toy phones are mostly the Google pixel, and Fairphones
- You can flash anything on these.
- You have 5-10 years of update on the android out of the box
- huge communities.
- consistent VoLTE and VoWIFI support
- lines are easy to understand (only a few models in each generation)
Samsung offers no long term support of phone, do hardly any publication to help open source communities to make a new image of android, and have the knox thing that makes it harder that it could be to flash. They just poop billions of different models every year without further support.
Xiaomi is like Porsche with the 911, which means they brand all of their phones the same, even when they have very different processors, vowifi support or not,... So pay attention to your exact model (the "pro" keyword isn't marketing, it can make the difference between a locked in Mediatek processor and a open source snapdragon)
I'm annoyed to have got the only flavour of Mi10-something without Vowifi support, for example, because I didn't read properly.
Sony has some OK phones to hack as well. And they look good ! But I think there was an article on HN a few days ago, about the hardware of the XA2 that called home to send analytics even with a custom ROM.
I'm also annoyed because I have had that exact model with iodéOS.
So yeah, I'd recommend to just get a Pixel phone if you want something compact (the 6A is pretty narrow), or the Fairphone if you want something large that you can physically repair, and update for the longest even if you don't hack it.
(I now have a Mi10 Lite and a Pixel 6A. I just had the latter, so that I can use one of these to hack a bit.)
Samsung community support is pretty good if you stick to the flagships, it's true that you lose Knox in the process but Knox is pretty much useless in my opinion anyways.
- You can flash anything on these.
- You have 5-10 years of update on the android out of the box
- huge communities.
- consistent VoLTE and VoWIFI support
- lines are easy to understand (only a few models in each generation)
Samsung offers no long term support of phone, do hardly any publication to help open source communities to make a new image of android, and have the knox thing that makes it harder that it could be to flash. They just poop billions of different models every year without further support.
Xiaomi is like Porsche with the 911, which means they brand all of their phones the same, even when they have very different processors, vowifi support or not,... So pay attention to your exact model (the "pro" keyword isn't marketing, it can make the difference between a locked in Mediatek processor and a open source snapdragon)
I'm annoyed to have got the only flavour of Mi10-something without Vowifi support, for example, because I didn't read properly.
Sony has some OK phones to hack as well. And they look good ! But I think there was an article on HN a few days ago, about the hardware of the XA2 that called home to send analytics even with a custom ROM.
I'm also annoyed because I have had that exact model with iodéOS.
So yeah, I'd recommend to just get a Pixel phone if you want something compact (the 6A is pretty narrow), or the Fairphone if you want something large that you can physically repair, and update for the longest even if you don't hack it.
(I now have a Mi10 Lite and a Pixel 6A. I just had the latter, so that I can use one of these to hack a bit.)