Xiaomi discontinued their blootloader unlocking service.

Uh yeah? I never said Pixels are Chinese. I use GOS on my Pixel 8a and I love it. I just don't like the fact that Google is our only option right know if you want a degoogled phone that also cares about security.

And I also never said anything about app issues with Graphene? Most have worked flawlessly (I do have play services installed tbf), the only ones that didn't were Paypal and my debit card bank (credit one works though), and in Veronica's video I saw she had PayPal downloaded, so I guess they fixed it in the time that I tried to get it to work.

But I hope Linux phones become viable soon, as AOSP is a sinking ship as long as Google is the head of it.

Ohhhh, thanks for clarifying that for me.

Not using any play services or g-mail.
I use busybusy for work, it says I need the play service but it works without it. My credit Union app works fine.
I never got into using my phone to pay, so haven't tried that.

I don't need payments to work, I've never used Gmail, and most of my apps are FOSS ones off FDroid. But banking apps must work, and so do push notifications. The latter are my biggest issue: afaik, they run through GCM (part of Play Services), and you won't get any unless an app has implemented an alternative listener (Signal does), which comes with more battery power draw. (How) do push notifications work for you without microG and Play Services?

I have a p8p as well and am a sucker for contactless pay.

I have a samsung android watch which costs like $50 second hand to get around the wallet not working on graphene.

I dont really care anymore about gathered metadata that much. I was more black and white earlier, but nowadays I just try to minimize the cloudification instead of being completely against it.

I choose my battles, and being against google wallet isnt really worth some effort from my side.

I dislike notifications so have them pretty much turned off.

Wow, thanks for the detailed answer! I've heard of ntfy, even considered running it in order to get notifications from my server. I guess you've given me new incentive to look into it more!

It's got the lowest worldwide vendor market share. Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile

^ Google is the lowest one on that list. Do you regularly just make stuff up?

Oh, that's a hot tip. I didn't know the watches could handle tap to pay independent of the phone.

... Though I'm awaiting a new pebble, not sure I'd like to dual wield watches.

Do you work for Google? It’s weird to see someone valiantly defending them, especially given their ad-driven surveillance business model. Google removed "Don’t be evil" from their code of conduct in 2018 lol. If so I’d expect you to be better educated about their history of "thinking about whether their software is soft and squishy" (lol) like the 2018 data exposure that affected 52 million users. Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

I dunno if this is helpful or not but on mine I went to Settings > Apps, clicked on my banking app and then turned on "Exploit protection compatibility mode" and that got it working for me. Probably depends on the bank but might be worth a try!

Yeah I think you just have to not let perfect be the enemy of good, as they say. I'm sure they still get something out of the mess of VPN'd sandboxed apps and addy.io burner email logins that make up my phone, but at least I can make things as difficult as possible for them.

There are unofficial builds as well on xde forum, but indeed some models are not covered or tricky to do.

I tend to buy <$200usd phones and use for 4 years (so: ~$50/year). I'm on a Pixel6A now, and plan to upgrade to an 8A at EOL in summer 2027. An unlocked 8A in "good condition" is $255 now on Swappa, and would get updates until summer 2031, so that meets the $50/year metric.

I'll be interested in GrapheneOS's new partner, but I suspect only their brand new phone will work, so... I'll consider it in 2031 :)

Same here: I pay contactless with a Garmin vivoactive3. It cost $30 on Craigslist, runs for ~3 days without charging. My thought was that Garmin has less "ecosystem" and is less likely to be monetizing purchase history, vs. Samsung... but I don't have any inside info.

I have the GarminConnect app in my "Google Crapola" profile, and for a few months I even deleted the app, and tap-to-pay on the watch kept working.

sorry for the very late response (it's better late than never, isn't it?), but Xiaomi has its bootloader unlocking service active. I used it last year to unlock my phone.

Here you can get the official mi unlock program (it works on hyperos): https://en.miui.com/unlock/index.html

And here is a guide to unlock the bootloader: https://miuirom.org/updates/xiaomi-bootloader

(don't do the usb debugging part, I don't know if it is necessary on older devices but on every xiaomi device that I had you don't need to enable usb debugging so mi unlock can communicate with fastboot)

edit: spacing.

edit 2: please don't do the bootloader lock via direct fastboot command as stated in the guide, I strongly recommend that you do a clean flash of stock rom with mi flash tool, if you plan to lock the bootloader later.

Noted, thanks