Right now I have a Nokia 8 and it cannot be rooted because the bootloader cannot be unlocked. Which sucks a lot.
Are there any manufacturers that make Android phones that are easy to root and have good support for LineageOS or something similar?
The only two hacker-friendly phones are Librem 5 (purism and Pinephone (pine64, but they are not yet finished/polished just yet (work in progress).
Some other phones are more or less good. Fairphone is good, the rest is really to be avoided unless you REALLY know what you’re getting. If rooting your phone is your only concern, you’ll probably find something that suits you. But if you’re interested in software/hardware freedom and don’t see a reason why the modem inside your phone should be technically capable to start your microphone or exfiltrate your entire data from memory to the phone network without your knowledge, then you should really go with Pinephone or Librem5 because they’re the only pieces of hardware even trying to respect users.
I mentioned Fairphone before. They’re not user-hostile. But they’re also mostly concerned with supply chains “ethics” and do not worry too much about hackability/security of devices. All other brands are REALLY user-hostile on so many levels i won’t even start.
Any device in the community category on the list of supported devices on the postmarketOS wiki has close-to mainline support and will thus support basically anything you want to do with it.
Xiaimi Poco F1 can easy root and install LineageOS
deleted by creator
Looking for something cheaper. 200-300$ range.
Used Pixels go for less than $100 and can run lineageos.
deleted by creator
I’m not sure about specific brands or models, but you can go through the list of devices that are officially supported by LineageOS. xda-developers forums also have a lot of info for each device.
Problem is some less common devices might have some bugs and it’s not easy to find information on this. I have an Essential PH1 and with LineageOS the speakerphone didn’t work which was a no go for me. So I am wondering if there are some devices that LineageOS supports better in general. There is also the factor that I would like the phone to be receiving updates for as long as possible.
More popular devices are probably better supported in general. And if you read through some threads on xda, they should mention which issues exist.
So, last time I’ve looked up how easy it was to unlock a phone and root it/install a custom rom was when i bought my current phone, a OnePlus 5T (that is, late 2017). At the time, OnePlus phones and Pixel phones were the easier to mod. OnePlus phones are probably still pretty easy to mod, and OnePlus has historically been pretty friendly with third-party developers - they also heavily marketed it as a selling point for years, but things change and big corporations are still big corporations and if endorsing the post-market world becomes not as profitable as it used to be, they’ll just drop the effort and stop being friendly with the community. No idea if it happened with OnePlus, but a few years ago imo they were the ones to pick if you were looking for a phone you could easily mod.
Again, I’m really out of the loop here so take my advice with a grain of salt
It might also be a good idea to get an older phone model, those should have better support (and you safe money).
Bonus if it’s second hand since you save it from going into a landfill.
I’m a fan of this, you can get a 2 year old popular phone model for less than $200 now, and chances are it’ll have a well supported degoogled rom.
Though I would personally get one with either a removable battery or one that’s easy to disassemble, since the battery is almost always the first to fail in a device. That way you can use the second hand device for much longer by getting batteries from reputable third parties.
I was looking at OnePlus too, then I saw this toot from Geotechland
Hmmm, I think they had to request a token just because of the T-Mobile partnership. I don’t think you really need to do that if you buy an unbundled OnePlus phone (if second hand, make sure it’s not a bundled version)
Ah thanks, I hope that’s it.
Rooting a device is not too difficult, but as you said it’s needed to unlock the bootloader: xiaomi allow to unlock the bootloader after you make a MI account and wait some time (generally 2 weeks but may vary), pixel phones and oneplus also allow to unlock the bootloader. Anyway you can search for supported devices in lineageos site: https://download.lineageos.org/ (go to menu to see the supported devices) or you can look at the xda-developers forum to see how to unlock the bootloader of a device: https://forum.xda-developers.com/
xiaomi allow to unlock the bootloader after you make a MI account and wait some time
Does this happen only in the MIUI version? I have one with Android One and the option has always been available to me.
I don’t know about android one versions but with MIUI it works as described. Enabling the option in android one actually unlock the bootloader? In MIUI you have the option but you also need to create a MI account and use MI unlock tool to actually unlock the bootloader
Enabling the option in android one actually unlock the bootloader?
It opens a pop-up with a warning about device protection features not going to work if the setting is turned on, and two buttons “cancel” and “enable.” Selecting “enable” just enables it, doesn’t ask for any account.
Edit: do they ask for a key after or before that screen? If it is after, during the fastboot commands, I can’t risk testing that because if it works without a key it’ll delete all the data I have on the phone (I’ve never done this before on a modern phone, my previous, older phone was easier because the bootloader wasn’t locked).
Ok, i searched in the xda-developers forum how to unlock the bootloader for xiaomi mi a1 (which is an android one device) and it seems that it doesn’t ask for a key to unlock. You need to enable oem unlock in the developer options and then boot in fastboot mode and simply run a command, doing this you will lose all your data (so you need to backup first)
Thanks! I’ll do as I usually do with Android phones and wait until my Android version gets too old for running modern apps or stops receiving security updates, once that happens I’ll unlock the bootloader, replace the OS with an unofficial but more recent version and root it.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I don’t know much about which manufacturers are root your device friendly, IMO they’re all kinda trynna lock down, but for lineage OS support check out Lineage OS’s website they have a list of phones supported by them right now.
