I’m using a Pixel 6 Pro right now, and I’m looking around to see if there are any good phones. However, I have heard that there are ads in the newer flagship phones (Samsung, Xiaomi). I am willing to spend around USD$750 on a new phone, but I just don’t want any crazy ads or preinstalled apps like Facebook. Are there phones that don’t suck nowadays? I can buy a phone that is sold in the US, Canada, or EU.
(I don’t want to go through menus to disable ads (Xiaomi), and I’m currently looking at phones other than the Pixel lineup to see if there’s a better option for me)
(I also don’t want to mess around with custom bootloaders/systems, I rely on Google services way too much)
EDIT: If it wasn’t clear enough, I am not looking for things like GrapheneOS or LineageOS or others, I am looking for a phone and judging based on the stock system on it.
Sounds pretty sweet to me… got a dialer with built in call recording.
I can install a 3rd party app store without moving to the EU and waiting 4 more years.
You can Dee-Google it by hacking the matrix with some ASOPs and pay $7 a month for a proton mail account while crying into your open office.
Run some McAafs
feey antivirus for that hit of early 90’s nostalgia, or Norton if you’re really old and miss the 80’s ;-)Firefox with a real uBlock plugin would be pretty sweet? Do they have that working yet?
I’m thinking pay-as-you-go burner but… oh right, android smart phone… I’m old and forgot what I was doing for a second.
I really can’t tell if this is a joke or not (I’m not mad), but don’t third-party app stores have almost all of the features as of the Play Store? F-Droid has the ability to automatically update apps silently, I think.
It’s both, I think we should all have the ability to easily record a phone call on the hardware we pay for.
But I feel like both platforms need to do better with security. Apple pretends their shit doesn’t stink and google says play at your own risk… and Israel says I’ll do that for a dollar 🤑
Try librewolf for browsing it’s a privacy oriented fork of firefox and I have ublock on it also I suggest nextdns for ad and tracker blocking on your whole phone and even router
I’ll give it a look. I generally just use Firefox and uBlock when I have a choice.
I’m running Techtinium right now for DNS privacy, any killer features in NextDNS that made you pick it?
I think techtinium is a self hosted solution if I’m not mistaken? Not really heard much of it so if it fits your needs then great. I like nextdns because I don’t want to self host my private dns and it is easy to setup and monitor for all my devices and provides a lot of lists to easily choose what I want to block on what devices. For example I have a different profile for my kids with parental control. Medium for the wife so that her internet browsing isnt distupted and strict tracker blocking for myself because I don’t mind things not working.
Oh okay, that’s pretty cool. I don’t think Techtinium can do per-device settings at all, and (obviously) only works on my home WiFi. And the bulk of the DNS requests are just passed to cloudflare, so it’s better than using my ISP, but only by a bit.
Sorry, as I was corrected in another comment, I meant Mull not Librewolf. Librewolf is on my PC and Mull on android. I also use an iPhone in which case I have the Orion browser from Kagi…
Samsung completely blocking the ability to record calls in their US phones really annoys the shit out of me. Outside of rooting and installing a custom rom they just didn’t leave a way to do it.
I live in Canada and screen recording a phone call with audio doesn’t work, and the option that seems to be in the phone app for India isn’t on my phone, even though Canada is a one-person call recording policy country.
So gay.
Same with Apple AFIK, though I think it’s broadly true… I think the legal theory here is that if you make an illegal call regarding that the company has aided your crime and could be culpable… but I’m not a lawyer, I just play one on TV 😎
But it’s standard in other countries and legal in most states. It should just come with a warning on legality and give you the choice. It’s legal to buy a Ford that’s able to do 120 down a residential street, but Ford won’t get in trouble if I plaster a 10 year old when I do it.
Yeah… this is where the  “play one on TV” part comes in. This is the standard explanation for why they don’t support call recording, but it’s always felt like it was missing something to me 🤔
I wasn’t aware that it was standard functionality everywhere else… now I like my country even less! There have even been a handful of (usually paid) services that try to get around it; running the speakerphone and audio recorder simultaneously was my favorite, but there were subscription VoIP solutions with call recording, $80 Bluetooth answering device with onboard recording.
Either Samsung has a compelling legal reason, a clearly identified financial incentive, or they would just rather make more bloat nobody wants? Is it Google? Have they locked all US phones… can’t be because people import them occasionally.
IDK… I’d love to hear theories. 
I dunno what samsung has behind blocking it off, but in some countries like India it’s just a simple setting to turn on in the settings menu under phone calls. You just click it to turn on and record calls. The option is just removed for some countries like the US.
Weird. Got to be some financial motivation then. I’m going to research it more now that I know it’s a stock option in some markets… Thanks :-)