Is it worth unlocking the bootloader on my phone? It’s a Samsung with One UI 7.0 (I’ve been avoiding upgrading to 8.0 since they don’t let you unlock it after that). I just want to avoid having Google Services and AI installed. I use my phone to take photos of my art / send it to friends on signal and hate the idea of it being scanned by AI. I use a camera and gallery from fdroid but somehow the default photos app still has access (I know because it makes GIFs of pictures I took even though I marked permissions as “not allowed”). I also would love to get rid of the default apps I don’t use. While I can unlock the bootloader (for now), I can’t install a custom ROM because there are none compatible with my phone, so will I just be forced into using 8.0 at some point anyway? :( ATP I’m pretty much ready to give up smartphones and get a digital camera for anything I don’t feel comfortable feeding to tech companies.
Not an expert, but I’ve been looking into this and it seems like grapheneOS is the way to go if you really want control and security on a modern phone with timely updates (you would have to switch devices). The timely-ness of updates/patches on other platforms is a big criticism that I saw brought up a lot in disussions online. Not sure how much of a problem that truly is, if at all, but it is something to look into before committing to a big change.
Also one thing to look into before doing anything drastic would be taking advantage of shizuku with something like Canta. As I understand it, shizuku is like an inter-app request mediator that is able to abuse wireless debugging access to grant root-like permissions to linked applications without requiring root access or an unlocked bootloader. This should allow you to do some serious debloating.
From what I have read, living without google play services is possible to an extent (using FOSS alternative), but can be difficult / not 100% due to how google has positioned the bundled play services specifically as an authority in modern android
Thanks for the suggestion. I think I’ll try tweaking things with shizuku first but will definitely consider getting a phone that supports custom ROMs in the future. I just have this one because it was inexpensive and had headphone jack (another thing that’s gone the way of the dodo). :)