I’m using a Pixel 6 Pro right now, and I’m looking around to see if there are any good phones. However, I have heard that there are ads in the newer flagship phones (Samsung, Xiaomi). I am willing to spend around USD$750 on a new phone, but I just don’t want any crazy ads or preinstalled apps like Facebook. Are there phones that don’t suck nowadays? I can buy a phone that is sold in the US, Canada, or EU.
(I don’t want to go through menus to disable ads (Xiaomi), and I’m currently looking at phones other than the Pixel lineup to see if there’s a better option for me)
(I also don’t want to mess around with custom bootloaders, I rely on Google services way too much)
Either keep using your current phone and install GrapheneOS or get a newer Pixel and flash Graphene. It’s the best mobile operating system you can find. It doesn’t come with any ads, trackers, bloatware, or any other annoying shit. It’s just pure Android with many privacy and security improvements.
I have already said that I don’t want to deal with custom bootloaders/systems.
It’s really not hard, it takes 10 minutes and the entire installation process can be completed from nothing more than your web browser. https://youtube.com/watch?v=L1KZWjZVnAw
I have the Xiaomi 13T Pro, and I haven’t noticed any ads. You can buy wallpapers and ringtones, but there are also tons of free ones, and it doesn’t pop up advertisements for it except once to show the function is there. The new HyperOS although it looks the same and has similar functionality on the surface as MIUI, is way way better IMO.
Security and game center are gone, 2 of the top annoyances with MIUI IMO. HyperOS feels way snappier too. With MIUI the 13T Pro was slower than my old Motorola to turn pages in an e-book quickly. Now it’s super snappy. HyperOS just feels better somehow.
I installed Firefox with uBlock Origin, and chose it as default browser. I also uninstalled “Community Center” I think it was called. An app to use various Xiaomi services.
There are a couple preinstalled apps, I don’t recall if Facebook was among them, but they are easy to uninstall, it literally just takes a minute to uninstall.But maybe Motorola would be more to your liking, they use almost completely vanilla Android, with only an app to configure Motorola specific features. I did get some ads for printing services on my Motorola, but it seemed to be more a Google thing than Motorola. (Haven’t seen any such things on my Xiaomi 13T Pro)
And AFAIK you can still remove the search widget from the desktop on Motorola, something that apparently is no longer possible in completely vanilla Android. Reason enough for me to completely avoid Google Pixel phones. Why would they even want to do such a stupid thing?Any with good hardware as long as you can switch to stable and community-made ROMs.
Agree a lot, Google Pixels are stupidly huge.
You can disable all the bloateware using an universal adb/fastboot debloater script on xda.
The mentioned debloater script is found here:
https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater#how-to-use-itThis is the list of apps the debloater script uses:
https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater/blob/main/resources/assets/uad_lists.json
iPhone.
I can’t use an iPhone because no sideloading, no filesystem access, you need iTunes to upload music (really?), etc.
(I’m asking in an Android community because I want an Android phone, not an iPhone.)Sure, makes sense. But the title was “what’s a good phone that doesn’t force ads on me.” None of the things you listed were mentioned in the post. I stand by my answer 😎. Come, join us in the land of good-user-interface.
I consider Weather telling me to open Apple News last weekend an ad… there are ads every time I try to search for something in Maps, and when navigation ends (or soon will be).
I agree with you, I’ll buy another iPhone until it gets worse. But I feel like were starting to lose the moral high ground here, how about you? 
Is Apple that bad nowadays that they need News ads in a weather app? I thought Apple was the almost ad-free and privacy-focused company.
Yeah, I hate to fanboy cuz’ Jobs was a prick… but cracks are starting to show. It’s been careful and slow but I have a marketing allergy so I’m not a happy man.
Granted it was a link to a local story, in apples news app, on a weekend where people were loosing their shit because it was going to rain… but it should have been well below all the content that’s supposed to be there.
So my calling it an ad was disingenuous, but I’ll stand by it.
Apple seems to be losing my respect for their software each year…
I’d say stick with the Pixels, especially since you’re already invested in Google services. You wouldn’t be gaining much from switching to Samsung, unless you want to use the S-Pen, or some of the advanced multi-tasking features or customisation options (Good Lock stuff).
But FWIW, I’ve had the Galaxy Fold 4 and now on a Fold 5, and I haven’t seen any ads on my device, nor do I recall seeing any third-party bloatware (besides Samsung/Google bloat of course). But your experience might be different if you buy a phone from a carrier, since it’s usually the carriers who load crap on your phone (with the exception being most C*****e phones, which come with thirdparty bloatware out of the box).
What would be some examples of Samsung bloat? Are there ads in those apps?
Side note: What is the C*****e company?Examples of Samsung bloat: AR Emoji, AR Zone, Bixby, Bixby Vison, Samsung Global Goals, Galaxy Wearable, Samsung Kids etc… there’s a whole bunch of them. I’ve disabled/removed all of them though.
The only Samsung apps I use are the basic ones such as the phone dialer, browser, camera, clock etc, and the system customisation tools part of the Good Lock suite. There aren’t any ads in any of these.
What is the C*****e company?
I’m talking about phones made by that country, such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Redmi etc. They usually tend to have ads, unwanted popups and third-party bloatware.
I bought the Zenfone 10 for those reasons and I’m pretty happy with it. I’m not going to buy a Samsung again.
The Zenfone looks really nice. I’m going to have to skip it though, because it’s just too small. (Hopefully they make a 6" screen version)
I recently bought a Pixel 8 and put grapheneos on it. Pretty happy with it but quite the learning curve.
GrapheneOS yo. You even already have a pixel for it lol
I have already said that I don’t want to deal with custom bootloaders/systems.
Depends what you mean by an “ad” but going by the usual definition no phones have ads except cheap chinese ones and some phones in amazon’s program.
I would consider an ad to be an ad like on Youtube, and also things like popups to download an app when connecting a device, or deals from the same phone company as a notification. I don’t care if the “ad” is from the same company as the phone, I still think of it as an ad.
I’m on a pixel 6a, I swapped out my DNS server to dns.adguard-dns.com and now I don’t get ads on any app or game I use, excluding YouTube (which I use very rarely).
Do you use the Stock operating system? If yes, I highly recommend you to check out GrapheneOS.
I’ve got a 6a and I ended up rolling my own DoT server so that it would adblock, but also resolve to servers in my own country.
I also moved to GrapheneOS. The only Google stuff that broke was Google Wallet’s tap payment thing. Reportedly even Android Auto is supported now.
Oh - my kid just got a Motorola G84. It was a very cheap handset for 12GB RAM and no ads so far. Very close to stock Android too.
Is it really? The hold up for me switching to Graphene has definitely been android auto compatibility. That’s huge.
From what their website says it now works with android auto.
Motorola seems to be a good choice for me, then.
ELI5 swapping the DNS? (I know what it is, but thought that wasn’t possible on the device.)
I believe you just add that to your network settings for private dns.
Go to settings - network & Internet - scroll down to see Private DNS and add a DNS of your choice like dns.adguard-dns.com.
Worked for me so far as I use pihole on WiFi at home but now not seeing adds on mobile data like I used to.
Update, this will override all DNS settings it seems. Just did a test at home and it now points to this DNS vs my pihole. If someone knows a better way, please lmk otherwise I’ll poke around more.
Unfortunately, there isn’t one, since it’s working as intended, short of pointing the phone DNS and Pihole to the same servers.
You’re overriding the DNS of the phone to point to the new server, and it will prioritise that over asking the router for one, like it might otherwise do if there wasn’t one configured.
Just taking the YouTube app off my home screen and replacing it with a Firefox shortcut has done wonders for my sanity. It’s really disorienting now, when I follow a YouTube link that opens up the app. All of a sudden it’s all ads and shorts and sponsors.
You can also block ads on YouTube by using Firefox Mobile + uBO. Mobile browsers are good enough now that there’s no reason to have the app anymore.
Where’d you hear about flagship Samsung phones having ads?
As far as I know, the only Samsung models that feature ads tend to be the lower end series that get sold in markets like India.
Their ads are mostly self promotion and bloatware apps. In my device I had to turn off notifications for most of the pre installed apps.
A pre-installed app is not an ad, though.
Plus pretty much of of them can easily be disabled.
Splitting those hairs! Weather™ app telling me there’s a story about the weather in Apple News™ isn’t technically an ad either, but really it is. Nobody should have to disable this kind of bullshit… it shouldn’t happen in the first place and it serves no purpose other than to annoy people.
It’s unacceptable to spend thousands of dollars on something that serves you marketing content.
What if the pre installed app is netflix, hulu and bunch of useless things i do not use? Its not a bloatware for you but for me it is. Yes, i can disabled but not all of them. Some just outright disable the disable button. Bunch of services running in the background. Samsung is notorious for this kind of behaviour.
I received a budget galaxy tab from a lucky draw. Shit is disgusting with how many useless stuff in there. Planned to give it to my mother but i cant stomach how laggy it is with android 13. It is not a good experience at all. I had to use adb to remove all of them.
I’m still pissed my Google TV has a Netflix button and I pay for and use Netflix… and that shit is “integrated” so deeply it still loads up in the background even… anyway.
Do people really rationalize this crap away?
Can’t you remove Netflix on CCwGTv? The Play Store let me, and it doesn’t seem to reinstall.
No idea what a CCeGTv… oh, no, this is an NVSwGTv ;-) But that’s a super solid point! I was actually paying for it up until they got greedy, just objected to the button. But now that I can uninstall it there’s a 95% chance it won’t be able to launch in the background.
Now I just need to sharpie over the logo, and my mind will be at peace 🤤
Try using Button Mapper to remap the button if you want to, worth a try!
I have a flagship Galaxy device and there was nowhere near that many. As I mentioned before, the budget Samsung devices are much worse than the flagships when it comes to bloatware.
In any case, the subject at hand is not bloatware (which is undeniably bad - no argument from me) but ads. Not the same thing.
Of course you have a samsung device. No surprise there. So by that logic, if i buy a low tier device i should just accept whatever shit samsung install on my device? Having a bad user experience doesnt matter because fuck me right? Good to know.
Oh. It is an ad though. Just by having an app pre installed inside my device. Guess what? The app can send notification and that notification is what? Ads.
On my note 8 a few years back I would get push notifications advertising from Samsung
I’ve got a GS22U and I’ve never seen an ad.
You should keep your phone and install GrapheneOS. It’s not hard, you just have to reboot your phone and press few clicks in your browser. You can install Google Play and every Google service should work (except Android Auto and you can’t use NFC with GPay).
I have already said that I don’t want to deal with custom bootloaders/systems.
Android Auto works by now. GPAY not so much sadly.
Where I live some banks have their own contactless payments app which can be set as default in Settings. Sadly many banks only support Google/Apple Pay.
I got tired of gpay breaking on crdroid. I just ended up getting a credit card that works with Garmin pay for my watch instead.
This. People with Google Pixels wanting to switch is something I dont get. You literally own the most secure phone on the planet, with the best OS.
I just want to see if other phones don’t suck nowadays, I’m not switching to a different brand just yet (I own too many Google things).
They do poorly. Securitywise (which also means update lifespan and ease of creating a custom OS with full support) Google Pixels are unbeaten.
Samsung actively prevents custom OS from using many security features.
Most other phones have nonexistent update spans.
Fairphone maybe, they are still worse softwarewise than Google.
Fairphone maybe, they are still worse softwarewise than Google.
They’re behind on software and security updates, as well as don’t have a secure element.
I am still loving my Pixel 6 Pro. Other than installing AdGuard, or just change your DNS, I pretty much use it as is. I turned off all the Google home or whatever that thing was to the left. Take a minute and go through your installed apps and turn off notifications for things you don’t want or just uninstall. I don’t think you could ever convince me to buy a Samsung again.
My only gripe is the size and how the camera sticks out. The battery life is great, I have plenty of space locally, and I can wirelessly charge my earbuds with it if I want.
You want your Pixel 6 pro to be bigger or smaller?
A little smaller as it is a little “tall”, but I otherwise love this thing. The uneven back (or something else?) makes it difficult to consistently work with the wireless charging pad in the car.
