I’ve been needing to buy a new phone and while I’m here in china I’ve seen some really intriguing options only available here.
obviously the telemetry is extremely problematic, more so than non chinese phones, is it feasible to try remove with adb or the universal debloater? since there is custom rom support at all? or should I just forget about it?
I would worry more about the rights of the workers, in tech, companies uses a lot of slavery work and get resources from places in a bad way, forcing more slavery in very bad conditions which is basically stealing resources from other countries. If you want something ethic, you could go to Fairphone which is more expensive than others for less capacity/power, but it is ethical.
Apart from that, any android have the ability to install a new ROM, just search for the support for it, as more support it has less difficult it will be to install custom and clean ROM, so doesn’t really matter where it comes from. Just check the support for custom ROMs and if you are really worried about equality go to Fairphone.
I would love to buy a fairphone and considered it heavily, but I live in australia and it costs almost $2,000 on amazon.