- Unlock bootloader (depending on vendor, you have to do an online verification),
- flash a recovery.img,
- load into recovery mode (which, depending on the phone, might need extra work)
- wipe some caches,
- select new os/rom image,
- pray it doesn’t brick your phone.
You’d think someone would’ve learned a thing or two from the easy graphical installations linux and even windows have been offering since the late 2000s.
Because if it was easy you wouldn’t feel the need to buy a new one every few years.
purposefully. they dont want you messing with their device. its that simple.
Yes. In the minds of executives, we’re paying to use their devices instead of purchasing it. They don’t believe that we should have the right to do whatever we want with the device we purchased.
ha, you werent under the impression you were buying a device, were ya?
youre buying a software license that happens to come with a piece of hardware.
youre buying a software license that happens to come with a piece of hardware.
They claim that, but they’re lying.
Fairphone makes it as easy as they can to install /e/OS or any other custom ROM, probably because they believe in selling the phone as the hardware itself, with you being able to choose your OS.
like it should be. like we are doing with PCs.
but a fairphone does come with a very uncompetitive price tag, trust me, i own one.
Assuming price isn’t an issue, would you recommend it? I’ve been looking into them for my next phone whenever this pixel decides to die.
definetely, i’ve only owned xiaomi and huawei devices that were on the brink of not working at all sometimes. compared to that, my Fairphone 4 is pretty reliable.
although the camera could be better, it’s perfectly usable. take a look at my cat trying to figure out what a cordless drill is.
i would call CPU performance “good enough” and GPU performance “kinda bad for the money”. even though fortnite, star rail and genshin impact run at a stable 30fps on low settings at 100% resolution.
and the battery lasts the day only if you’re lucky.
all in all, if has been my companion for one and a half years now and i don’t regret spending full price on it. i imagine the Fairphobe 5 being even better, it supposedly performed very well in mkbhd’s blind camera test.
and don’t get me started about the ability to repair this thing. i’ve had it disassembled down to the motherboard multiple times, there are no adhesives in there, like at all. the CPU has some kind of hard thermal pad.
How’s audio for videos or calls, or auto brightness? Any other annoying things? I’m interested in getting one when my phone eventually dies, but Linus from ltt was having a lot of annoying issues with it.
The web-based installer for GrapheneOS is very easy to use. The catch is that it only works for Pixel phones (and only those that are still receiving updates).
If you don’t mind me polling your opinion: do you recommend Graphene for someone previously used to Cyanogen / Lineage? I recently upgraded to a Pixel 8 from quite an old handset and I’m not particularly fond of the stock ROM. Much has changed since the last time I had to think about this stuff! I primarily care about privacy, and use my cell for little more than phone calls, messaging, and its camera.
Yes- I’d recommend Graphene to anyone who can live without Google Pay. I’ve only been using it for a month but everything has worked without issue and with the added benefit of “storage scopes” and Google Play sand-boxing.
I decided to install Graphene before looking up the installation and was blown away by how easy it is. I’d been on stock android for years and was expecting a similar experience as OP describes. My very old custom ROM folder is filled with files with names like ‘confirmedsafeblob’ and ‘bricksafe’ that I don’t even know what they are anymore but speak to some past misery. Then beep-boop done with the web installer.
It used to be easy… When people were actually making custom ROMs for everything and you could literally just plug the device into your PC and run a program to do everything. I don’t think there is anything inherently in most phones stopping this; it’s the lack of people developing custom stuff for every piece of hardware out there. Some phones do actively try and thwart custom ROMs, such as Samsung with their Knox bullshit, but most don’t need to; nobody is hacking them in the first place.
