Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: I purchased a #Xiaomi #Android phone as an emergency backup when my OnePlus 6 screen ...

I purchased a #Xiaomi #Android phone as an emergency backup when my OnePlus 6 screen died a few weeks ago.

That’s probably been the worst mistake I’ve made in a while.

I was initially impressed by the robust hardware, dual SIM card + SD card support for a very competitive price. Now I see what price you actually pay for it.

The stock ROM is a nightmare. MIUI was still kind-of decent, but as soon as you configure the phone you’ll get an upgrade to HyperOS. And that’s literally the worst Android ROM I’ve ever seen. Laggish animations. Laggish scrolling. I’ve literally had to disable all animations from developer settings, and even after that the phone would still be barely usable. Plenty of background network requests are done even when you open the apps drawer. And even a factory reset doesn’t fix anything.

I then tried to unlock the bootloader and flash a custom ROM. Guess what? Xiaomi has managed to introduce as much friction as possible in the process.

Enabling several developer options requires you to be on a Chinese IP address because the phone will try to connect to IP addresses available only within China. Or you’ll get a network error even by trying to check the bootloader lock status. I’ve managed to make it work only by connecting to a Hong Kong VPN.

It’ll also require you to associate a Xiaomi account to your phone, and that account must be at least 30 days old.

It’ll also require you to have a SIM card on your phone, and be on a mobile data connection - it won’t work on WiFi, I guess that they *REALLY* want to know your IP address given by your mobile carrier.

It’ll also require you to submit a bootloader unlock request to Xiaomi for your phone’s IMEI, then wait 7 days, then download a Windows-only exe to unlock your phone.

Also, each Xiaomi account can unlock at most one device per month, and 3 devices per year.

I can’t think of any greater level of friction to discourage people from running their own software on a phone, even on a system like Android that in theory is easy to tinker with.

I’m not sure if I want to jump through all these hurdles to finally have a usable phone with LineageOS, or even just a vanilla Android ROM. It’s really a shame because Redmi devices are great hardware that just happens to be ruined by Chinese crapware/spyware, and they could perform great with a decent OS. But right now I’m tempted to just sell it away. Also because I’m not sure if, given all these Xiaomi-specific steps, I’ll actually ever manage to have a spyware-free device even after flashing a new ROM.