AFIAK you cannot get it directly to North America. You need a mail-forwarder. And of course, there’s no warranty. And if you need replacement parts, it also has to go through the mail forwarder.

And since they haven’t been “approved” they only work on 1/3 of the carriers, and T-Mobile could change their policy at any time.

Edit: Just checked the website, it only ships to EU countries.

Murena sells the Fairphone 4 (with e/OS) to North America, but not the Fairphone 5. Fairphone 4 is about to lose support in 2 years, so not really worth it.

they kept dying

Curious, in your experience, how often do they die? What brand MicroSD cards where they, or was it random nameless cards?

Oh yea that sound fucking annoys me. I had one like a couple years ago, they still had that sound.

I keep my phone on silence most of the time, so, if your ringer volume is off before the power off, you won’t hear it the next boot.

Step 1: Buy portable SSD

Step 2: Duct tape said SSD to back of phone, connect USB-C cable

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit?

A 1TB phone would cost $1500 USD, the base storage are around $1100 USD.

A $150 1TB MicroSD card is much cheaper. Pair it with a $400 ish midrange and you got a 1TB phone and save about $1000.

I don’t need all the processing power of flagships, midrange specs are good enough.

Edit:

The is the Galaxy S25 Ultra, the only Samsung model with the 1TB option:

Fucking nuts

The Samsung XCover phones have removable battery, MicroSD card slot, headphone jack, IP68 rating, the performance aint great according to reddit.

But samsung might just kill those features in future releases, as they do with other phone. They start with the top, slowly going down to the budget ones, they’ll eventually just end the XCover series.

Edit: Or maybe not, we’ll see how the EU regulations will get enforced.

3 years of updates for flagships is not great.

I mean, might as well just go for the budget Motorola phones, they also have MicroSD card slot, headphone jack, IP68/69 water resistance, they are also at 3 years of security updates.

What’s all the processing power even for, the Moto G Power (2025) (USD $300) is capable of doing most tasks.

I just look at the next biggest smartphone manufacturer, Motorola.

The Moto G (2025) (USD $200) and Moto G Power (2025) (USD $300) both has MicroSD Card slot and headphone jack. The $300 one has IP68/69. Samsung’s A26 is also $300, but lack the headphone jack, MicroSD card slot, doesn’t have eSim capability (nvm, it actually does have it), doesn’t have wireless charging, doesn’t have stereo speakers, stereo speakers that even the Moto G (2025) that’s $100 cheaper have.

But the Motorola phones still use LCD, bummer for the colors. And also is a bit slower. Their flagships also don’t have SD card slot. Welp, I guess its the cost of wanting my favorite features. My phone aint breaking any time soon (I hope I don’t jinx it), so I don’t need to buy anything right now. But if I needed one today, its probably a Motorola.

But I fear one day, Motorola would kill it too, as with other manufacturers. And there’s also the issue of Google potentially dropping the SD card slot codes from AOSP Code, and small manufacturers would just go with the easiest option and drop SD card support, instead of spending time to write code for it.

I hate this future.

Dude speeded in a school zone and then tried to cover it up. Untrustworthy

Not really.

Chinese phones sold in the west still have Google Play Services, which give google (potential) ad revenue.

So you just get spied on by BOTH the NSA and the Chinese Intelligence Agencies.

“Once the rockets go up, who care where they come down”

Lenin Lectures Mao?

They don’t sell a lot of video games

Wait, y’all buy them?

[AwkwardMonkey.jpg] 👀

Idk man, my torrent apps works fine.

I already tried, doesnt work.

If something moves in the fov of the camera, the app seems to indicate that its recording, but then it kinda just freeze… idk what its doing, but I never found any video files anywhere… 🤷‍♂️

Since the phone knows what cell towers it’s close to and signal strength, google can use this data to triangulate your location

Lol they already have your location data unless you had airplane mode turned on 24/7

Not on mine, some carriers apparantly can make that option disappear somehow. (Idk why they want to do that, their 5G coverage is so bad)

Network issues. Constant switching back and forth is annoying, internet disconnect, phone gets hot, battery drain, etc.

Iphone 6 “Bend-Gate” 2: Electric Boogaloo

Like 95% of Android users (excluding regions that doesn’t ship with Google Play Services such as China)

RIP.

Does Google Voice work?

This article suggests they are removing restrictions, not imposing more restrictions.

Just make another account to bypass it?

Are they still defaulting to “With network in high-traffic areas only”?

Because that essentially makes the tags useless.

Motorola only has it for budget devices, same with Samsung, which also have it SD card slot for any device A5x tier or lower, A2x tier or lower has headphone jack too.

For flagships, its just Sony (and maybe a few others brands that nobody really buys). Unless you count the Fairphone 4 as “flagship” (which it isn’t). And Fairphone 5 also removed the headphone jack 🤦‍♂️

It means you have the superior Wifi Plus 😎, peasants only get the shittier wifi 🤮.

/jk

Yea… I already mentioned that I knew about this.

But the point of this post is that having your house down everytime you haven’t gone home for 24 hours, isn’t the same as a your house automatically going into lockdown with blast shields covering every door and window when you left home for more than 6 hours.

Locks > Nukes for most scenarios.

I’m sure if your nuke (Wasted) gets accidentally triggered because you got drunk one night and passed out for more than the timer you set, you will never use the app ever again. And if you timer is wayy to long like 72 hours, then the bad actors would have time to break in.

A lock (an app turning AFU to BFU) is more versatile. I could set it to as low as 3 hours, and even if it gets triggered all the time, its only a minor inconvienience of having to input the pin/password and wait slightly longer for things to load, not the same as a nuke.

Not sure if this counts as “underrated” but Quick Share / Nearby Share. Its just Airdrop but for Android, not much to explain. It’s built in to all modern Android versions, and some older devices might also have it if they are new enough to have the “Google Play System Update” option on their phone as a separate update option from the main OS update.

Edit: Actually, its reportedly available for every android phone with Android Version 6.0 or newer.

Hmmm, I tried that but then I looked into system “Up time” and nothing changed, even when the it says the “last auto restart” did indeed happen. So I’m assuming that its a “soft reboot” that clears the ram and shut down every process, not turning AFU mode to BFU mode.

As far as I know, its USA only. I’ve never heard of any other country also having this. I know Europe outright outlaws carrier-locking.

Carrier lock exist to prevent people from just deciding to not paying their installment plan on their phone and move to another carrier. (Some people can’t afford to buy their phone outright, I guess… I’m not sure 🤷‍♂️)

Also, some carrier-locked version of phones are cheaper than the unlocked versions. You can get a cheap $50 prepaid Samsung or Motorola phone that would be locked to a carrier (these are basically in every Walmart, Target, practically every store that sells a variety of stuff), but the unlocked version would cost like $150-$200.

Bestbuy also sometime have deals where the locked version is like $100-$200 cheaper.

I think the point is, if you could flash an OS, you could theoretically bypass sim locking.

Is your device already sim unlocked? Is so, you just connect to the internet with developer menu turned on, then wait (anywhere from hours to days, like let this happen in the background, it doesn’t have to stay on the screen) and hope the option becomes selectable. And reboot once a day to see if the menu option changes. I had a sim locked device that had the option suddebly become available for some reason.

I’m assuming those require root?

I’m not really into rooting. More attack vectors. I have rooted in the past and managed to brick some phones, not really in the moods to destroying stuff.

Or alternatively, don’t even mention you have such an app and when they ask if you had anything to do with the phone getting wiped, you say “hmm that’s odd, it must been some sort of hardware failure, I’ve heard that [Phone’s Manufacturer] have had some issues with quality control, perhaps that’s the reason”

You’re not lying, you’re just suggesting a possible reason: hardware failure. And every manufacturer had quality control issues, it wouldn’t be odd for you to have heard about such news, or even just rumors amongst people about a company’s quality control issues.

My “Top” apps are what I think are cool, not necessary what the most useful apps are to me.

Briar its a peer to peer communications app that can communicate via wifi, blutooth, or through the internet via Tor. It can form a sort of mesh network with devices in proximity. Hypothetically, with enough users, you could spread information across a long distsnce even with a nationwide shutdown of the internet like some authoritarian countries do.

There’s already some public forums on there by connecting to random people around the world via Tor, although, these forums doesn’t have much activity now. But it exists and thats so cool. Its like a secret corner of the internet, even more obscure than the “dark web”

Wasted Remember those news about iPhones randomly restarting in police storage lockers? This app does something even better. Amongst many functions, this app can let you set your phone to auto-wipe itself if not unlocked for X amount of time, ranging from 5 minutes to 7 days. (Warning: You may get in legal trouble for using this, if you get arrested and the phone auto-wipes, you could get a “Destruction of Evidence” charge. I am not a lawyer. You might wanna consult a lawyer before using this)

OpenKeychain Just a PGP tool for Android, pretty straightforward. Very cool to have a digital signature right in your pocket to validate your online identity with other internet users. Potentially useful for secret drug trades ahem just kidding lol, don’t do drugs, kids. (Seriously, don’t)

Okay, so this is not really to answer your question, but I don’t think you needed a separate phone just for one app. You could’ve just use a “work profile” to put that app inside, and whenever you don’t need the app, you can turn off the work profile, and its effectively like that part of your phone being turned off.

I use an app called Shelter to do this.

Apps in “Work Profile” are effectively the same as if it were on another phone, they cannot access the data on your main profile.

Android 6.1? (Not OneUI 6.1 right?)

Its must be an old unpatched bug.

(Btw, how long have you been holding onto the device? Its amazing your phone survived that long.)

If its OneUI 6.1, then thats weird, since I’m also on OneUI 6.1 and it doesn’t work.

OneUI 6.1 is Android 14 btw, Android Version =/= OneUI Version

You mean the “recent apps”?

What Android version?

In any recent Android versions, anything within the app in the “recent apps” would show as all white or all black in any screenshots or screen recordings.

Yea… I though about rooting, but heck no, too much security problem, I don’t want more anxiety. Guess I’ll just have to keep use my cheap secondary phone to take pictures as a workaround… 😓