[Abishek_Muthian]

You'll be surprised on how much crap Samsung packs into low-end & mid-end smartphones in India, especially since now the phones are made in India, available only in India(M-series).

The phones have major international data hoarder apps, their equivalent in India and their Samsung equivalent with its own app downloading services which masquerades as system updates to force the gullible into downloading Samsung apps even if you disable them.

The phones are very much subsidised for data hoarding.

[swiley]

I wouldn’t be surprised. I recently bought a low end android to use as a balloon tracker (which I didn’t realize was illegal until later) and had to wait around 10-20 minutes after connecting it to WiFi While it downloaded ~15 apps (some of which kept launching background services and crashing the phone because it would run out of memory.)

I used to think consumer PCs were bad but holy cow, the way android enables malware out of the box is insane! And in the name of protecting the user from malware they have no tools to deal with it.

[Abishek_Muthian]

>And in the name of protecting the user from malware they have no tools to deal with it

There are tools as the ecosystem is open and the community is extraordinarily talented, but it largely depends upon the device, whether the kernel source, driver blobs are available and boot loader can be unlocked; these were generally true for most devices from high profile manufacturers, but now things are changing as those manufacturers have ventured into $1000 smartphones and don't care for their enthusiast population.

Then again, new breed of pure Linux smartphones are available now. IMO, this should be the long term focus for any enthusiast wanting a free, open, secure mobile computing experience.

[swiley]

It depends on the device manufacturer which is the one installing malware in the first place. There is no hope for android unless something fundamentally changes.

[noisy_boy]

I just hope we have a clean option like Pinephone with flagship quality hardware soon.

[Abishek_Muthian]

True, but unfortunately PinePhone shipments have been stopped to India & Russia[1]. I assume that would be the case for many other brands shipping their handsets from China/HongKong to India.

So, these local manufacturers are going to have free run shipping crap embedded phones for a long time.

[1]https://www.pine64.org/2020/07/15/july-updatepmos-ce-pre-ord...