Nothing/CMF phones

General Computing
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Hello,

This is my first post here. English is not my first language so I apologise in advance for any phrasing or grammatical mistakes. I will try to keep my post as brief as possible.

I live in a rural part of Southeast Asia and am in the market for a new smartphone. Earning capacity is low here in comparison to most developed countries. What most of you would group in the midrange segment is probably very high end already in my area. My town is mostly dominated by the budget offerings from China companies or Samsung’s low end line. Only big criminals/politicians/both carry iPhones here.

With this in mind, I plead with you to not force Graphene OS onto me. This was my experience in another privacy forum. Pixel A series devices are too expensive here and there are no official sales channels or secondhand market for this product line. I recognise Graphene is the most secure and private OS, but it is too unrealistic for me. Even if a free Pixel falls from the clouds I would not be able to install Graphene because I do not have a PC. My smartphone is my only device used for everything in this life.

I have been looking at Nothing Tech. The CMF Phone 2 Pro or Nothing Phone 3a are devices I can try to afford. I know it is still Android, but from what I have seen from Youtube or testing the CMF version in shops, there much less bloatware compared to budget China or Korea phones. Hopefully this also means less apps trying to spy on the owner in the background.

Does anyone have any experience with Nothing or CMF branded phones? As I stated above it will be my only computing device. Rooting is not feasible because I will need banking and other financial services apps. From my searching, it looks like I can perform some debloating using Shizuku and Canta apps. To my knowledge, this method is similar to ADB command lines applied from a PC. I also found out about Tracker Control or Rethink Firewall which can block internet access for selected apps. I know about Brave or Cromite as a substitute for Chrome. I do not use Facebook, but WhatsApp is required to survive in my area, tragically.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. No need to waste your time typing long tutorials. Links to threads on this forum or verified external resources will be more than enough. Every small percentage of privacy improvement will help. I am also open to other phone brands of course.

Thanking you for reading. Best regards.

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I recommend getting whatever phone you can afford and hardening it as much as you can. With your constraints, this is pretty much all you can do. Seems like you’ve been reading and researching enough already to know how to harden and what apps to use and not use so that’s good.

But I don’t have any other practical advice with those limitations. Sorry.

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I never used a nothing phone but they offer a new experience that i never seen in others like one ui hyper os2 etc… And yes for sure they have less bloat than xiaomi phones i recommend you to harden it as much as you can like what i did (i have a poco phone beacuse it was cheap and just hardend it) you can do pretty well in hardening it beacuse at the end of the day its still android and you can customize android a lot. So feel free to buy it :slight_smile: here where i live i also have the same problem with pixel phones they arent available at all maybe newer pixels being available at a crazy price.

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I will send you a link, via private message, of a podcast episode from a well known privacy advocate about Android sanitization.

It might shed a light about what your next steps.

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