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The answers here are only partially correct. If you want to use your device internationally, there are four things or categories you need to consider:
- Carrier locked devices
- Region-specific devices
- Carrier whitelisting
- Regulatory requirements
Carrier locked devices are exactly that, these are the ones sold by your carrier and subsidised, they usually mention that you can’t use them with other carriers. Eg the SM-S928U of the S24 works only on AT&T. If you have one of these, you may be able to buy an unlock code online to unlock your phone. Depending on your model, you might also need to flash compatible firmware or unlock additional bands from the service menu, if you want to be able to actually use it with your destination carrier.
Region-specific devices generally have limited cellular bands, meant for usage in that country. Eg although the SM-S928U1 variant of the S24 is factory unlocked (unlike the SM-S928U), it may not carry all the bands required for operation outside the US. If you’re unsure about compatibility, use this website to check the bands for your target country/carrier. Generally though, if you travel a lot, it’s recommend to buy the international / global variant of a phone. As an alternative, if you have a US variant Samsung, you could use the service menu to enable all bands. Though regardless of the variant, it’s always a good idea to check the band compatibility before you purchase the device/travel.
Carrier whitelisting is a recent annoying thing which carriers have started doing for some technologies such as 5G, VoLTE, VoWiFi etc. Some of these features may or may not be critical for you, for eg, if the destination carrier no longer offer 2G/3G services, that means you must be able to get VoLTE in order to make calls. And VoWiFi is needed if you’re in an area with poor reception, but have WiFi access. Finally, 5G would be a bonus thing but most carriers allow only whitelisted models to connect to their 5G services. Samsung normally should work in general, but given how many variants Samsung makes, there’s no guarantee that your specific variant would be able to use some/all of these services. So you’ll need to check with your target carrier in advance to see which of their services your phone would be able to support.
Finally, some countries may have regulatory requirements which may legally prevent shops/carriers from selling you a SIM card, if your phone isn’t in their database. For instance, in Japan, it’s technically illegal to operate a device without a “giteki” mark - and if your phone doesn’t have this, operators may refuse to sell you a card. In this case however, you should be fine if you order a compatible SIM/eSIM online before arrival (eg from Sakura Mobile).
GSIs are the way to go these days for anything that’s not a Pixel. I’m not sure if there’s a fully-degoogled GSI out there though, but you can check the list here: https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/wiki/Generic-System-Image-(GSI)-list
Or here: https://xdaforums.com/f/treble-enabled-device-development-a-ab-roms.7260/
And once you found a GSI you like, install using the instructions here: https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/wiki/Samsung
But it’s best to check XDA forums as well for any device-specific quirks.
Although not the same, this has been going on for about two years now. Jensen Harris, a former MS engineer, criticized the ads as well as the design of the new Start Menu, over here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1564399431545667585.html
Firebase is a platform/service provided by Google, so it makes sense that the content goes thru Google’s servers.
Also, E2EE in a closed-source app like WhatsApp, run by a nefarious corporation like Meta, was always a joke concept, a marketing ploy at best. People who are truly concerned about their privacy would never touch WhatsApp.
Syncthing, it was made exactly for situations like this. And unlike DropBox etc your data stays local.
Mercury is worth checking out - it’s based on Librewolf but has additional privacy and performance patches.
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.
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).
Heh yeah Galactic Battlegrounds is so unfairly underrated IMO. People who knew of it brushed it off saying it’s just a reskinned AoE - but there’s so much more to it. I fell in love with it all over again last year, after I discovered a couple of excellent mods: the first being Expanding Fronts, which brings new civilizations, units, maps, music and QoL improvements. The other being cnc-ddraw - which fixes graphics/compatibility/resolutions and does some excellent upscaling. The game is so much fun with this, been playing local multiplayer with my friends using ZeroTier and we have massive battles against bots, its amazing.
What’s the story line like (if there’s any)? One of the reasons why I like Diablo (1&2) so much is because of the atmosphere, the world building, the lore, the attention to small details. Especially in Diablo 2, for instance, things like cool random names for mini-bossess, the personality of the all monsters (like how the fallen make cute grunts and scream “RAKANISHU!”) - it feels like you’re fighting against real creatures which are alive. It makes the world feel so much more alive and immersive, and increases the replay value.
Now compare this with Diablo 4, where all the mobs just feel so generic and unimaginative - like you’re fighting a big bear called “beast”… like wtf. Also, the biggest problem in Diablo 4 is that the difficulty scaling is whack - you never feel like you’ve become powerful, because the monsters become just as powerful as you and it just feels like an endless, soulless grind. Even so called “legendary” items are crap and meaningless, they don’t bear any excitement at all - like imagine how excited you’d be in D2 if you got a Tal Rasha’s or an SoJ or something, or heck, even just one of the upper runes. And finally, in D2 you have some very memorable NPCs with iconic dialogue and voice acting. Even more than two decades later, people reminisce fondly about Decard Cain and all his epic quotes like “Stay awhile and listen!” - and I bet any D2 fan reading this would’ve instantly read that quote in Cain’s voice. D4 has none of that, it’s a soulless game. So how does Last Epoch fare in regards to all that? Specifically, what I want to know is how’s the:
- Story
- Music
- Environment/world building
- Mobs
- NPCs
- Loot
Another option is to get Grim Dawn, and then get the Reign of Terror mod. It’s basically Diablo 2 recreated almost completely + some extra content.
But since you’ve never played Diablo 2, I’d recommend playing it first in some form (D2R or PD2) so you can appreciate the storyline (and the epic cutscenes) - and then play the Grim Dawn mod.
My earliest would probably be Space Invaders on the Atari 400.
But I also did a lot of PC gaming around that time - Alley Cat, Paratrooper, Prince of Persia, Dangerous Dave, GORILLA.BAS, NIBBLES.BAS - these were some of the earliest DOS games I played and still remember them fondly.
When we got a NES later on, spent a lot of time on Duck Hunt. And Super Mario of course, but don’t think I ever managed to get past level 3. Still had fun though.
I no longer have a OnePlus, but I believe Project Elixir is pretty decent, might be worth checking out?
It’s already a reality: https://www.unihertz.com/collections/jelly-series
My only issue is that it’s not Snapdragon and not quite dev/root friendly, but otherwise it ticks all the boxes - including a 3.5mm jack and an IR Blaster!
Not a dumbphone, but Unihertz makes some actually small phones - like ones that can fit completely in your palm. These things are great to have as a backup phone, or something you can take with you while you go out for a run or the gym.
A phone may not be better than AA, but a dedicated tablet could be. I haven’t owned a car in a while now so I’m not sure what the current scene is like, but back in the day there used to be dedicated custom ROMs for cars (Timur’s ROM for eg), which had various optimisations for car usage. I used those ROMs in combination with Tasker and Greenify, so that my tablet (a Nexus 7 and later a Nexus 9) would automatically activate and launch my GPS apps and Spotify when I turned on my car, and when I turned it off, it would enter into airplane mode and go into deep sleep. With this, I could leave my tablet in my car and have it behave like a built-in infotainment system.
I also had it hooked up to my car’s OBD2 port using an adapter, and could get realtime car stats like the speed and temps. There’s was also a This third-party car home app (I forget the name, Speedometer or something), which, IMO, was a much better (and customisable) interface than AA.
Compared to the setup I had back then, AA feels like a joke in comparison. Mind you, I don’t think the concept of AA irsel isn’t bad, but at least in my experience and use case, I felt it was quite restrictive and clunky compared to using a full-fledged Android with third-party apps. The best part of this setup was that there was no reliance on my phone, no reliance on my car manufacturer, and no reliance on Google.
The core ideas remained the same, only difference is that they’ve got more roadblocks now which makes it considerably tricker (security measures in the OS + anti-cheat + encryption/DRM + server-side checks etc).
But modern day cheating goes beyond memory editing, for instance there are things like aimbots which can work at the GPU/driver level, or input automation/macros which work completely ouside of the game so normal anticheat measures may not prevent it.
Unlikely, unless the source code for the anti-cheat system and the server have been leaked as well.
The source code for just the game isn’t really going to help cheaters. Cheat makers typically don’t care about the code, they’d look at either altering the game files, and/or the memory space where the game variables are stored. Having access to the source doesn’t really help with that (well it may help them understand the compiled binaries a bit better, assuming they don’t know them inside-out already - we’re talking about a 10 year old game here).
But it may help modders for making mods and stuff. These mods may or may not be detected by the anti-cheat system though.
If Rockstar coded the game properly, the server won’t allow the client to connect if any of the files have been modified, or if the anti-cheat system is spooked/borked. So assuming that’s the case, any mods that may come out of this would be for offline gaming.
TL;DR: There’s nothing the worry about, online gaming (against randoms) will continue to suck as usual, best to stick to offline play or playing with/against a trusted friend circle.
Not sure, will need to see a screenshot, your adb versions etc. XDA would be a better place to ask this.
Or maybe try it from a Linux distro like Ubuntu or something, adb is pretty easy to install from the official repos and there’s no need for any drivers. I find Linux just works better for stuff like this.
If you look inside the fastboot.sh file, there’s this bit of code here:
command_array=($1 $2 $3 $4 $5)
for command in ${command_array[*]}; do
case $command in
8917)
down_platform="8917"
continue
;;
8937)
down_platform="8937"
continue
;;
esac
That means you’re supposed to pass an argument to the script with the model? number of the device. So since your device is an 8937, run the script like so: ./fastboot.sh 8937
Further down the script, you can see what it actually does: it unlocks the device, flashes a bunch of partitions and finally reboots it. Since you didn’t specify the model number, it skipped the flashing bit and went directly to the reboot bit. :)
Edit: I also took a look at the .bat files, they basically do they same thing except under Windows, and it’s specific to the model.
Haven’t used custom kernels in ages, but why not just use Wavelet? It’s made by the same guys who made Viper4Android.
https://areweanticheatyet.com/ - a crowd-sourced database of games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with Linux/Proton.
There are alternatives. Pushy is pretty easy to use, and it’s not that hard to allow it to run in the background. See: https://support.pushy.me/hc/en-us/articles/360043423332-How-can-I-send-notifications-to-Android-devices-in-Doze-power-saving-mode-
Of course, an OEM may do aggressive app killing where the above may not work (Huawei is notorious for this), but that is an OEM-specific issue that applies to all apps in general, so as a developer it’s up to you whether you want to test against, or even support such OEMs.
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Because MIUI deviates from stock Android so much that it often causes unexpected behaviour and bugs. So it’s easier for developers to just say they don’t support it, instead of putting up with negative reviews and complaints.