The best photo smartphone of 2024 comes with Android

Yeah bro, this isn’t the 90s. You don’t need to insert stacks of DOS floppys.

It could be a different stratum of society. Maybe like politicians and businessmen. They say ~5% of Indians have iPhones, but I only know two people with iPhones (and one was second-hand).

I don’t think SMIC refuses to sell to non-Chinese companies. Nokia mostly uses Unisoc chips, which are made in China (not sure if by SMIC).

But if they did, it would be a pretty serious problem, since I don’t think SMIC even has a viable competitor in the entry-level smartphone chip market.

They have microSD, audio jack, okay chip (Snapdragon 4 Gen 2) and RAM (4-8 GB), replaceable batteries and screens, and HMD has pledged spare parts for seven years. That’s a good start, but it’s a bit overpriced for its specs and currently only available in Europe, so it probably won’t sell very well.

Apple is leading in a lot of countries despite Android being the dominant OS, because the Android userbase is divided among different manufacturers. See China, for example.

I mean, the biggest (or rather, only) reason I still use WhatsApp is that it works with (other people’s) WhatsApp.

Oh right, some of their assets were frozen, due to non-payment of tax. I thought you meant freezing all assets and kicking them out of the country, like what happened to Huawei.

To some extent, these might be routine tax evasion investigations. But there is definitely a pattern of certain Indian companies getting favourable treatment over foreign competitors. Whether this is a deliberate move, or just politicians shaking up businesses for hush money, I do not know.

It could just be small sample size giving a wrong result. These are based on website hits, not official sales figures.

Grey is ‘I couldn’t be arsed to look up this country; it’s tiny so I hope no one notices’.

Apple has ‘won’ a lot of countries with just 20-30% marketshare, because the Android market is so fragmented. Look at China, for example.

Major markets. The arrangement is whatever LibreOffice chose, which for some reason is reverse alphabetical order. Oh well, at least World comes first.

India has not frozen Xiaomi’s assets as far as I know. They got a pretty big fine for tax evasion (they said they were paying the tax in China, but weren’t, or something like that).

its attempts to stir up a China vs India culture war

All the viable alternatives to Xiaomi (Oppo, Vivo, Realme, etc.) are also Chinese, so this doesn’t really matter. Now these companies are challenging Xiaomi, but they’re doing it by offering comparable performance to price ratio and better cameras. Also, Xiaomi has conceded to our demand to set up some local manufacturing. Low-end phones are now assembled in Chennai, Bengaluru and Noida, although the components are still imported.

Edit: First sentence is incorrect, as pointed out below.

1. There are Terminal emulators. They can’t do everything, but they’re okay.

2. They used to have freely unlockable bootloaders but it is becoming harder and harder with newer models.

1. Why? Android is Linux.

2. Xiaomi allows bootloader unlocking, so you can install a ROM that gives you root access.

I hope some OEM (especially those opposed to google) picks up and develops mainline linux like Pine Phone.

Huawei is being forced to do it. But like Android, their HarmonyOS is not 100% open-source. There’s also KaiOS, which some Nokia and Alcatel, and all Jio, devices use.

even Dalvik and the android runtime itself is an inefficient relic of 10+ years ago when mobile devices had at most 2gb of ram and a tiny low power ARM processor.

Both the ones I mentioned are designed to be more memory efficient. KaiOS in particular is aimed primarily at feature phones and entry-level smartphones.

You can disable all automatic updates.

That’s like saying you can build a nuclear bomb by smashing pieces of uranium together. Technically true, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Write down a list of the software you use (e.g. web browser, office suite, notepad, image viewer, video player, … ). Download Linux Mint from here and use Balena Etcher to write it into a pen drive. Switch off your computer, plug in the pen drive and switch on. DON’T INSTALL YET. Run Linux ‘live’ for a couple of hours, see if everything (speaker, printer, webcam, all the software you listed above) is working correctly.

Once you have confirmed that all is well, copy your files into an external hard drive, confirm that everything important has been backed up, and then install Linux from the pen drive. (You can have both Windows and Linux on the same computer, but then Windows should not be given internet access or it will ‘update’ and mess up everything. This can be repaired using, for example, this software, but why bother?)

I can’t find ROMs for any Infinix phone on the Lineage OS website.

I think they’re only including mainstream models.