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.
I would consider an ad to be an ad like on Youtube, and also things like popups to download an app when connecting a device, or deals from the same phone company as a notification. I don’t care if the “ad” is from the same company as the phone, I still think of it as an ad.
The easiest way to get rid of ads it’s a DNS level AdBlock, you can simply use the private DNS option of Android(with AdGuard or Mullvad free DNS resolvers), next step use alternative frontends for YouTube(NewPipe x SponsorBlock) and Music like Spotify and YT Music(xManager or ReVanced), there will be some apps what will keep showing ads like Facebook but at least it will be a minor amount.
If you want to be more sophisticated about Android AdBlocks I will suggest you to root your phone, but with these non-root options 90% of people will do pretty fine.
I have the Xiaomi 13T Pro, and I haven’t noticed any ads. You can buy wallpapers and ringtones, but there are also tons of free ones, and it doesn’t pop up advertisements for it except once to show the function is there.
The new HyperOS although it looks the same and has similar functionality on the surface as MIUI, is way way better IMO.
Security and game center are gone, 2 of the top annoyances with MIUI IMO. HyperOS feels way snappier too. With MIUI the 13T Pro was slower than my old Motorola to turn pages in an e-book quickly. Now it’s super snappy. HyperOS just feels better somehow.
I installed Firefox with uBlock Origin, and chose it as default browser. I also uninstalled “Community Center” I think it was called. An app to use various Xiaomi services.
There are a couple preinstalled apps, I don’t recall if Facebook was among them, but they are easy to uninstall, it literally just takes a minute to uninstall.
But maybe Motorola would be more to your liking, they use almost completely vanilla Android, with only an app to configure Motorola specific features. I did get some ads for printing services on my Motorola, but it seemed to be more a Google thing than Motorola. (Haven’t seen any such things on my Xiaomi 13T Pro)
And AFAIK you can still remove the search widget from the desktop on Motorola, something that apparently is no longer possible in completely vanilla Android. Reason enough for me to completely avoid Google Pixel phones. Why would they even want to do such a stupid thing?
I’ve been happily running cheap Nokia phones for the last couple of years. It’s vanilla Android with very little bloat, no ads and years of security updates.
I can’t use an iPhone because no sideloading, no filesystem access, you need iTunes to upload music (really?), etc.
(I’m asking in an Android community because I want an Android phone, not an iPhone.)
Sure, makes sense. But the title was “what’s a good phone that doesn’t force ads on me.” None of the things you listed were mentioned in the post. I stand by my answer 😎. Come, join us in the land of good-user-interface.
I consider Weather telling me to open Apple News last weekend an ad… there are ads every time I try to search for something in Maps, and when navigation ends (or soon will be).
I agree with you, I’ll buy another iPhone until it gets worse. But I feel like were starting to lose the moral high ground here, how about you? 
Yeah, I hate to fanboy cuz’ Jobs was a prick… but cracks are starting to show. It’s been careful and slow but I have a marketing allergy so I’m not a happy man.
Granted it was a link to a local story, in apples news app, on a weekend where people were loosing their shit because it was going to rain… but it should have been well below all the content that’s supposed to be there.
So my calling it an ad was disingenuous, but I’ll stand by it.
I’ll second that in a heartbeat. It’s not just the obvious stuff either, much of the inobvious refinement is just gone. I hated Apple for years because their UIs were offensive and the thought of a single mouse button seemed convicted for the feeble minded… but I came to really appreciate the small refinement, common actions requiring minimum input. It’s hard to be specific without getting to esoteric, but the primary input field always having focus is the one that on my mind constantly.
For example I navigate somewhere with maps, hit end navigation, it’s now 3 clicks to get back to a search field and type the next destination… not a lot of work, but that’s coming from 0 clicks.
I would happily go on, but I sound like a cranky graybeard already and we’re supposed to be finding you a decent phone ;-)
I might consider the Fairphone much more highly when the software is more polished and Qi is added. (I use a Framework laptop, so the Fairphone is really fitting for me)
I can definitely recommend getting a Fairphone. I quite happy with my Fairphone 4. Bloatware is limited to Google stuff and they even give instructions how to easily install a custom ROM (have not tried that yet though).
The specs are not great, but good enough for me. But the main advantage for me is that it does not break that easily. I drop my phone all the time. My Samsung phones and Pixel phone I have broken within the first few weeks. Usually I dropped it and the screen cracked, even with a protected case.
I have had this phone for a lot longer now (maybe years by now) and I dropped it like a 1000 times and it is still fine. The screen has not cracked, it still works. Only the side is a little chipped. I don’t even use a protective case. And even if it breaks, I can just buy the broken component from their website and easily replace myself using normal tools. So that is really nice.
Nice to read your experience with the fairphone. We’re looking at it as well. It’s expensive, but can at least be repaired when something breaks. I’m curious aboutt the custom roms though, as they are my main requirement, next to costs of max €100 per expected year of usability. (And as phone, it should be usable for a while)
I think they have instructions on the website on how to unlock the bootloader etc. There is also a lot on how they support open source with their own OS. I think that your warranty also remains valid after you unlock the bootloader and install another OS, as long as you revert to theirs when asking for support. I can sortof understand that, as it would not be feasible to support all sorts of custom ROMs.
I needed a new phone last year just as the Fairphone 5 was launched so I went with that. Very, very happy with it. I really don’t miss wireless charging: the main reason I used it on my old phone was to extend the range of it’s ageing battery. Having a new battery removed that problem - full day of heavy use, no issues at all - plus it takes all of twenty second to replace the battery once it starts to age.
I’d get a falcons in a heartbeat if it was smaller. Don’t mind the thickness but I’m sick of large phones. I’m probably just going to get the jellystar
Depends on your usecase and your country of living. Why do I say so? I will name my 2 points:
Lack of sd card. Yes I need my sd card, I don’t want to upload stuff online on a 400kbps connection or download on a 16mbps connection. It’s not a good experience.
Not officially sold in my country, only available rarelly in resellers for 200+ euro more than normally.
Fairphone is also quite hackable. Hard to get in the US, only distributor is Murena. In Europe they’re pretty easy to find from what I hear. Sd exists but you need to power cycle the phone to access it so maybe not your best bet. Still, if I need to transfer stuff quickly USBC is really fast.
Pixel has a Trusted Protection Module like computers with secure boot. No phone hardware in existence is documented at the hardware level. This is how planned obsolescence is created and why you have to buy a new phone every few years.
With a TPM chip it becomes possible to run signed and secured code on top of untrusted hardware and underlying software. Without this, your security is very limited in practice. Graphene OS is verifiably secure and only runs what you put on it.
The entire Android system is designed for people to use when they have no clue how to secure a device themselves and when they are far too incompetent to learn. The way this is done is to delegate a lot of permissions to app developers. This gives a lot of freedom to the apps you run. They can exploit the hell out of you within their little sandbox of vague permissions. Graphene does everything possible to limit what is happening in the background and the exploitations. It is default privacy.
I do not purchase phones as hardware any more. I don’t care what is sold by any of the exploitation clowns. I shop for my ROM and buy a device that is well supported by that project. I’ve owned several Graphene OS devices and am happy with them. I had a Lineage device I liked too awhile back.
Lineage OS is not a secure ROM, as a matter of fact the way it is hacked makes it a security nightmare, but you can breath new life to old devices and install adblockers that need root and set other features that allows you to avoid ads and Google, which is nice.
It is showing a different paradigm of thought. Valuing a few IO options to be exploited makes far less sense to some people. The OP is about “doesn’t force ads on me.” Hardware centric thought is a marketing leverage used to force ads on people. Buying for the ROM is the best way to protect your privacy and avoid the ads.
Thats nice, but google doesn’t sell them here like I said, we only have them on resellers sometimes. For example there is pixel 6 pro here sold for 600+ euro on a reseller, while there is no other pixel available rn in the country at all.
That’s true, but I was just talking about the best phone to get for a Google free experience. Stuff like pricing, specific features, or availability is another matter. Like it someone asks what is the best consumer available GPU VR gaming to get people would say 4090. Since unless they ask about price and availability they are just asking about hardware.
And this person already has a Pixel. So availability or price isn’t an issue for them.
Just because someone own’s something doesn’t mean they themself were able to afford it, or it was available to them. That argument doesn’t fly just like that.
Maybe they got it as a gift, on a giveaway, from a cousin who got a new one, …
It’s too simple to think that just because someone own’s something they got it themself, unless specified otherwise.
I live in Canada, and the Pixel non-pro phones seem to sell at a normal price for me (I still don’t want to overspend on a pro model) I’m also really in the Google ecosystem right now, so I can’t leave and install custom systems and disable Play Services. I’ve also never heard of the Pixel’s being out of stock here.
I have already said that I don’t want to deal with custom bootloaders/systems. I’m also just looking at phones (and by extension phone companies) to see whether I should stay with Google in the future, or switch to a different brand.
I’d say stick with the Pixels, especially since you’re already invested in Google services. You wouldn’t be gaining much from switching to Samsung, unless you want to use the S-Pen, or some of the advanced multi-tasking features or customisation options (Good Lock stuff).
But FWIW, I’ve had the Galaxy Fold 4 and now on a Fold 5, and I haven’t seen any ads on my device, nor do I recall seeing any third-party bloatware (besides Samsung/Google bloat of course). But your experience might be different if you buy a phone from a carrier, since it’s usually the carriers who load crap on your phone (with the exception being most C*****e phones, which come with thirdparty bloatware out of the box).
Examples of Samsung bloat: AR Emoji, AR Zone, Bixby, Bixby Vison, Samsung Global Goals, Galaxy Wearable, Samsung Kids etc… there’s a whole bunch of them. I’ve disabled/removed all of them though.
The only Samsung apps I use are the basic ones such as the phone dialer, browser, camera, clock etc, and the system customisation tools part of the Good Lock suite. There aren’t any ads in any of these.
What is the C*****e company?
I’m talking about phones made by that country, such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Redmi etc. They usually tend to have ads, unwanted popups and third-party bloatware.
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Any with good hardware as long as you can switch to stable and community-made ROMs.
Depends what you mean by an “ad” but going by the usual definition no phones have ads except cheap chinese ones and some phones in amazon’s program.
I would consider an ad to be an ad like on Youtube, and also things like popups to download an app when connecting a device, or deals from the same phone company as a notification. I don’t care if the “ad” is from the same company as the phone, I still think of it as an ad.
GrapheneOS yo. You even already have a pixel for it lol
I have already said that I don’t want to deal with custom bootloaders/systems.
As far as I know Motorola and Pixel are the only OEMs with no ads or bloatware. For samsung you need to debloat and turn off notifications.
Motorola seems good, I’ll check it out.
The easiest way to get rid of ads it’s a DNS level AdBlock, you can simply use the private DNS option of Android(with AdGuard or Mullvad free DNS resolvers), next step use alternative frontends for YouTube(NewPipe x SponsorBlock) and Music like Spotify and YT Music(xManager or ReVanced), there will be some apps what will keep showing ads like Facebook but at least it will be a minor amount.
If you want to be more sophisticated about Android AdBlocks I will suggest you to root your phone, but with these non-root options 90% of people will do pretty fine.
I have the Xiaomi 13T Pro, and I haven’t noticed any ads. You can buy wallpapers and ringtones, but there are also tons of free ones, and it doesn’t pop up advertisements for it except once to show the function is there. The new HyperOS although it looks the same and has similar functionality on the surface as MIUI, is way way better IMO.
Security and game center are gone, 2 of the top annoyances with MIUI IMO. HyperOS feels way snappier too. With MIUI the 13T Pro was slower than my old Motorola to turn pages in an e-book quickly. Now it’s super snappy. HyperOS just feels better somehow.
I installed Firefox with uBlock Origin, and chose it as default browser. I also uninstalled “Community Center” I think it was called. An app to use various Xiaomi services.
There are a couple preinstalled apps, I don’t recall if Facebook was among them, but they are easy to uninstall, it literally just takes a minute to uninstall.
But maybe Motorola would be more to your liking, they use almost completely vanilla Android, with only an app to configure Motorola specific features. I did get some ads for printing services on my Motorola, but it seemed to be more a Google thing than Motorola. (Haven’t seen any such things on my Xiaomi 13T Pro)
And AFAIK you can still remove the search widget from the desktop on Motorola, something that apparently is no longer possible in completely vanilla Android. Reason enough for me to completely avoid Google Pixel phones. Why would they even want to do such a stupid thing?
They will hate me but iPhone has BSD/XNU/openSTEP. Of course it may feel like a prison after Android. Either that or a Linux phone with Waydroid
I’ve been happily running cheap Nokia phones for the last couple of years. It’s vanilla Android with very little bloat, no ads and years of security updates.
You can disable all the bloateware on any phone using an universal adb/fastboot debloater script on xda.
Does not need root access.
My recommendation is FairPhone. Check specs before buying. It’s only a mid range CPU.
The mentioned debloater script is found here:
https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater#how-to-use-it
This is the list of apps the debloater script uses:
https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater/blob/main/resources/assets/uad_lists.json
I’m using a pixel 6 non pro, and found that the pixel 7 and 8 were both a downgrade in terms of performance. Sticking with the 6 for now
iPhone.
I can’t use an iPhone because no sideloading, no filesystem access, you need iTunes to upload music (really?), etc.
(I’m asking in an Android community because I want an Android phone, not an iPhone.)
Sure, makes sense. But the title was “what’s a good phone that doesn’t force ads on me.” None of the things you listed were mentioned in the post. I stand by my answer 😎. Come, join us in the land of good-user-interface.
I consider Weather telling me to open Apple News last weekend an ad… there are ads every time I try to search for something in Maps, and when navigation ends (or soon will be).
I agree with you, I’ll buy another iPhone until it gets worse. But I feel like were starting to lose the moral high ground here, how about you? 
Is Apple that bad nowadays that they need News ads in a weather app? I thought Apple was the almost ad-free and privacy-focused company.
Yeah, I hate to fanboy cuz’ Jobs was a prick… but cracks are starting to show. It’s been careful and slow but I have a marketing allergy so I’m not a happy man.
Granted it was a link to a local story, in apples news app, on a weekend where people were loosing their shit because it was going to rain… but it should have been well below all the content that’s supposed to be there.
So my calling it an ad was disingenuous, but I’ll stand by it.
Apple seems to be losing my respect for their software each year…
I’ll second that in a heartbeat. It’s not just the obvious stuff either, much of the inobvious refinement is just gone. I hated Apple for years because their UIs were offensive and the thought of a single mouse button seemed convicted for the feeble minded… but I came to really appreciate the small refinement, common actions requiring minimum input. It’s hard to be specific without getting to esoteric, but the primary input field always having focus is the one that on my mind constantly.
For example I navigate somewhere with maps, hit end navigation, it’s now 3 clicks to get back to a search field and type the next destination… not a lot of work, but that’s coming from 0 clicks.
I would happily go on, but I sound like a cranky graybeard already and we’re supposed to be finding you a decent phone ;-)
I bought the Zenfone 10 for those reasons and I’m pretty happy with it. I’m not going to buy a Samsung again.
The Zenfone looks really nice. I’m going to have to skip it though, because it’s just too small. (Hopefully they make a 6" screen version)
Fairphone 5 is still on my list but unfortunate it does not support QI charging.
I might consider the Fairphone much more highly when the software is more polished and Qi is added. (I use a Framework laptop, so the Fairphone is really fitting for me)
I can definitely recommend getting a Fairphone. I quite happy with my Fairphone 4. Bloatware is limited to Google stuff and they even give instructions how to easily install a custom ROM (have not tried that yet though).
The specs are not great, but good enough for me. But the main advantage for me is that it does not break that easily. I drop my phone all the time. My Samsung phones and Pixel phone I have broken within the first few weeks. Usually I dropped it and the screen cracked, even with a protected case.
I have had this phone for a lot longer now (maybe years by now) and I dropped it like a 1000 times and it is still fine. The screen has not cracked, it still works. Only the side is a little chipped. I don’t even use a protective case. And even if it breaks, I can just buy the broken component from their website and easily replace myself using normal tools. So that is really nice.
Nice to read your experience with the fairphone. We’re looking at it as well. It’s expensive, but can at least be repaired when something breaks. I’m curious aboutt the custom roms though, as they are my main requirement, next to costs of max €100 per expected year of usability. (And as phone, it should be usable for a while)
I think they have instructions on the website on how to unlock the bootloader etc. There is also a lot on how they support open source with their own OS. I think that your warranty also remains valid after you unlock the bootloader and install another OS, as long as you revert to theirs when asking for support. I can sortof understand that, as it would not be feasible to support all sorts of custom ROMs.
Thanks, looks like I need to start saving, my Nokia 6.1 with Lineage will probably need replacing withing a year or 2.
I needed a new phone last year just as the Fairphone 5 was launched so I went with that. Very, very happy with it. I really don’t miss wireless charging: the main reason I used it on my old phone was to extend the range of it’s ageing battery. Having a new battery removed that problem - full day of heavy use, no issues at all - plus it takes all of twenty second to replace the battery once it starts to age.
I’d get a falcons in a heartbeat if it was smaller. Don’t mind the thickness but I’m sick of large phones. I’m probably just going to get the jellystar
Why do you feel the need to change phones? Pixel 6 Pro should still be plenty good enough.
If its stock ROM bothers you, you’re in luck because Pixels are surprisingly hackable and it’s very easy these days.
See i.e.: https://grapheneos.org/
No need to worry about Google services, they work: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play
Yep, Pixel is the best phone to get the most Google free experience for those that seek it.
Depends on your usecase and your country of living. Why do I say so? I will name my 2 points:
Lack of sd card. Yes I need my sd card, I don’t want to upload stuff online on a 400kbps connection or download on a 16mbps connection. It’s not a good experience.
Not officially sold in my country, only available rarelly in resellers for 200+ euro more than normally.
Fairphone is also quite hackable. Hard to get in the US, only distributor is Murena. In Europe they’re pretty easy to find from what I hear. Sd exists but you need to power cycle the phone to access it so maybe not your best bet. Still, if I need to transfer stuff quickly USBC is really fast.
Too bad I live in the tech shithole called croatia where fairphones are even rarer then pixel’s here.
Pixel has a Trusted Protection Module like computers with secure boot. No phone hardware in existence is documented at the hardware level. This is how planned obsolescence is created and why you have to buy a new phone every few years.
With a TPM chip it becomes possible to run signed and secured code on top of untrusted hardware and underlying software. Without this, your security is very limited in practice. Graphene OS is verifiably secure and only runs what you put on it.
The entire Android system is designed for people to use when they have no clue how to secure a device themselves and when they are far too incompetent to learn. The way this is done is to delegate a lot of permissions to app developers. This gives a lot of freedom to the apps you run. They can exploit the hell out of you within their little sandbox of vague permissions. Graphene does everything possible to limit what is happening in the background and the exploitations. It is default privacy.
I do not purchase phones as hardware any more. I don’t care what is sold by any of the exploitation clowns. I shop for my ROM and buy a device that is well supported by that project. I’ve owned several Graphene OS devices and am happy with them. I had a Lineage device I liked too awhile back.
That’s all fine and dandy, but when it outright doesn’t have features you wan’t, and costs in most cases double your wage it just doesn’t pay off.
Lineage OS is not a secure ROM, as a matter of fact the way it is hacked makes it a security nightmare, but you can breath new life to old devices and install adblockers that need root and set other features that allows you to avoid ads and Google, which is nice.
What does this have to do with what they said?
It is showing a different paradigm of thought. Valuing a few IO options to be exploited makes far less sense to some people. The OP is about “doesn’t force ads on me.” Hardware centric thought is a marketing leverage used to force ads on people. Buying for the ROM is the best way to protect your privacy and avoid the ads.
Well, for the use-case described (“most google free”), Pixel is it.
Now, if you wanna lay down some other requirements, then its a different use-case.
I connect my Pixel 8 to my PC with a USB a to USB c cable. Plenty fast.
I bought it from google, off their website. On sale.
Thats nice, but google doesn’t sell them here like I said, we only have them on resellers sometimes. For example there is pixel 6 pro here sold for 600+ euro on a reseller, while there is no other pixel available rn in the country at all.
That’s true, but I was just talking about the best phone to get for a Google free experience. Stuff like pricing, specific features, or availability is another matter. Like it someone asks what is the best consumer available GPU VR gaming to get people would say 4090. Since unless they ask about price and availability they are just asking about hardware.
And this person already has a Pixel. So availability or price isn’t an issue for them.
Just because someone own’s something doesn’t mean they themself were able to afford it, or it was available to them. That argument doesn’t fly just like that.
Maybe they got it as a gift, on a giveaway, from a cousin who got a new one, …
It’s too simple to think that just because someone own’s something they got it themself, unless specified otherwise.
I live in Canada, and the Pixel non-pro phones seem to sell at a normal price for me (I still don’t want to overspend on a pro model) I’m also really in the Google ecosystem right now, so I can’t leave and install custom systems and disable Play Services. I’ve also never heard of the Pixel’s being out of stock here.
I have already said that I don’t want to deal with custom bootloaders/systems. I’m also just looking at phones (and by extension phone companies) to see whether I should stay with Google in the future, or switch to a different brand.
How about phones sold preinstalled with a custom rom?
I’d say stick with the Pixels, especially since you’re already invested in Google services. You wouldn’t be gaining much from switching to Samsung, unless you want to use the S-Pen, or some of the advanced multi-tasking features or customisation options (Good Lock stuff).
But FWIW, I’ve had the Galaxy Fold 4 and now on a Fold 5, and I haven’t seen any ads on my device, nor do I recall seeing any third-party bloatware (besides Samsung/Google bloat of course). But your experience might be different if you buy a phone from a carrier, since it’s usually the carriers who load crap on your phone (with the exception being most C*****e phones, which come with thirdparty bloatware out of the box).
What would be some examples of Samsung bloat? Are there ads in those apps?
Side note: What is the C*****e company?
Examples of Samsung bloat: AR Emoji, AR Zone, Bixby, Bixby Vison, Samsung Global Goals, Galaxy Wearable, Samsung Kids etc… there’s a whole bunch of them. I’ve disabled/removed all of them though.
The only Samsung apps I use are the basic ones such as the phone dialer, browser, camera, clock etc, and the system customisation tools part of the Good Lock suite. There aren’t any ads in any of these.
I’m talking about phones made by that country, such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Redmi etc. They usually tend to have ads, unwanted popups and third-party bloatware.