’ll lose it, drown it, kill it. That’s another good reason for dumb phones.
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 call my wife everyday on my way home from work.
Also I have to make phone calls to get ahold of doctors and such
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 have an fe last one ever, pixal here I come.
