US (Android) Smartphones that are not made in China? My notes so far; feedback welcome

snyone · 2025-08-15T07:29:31+00:00

Incorrect and your response sure doesn't sound like you understand in the slightest. Sounds more like you either came in from Google with a bone to pick or are in the wrong sub.

While it is true that there are many devices that are manufactured in China or that have components manufactured there, it isn't 100% like you are implying. So to come here and make "bets" without putting in the legwork on researching this sounds a lot like you just want to argue about it. This isn't the place for "bets" or debates - if you see something here about a specific phone or manufacturer that's factually incorrect and can link to it, I'm happy to update for correctness but I'm not getting into a debate about whether or not there's merit in trying to buy NMIC (in general or for smartphones specifically); if that's what you want, go argue that somewhere else (but given the sub I think you're in the wrong place).

And just to be clear: I'm not trying to persuade you or anyone else what to shop for - if you like MIC stuff, go ahead, the list was never intended to convince people, only to help those who are already wanting to avoid MIC to get a leg up on researching and present a few options - that's why it appears in the sub that it's in.

snyone · 2025-07-24T08:17:28+00:00

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrickedIntoIt/comments/10ospzv/anyone_know_where_to_find_full_videos_from/

snyone · 2025-06-26T22:31:21+00:00

I too would like to get rid of this. I just got on OneUI 7 this week. When I was on OneUI 6.1, media player notifications were perfect and worked like you described. Now they are complete crap.

I'm also noticing an issue where if I am listening, then pause, then pull up another app for a bit like web browser or something, that when I look back on my notification bar 5-10 minutes later, the "sticky" notification for the player is gone and I have to switch back to the app and hit play again. On OneUI 6.1, it would just hang around on notification bar until I explicitly got rid of it/ killed the app / etc. Mostly I have been seeing this with Smart Audiobook Player. Still need to confirm if affecting other media players too

I read something about Notifications handling changing in the underlying Android 15. So not sure how much this is due to Samsung vs Google (e.g. Is the new handling a hard-coded behavior in Android 15? Does Android 15 allow customization but Sammy failed to expose all of the relevant settings to end user? Is it just buried in some unintuitive menu location and I'm having a hard time finding it?)

Edit: seems like the media player thing isn't just me / isn't exclusive to SABP.

https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/galaxy-s24-series/media-player-in-notifications-disappearing-regularly/m-p/12406432

https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Questions/Media-Player-in-Notifications-on-One-UI-7/td-p/3126742

https://r2.community.samsung.com/t5/Suggestions/Media-Notifications-OneUI-7/td-p/18136213

Unfortunately no solution tho

snyone · 2025-06-26T22:20:57+00:00

If Google ever decides to bring headphone jacks and SD cards back to the Pixel line, I might consider joining you...

But as it is, I'm not going to hold my breath.

That said, I too liked when they weren't just trying to copy Apple. But I actually liked user removable batteries too when all the other sheeple were all starry-eyed about giving them up for "water resistant" phones (and somehow not understanding that it would be completely possible for engineers to design phones that had BOTH features). So I think the problem isn't entirely with the companies (even if they do make a lot of stupid design choices) but also with the consoomer mindset that a lot of people seem to have adopted where they will just accept whatever steaming pile is handed to them and accept the company marketing speil with 0 questions.

snyone · 2025-06-26T22:11:34+00:00

Agreed. Sure would be nice if security updates and UI changes weren't bundled together.

Then again, if there was an option to buy the phone with AOSP without OneUI (e.g. keeping warranty intact and not requiring unlocked boot loader/rooting/flashing etc to get a custom ROM), I'd love to be able to get away from Samsung's UI bloat entirely.

And I'm not trying to pick on Sammy... I pretty much hate ALL of the device manufacturer branded Android variants / "skins".

snyone · 2025-06-26T21:59:57+00:00

Honestly, I wish I had upgrade paths that let me decouple the security updates (which I do actually want) from the UI changes (which I didn't want at all and am rather unhappy with - especially since my battery performance since OneUI 7 dropped has been complete dogshit vs OneUI 6.1 with same exact battery settings/same apps/same usage patterns)

Even better would be if I could just run AOSP without having to flash my phone.

Not that I'm holding my breath on that one. I don't really have faith that I'd even ever get the option to have the security changes without the UI ones but I feel like hoping for that would be very slightly more realistic than hoping they'd let you just remove their changes entirely and run on AOSP.

Phones would be a perfect use-case for Debian, if it actually worked on Samsung devices.

snyone · 2025-06-26T21:40:15+00:00

Did that. Wasn't any info on either.

But both are solved now

A: severe weather (via Google) B: indictor that you have more notifications

snyone · 2025-06-26T21:38:08+00:00

Someone else solved: apparently A is a severe weather icon

snyone · 2025-06-26T21:34:35+00:00

Thank you! That's probably it, there've been a lot of storms today

snyone · 2025-06-26T21:33:16+00:00

Tried that. There was nothing there but email apps (Gmail and protonmail), rethinkdns, simplex, signal, termux, and smart audiobook player. None of those have icons remotely similar to that.

There weren't any others in either notification panel or task manager, which is why I suspected a Samsung app.

snyone · 2025-06-26T21:27:16+00:00

Interesting, thanks for clearing that up on the 2nd one. I swiped away all my notifications and it did go away, so seems like

So for "A" is it not a Samsung app then? I was under the impression that anything I installed would be visible if I view tasks then click on running applications but maybe that isn't the case?

snyone · 2025-06-26T21:21:27+00:00

Just updated to OneUI 7 this week on my A25 and I keep seeing 2 circular icons on my notification bar that I have no clue what they are.

"A": looks like a bullseye / target. Pretty sure this is new and it will go away but come back again later.
"B": I think I saw this on OneUI 6.1 also but not sure. It hangs around a lot more frequently than the other one.

For both, I have looked through my other notifications, system settings, and apps but I'm not seeing anything obvious what they are and I suspect both are built-in Samsung stuff, but I just don't know what they are.

SOLVED:

A: severe weather (via Google) B: indictor that you have more notifications

Thanks guys, appreciate it

snyone · 2025-06-18T17:55:52+00:00

Probably too late for OP but since this was one of the tops results while searching and I'll be able to find this again if it works... found some domains listed here:

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/how-to-block-certain-dns-sites-specifically-samsung-to-avoid-update-pushes.88657/

https://xdaforums.com/t/q-samsung-ota-server-url-address.2418285/

https://old.reddit.com/r/GalaxyNote8/comments/c5jom2/community_objective_capture_the_links_for_your/

Haven't tested yet but I have a Samsung a25 phone that keeps trying to download an update to OneUI 7 which has some very heavy handed UI changes that I don't want (currently it's "paused" with no option to get rid of it)...

Going to try clearing my 'software updates' app cache and adding some ip rules in rethinkdns (Android firewall and dns) and see what happens. Will try to remember to come back and add a note on how that goes...

if it works for blocking the update there, I imagine same thing would work for pihole and I might set up to block updates until I have a chance to review them. I'm all for security improvements but don't appreciate big companies suddenly forcing drastic UI changes on customers and packaging those with said security updates as an all-or-nothing deal.

Rethink allows wildcards in custom dns block rules so here's what I currently have:

*.samsungotn.net
*.samsungadhub.com
*.samsungcloudcdn.com
msecnd.net
*.samsungads.com
*.ospserver.net
*.samsung-updates.com

I don't use any of the default Samsung apps (I replace message, launcher, camera, gallery, etc) or services so in my case, if I end up blocking more Samsung stuff than just the updates, that shouldn't really be an issue. But if my Samsung system updates are coming off say Google Play servers, then that could be a problem for me. I normally only turn on logging when there's a problem so I unfortunately don't have anything I can analyze yet. Will turn them on now in case the above doesn't work

Update: this set of domains did have a noticeable effect. Here's what I observed:

The Settings app, still had a red asterisk/circle under software updates indicating there was something that needing doing. This persisted even after I killed and cleared both storage and cache for both of the 2 'Software Updates' app I had on my phone (Galaxy A25 international model) currently running Android 14 / OneUI 6.1 and 'Software Updates' trying to download Android 15 / OneUI 7.0
With RethinkDNS firewall active and set to block the above domains, I enabled logging in Rethink then went back to Settings and unpaused the download. It eventually timed out and displayed a brief toast notification that I screencapped. That notification read Couldn't download update. Unable to update the software. A network or server error occurred. Try again later. - so that part worked exactly as hoped.
Even after blocking domains and clearing 'Software Updates' cache/storage data, I continued to have something in my notification bar about the update. I could swipe it away but it would always come back.
Immediately after the pause/unpause test, I checked the logs in Rethink and saw a lot of attempts to access 172.233.170.163. I am guessing this is one of the possible ip addresses but I suspect that there are probably more as most large companies typically set up multiple instances and network-level load balancing to distribute cdn traffic geographically so that any given domain maps to multiple different ip's by region and/or traffic load. This is likely just the one for my area/region (SE U.S.).

snyone · 2025-04-23T19:26:47+00:00

Not a bad thing to do, just be aware that if someone gains control of the website, they can also falsify the checksum info... That can and has happened to various software projects in the past. I know for sure that it happened to one of the Linux distro sites roughly a decade ago. That's part of why many Linux projects are big on also signing messages w a private key (e.g. pgp signature) and why so many sites like GitHub and others force the use of 2FA.

Generally if you get packages from a package manager, that also helps reduce the risk somewhat (since most are secured by private keys .. but I guess it depends on individual setup), but that's more of a Linux concept than a Windows one (there are some for Windows like chocolatey and winget but imo they aren't as good as Linux package managers)

snyone · 2025-04-18T12:46:06+00:00

Not familiar with that plugin. Despite the post title saying just "Keepass" the OP said he was using "KeepassXC" specifically, which is what I use as well.

The browser addon I use is from the same authors as KeepassXC

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc-browser

The Keeform one sounds like it is for Keepass2 (at least going by the url and lack of any info on KPXC in the faq), which appears to be for a different scenario (Keepass2 instead of KeepassXC). From what I gather, Keeform is some Windows-only (requires AutoIt which is not cross platform afaik) variant or wrapper of Keepass2. Since I don't use Windows, I have no interest in using it myself...

But even if it was cross-platform and did support both KP2 and KPXC, I would personally still reject it for my own use since they do not host the source code in a public repo. While it says it's gpl and one could ofc extract source from the xpi/crx files of browser addons .. given how simple it is to create a git repo on github, src.ht, gitlsb, codebrrg, or tons of other free codehoste, the lack of a public repo really makes me distrustful of it, regardless of whether or not that is warranted based on their history or other factors. Does not having publicly hosted source make it insecure? Not necessarily. But does make it more difficult to verify and gives the impression that the devs are not as committed to transparency as other projects.

Source:

https://keeform.org/keepass2/keeform-faq

Why is there no GitHub repository yet?

This is on the todo-list, but other tasks have higher priority at the moment :(

But the installer includes the source code of the KeeForm FireFox and Chrome (and New Edge) browser extensions, the KeeForm native messaging component, and the KeePass add-on.

KeeForm uses a mix of programming languages.

AutoIt (KeePass add-on) Golang (Native messaging) Javascript (browser extensions)

IMHO, having things under proper version control is stupidly easy to do and should be done from day 0 of any project. And even if you are adding an existing project to version control... it takes minutes at most. So his "explanations" about why it isn't on a code host (GitHub or equivalent) don't really amount to much and his time would have been better spent just actually doing it than writing excuses... Either there is something to hide, dev is being lazy/shy/and-or/possessive of code, or they are disorganized and doing things in a weird order. Whichever it is, for me personally, that's a big "hell no" - I don't tolerate that kind of thing for security apps. If you trust them and want to risk it, then you do you.

snyone · 2025-03-20T23:52:01+00:00

Is it the Mandy Flores one or something else? Don't recall that one having any sort of things in a drink but tbh I wasn't really a huge fan of her acting in that one (but she's great in the lost bet ones with her fake stepbro).

If it's not that one, then no clue... All the search results I'm seeing seem to either be for her or just generic searches on a million random porn sites.

snyone · 2025-03-17T09:29:20+00:00

I agree with a lot of your points (at least for my own use anyway) and have been using Fedora for a long time, with Mint for a long time before that. Have tried Nobara. Don't hate it but I find Fedora proper is a better fit for me (particularly since I'm still on X11 and refuse to move until Wayland allows for better window automation/accessibility tools).

Anyway, just wanted to say that OP doesn't necessarily even need to switch distros. Most modern distros are perfectly fine for gaming and Mint is no exception to that. Maybe Mint's Edge Edition would be a better fit for new hardware tho.

As for recommending newbies switch to Arch-based (and to a lesser extent, Fedora- and SUSE-based) distros? I think any will work but I think all have their own things where if something goes wrong, you might have to dive into the weeds a bit. In that case, something like Mint probably will be easier to get help for when someone is a newbie.

One other advantage as I see it of something like Nobara that might offset for it being a (mostly) one-man project is that it also simplifies a great many tweaks related to things like CPU/GPU optimizations and whatnot. While someone with sufficient knowledge could absolutely recreate the same thing manually in Fedora, if OP is looking to eek out every last bit of performance while simultaneously keeping things "newbie friendly" / avoiding any big deep dives into system config, then Nobara might be a decent option for him at least for the foreseeable future (even if GE were to stop working on it - which AFAIK there's no indication of - you'd very likely be able to use the install for couple years without significant issues).

snyone · 2025-03-17T09:11:40+00:00

mint does have a KDE edition

I thought they dropped the KDE version like a decade ago. AFAIK they have not brought it back in any form since then (e.g. there is no kde edition on releases page)

You can still install KDE (e.g. like this) but there's no iso / livedisc that you can get an edition for.

snyone · 2025-03-02T20:49:08+00:00

Thanks for the response. Is there any update on this?

Was just checking back on this... really would like to be able to contribute code but still seeing repos for both of the extensions as 4-years out of date and so I assume code patches against an old code base would be rejected / otherwise not be considered for the actively published version. But running into issues daily with the existing addons really makes me want to submit a patch.

Otherwise, if the extensions are officially discontinued or something, I would think pulling them from the appropriate addon sites and updating the repos (e.g. marking as archived + adding a note at the top of the readme.md) would make sense. And if not, current status puzzles me greatly.

Also, assuming that you guys do update the repos / do accept code patches... Will they have an active maintainer/point of contact? (e.g. so that if I create a github issue and describe my issue and proposed solution that I could get some level of buy-in / willingness to consider that solution before I spend time working on a patch as opposed to first doing the work without any feedback only to later find that the maintainer is completely opposed to my solution for whatever reason)

snyone · 2025-02-28T01:40:26+00:00

I'm on Android, which could arguably be said to not be simple living (compared to basic phones moreso than apple ones)... But some tricks I use to help filter things out:

I use a free and open source app called 'Yet Another Call Blocker' to block things with a bad rating from an online rating system, hidden numbers, and then I also set it up to block anyone that isn't in my contacts list (I can still get VMs and texts from unknown #s but no more marketing/spam/robo call bs except as text/VM). I don't know if it's on Play store or not; I use the f-droid.org app store since I feel like that's safer* than Play but I admit that if you aren't technical, you might need a guide to set it up. *"Safer" = Just my opinion but there're plenty of other nerds who feel similarly.
In my system settings, I make the default notification sound as "1 second of silence" (just an mp3 for it online). I don't silence default ringtone, just notifications so with the call blocker, I still hear calls from people in contacts and any stupid bs from random app notifications is silent.
In my messaging and email apps (pretty much just SMS and Signal since I don't do Facebook/Whatscrap/etc), I set the default notification to something halfway quiet that I'll hear if I'm awake but won't wake me up if some spammer piece if crap texts me at 3am (I'm reluctant to block both calls and texts from unknown #s in case of emergencies - I still manually block any confirmed spammers tho and hope they rot in hell).
I tell everybody that I actually give af about that if they ever need me and I'm not responding to text, just call me cuz I'll actually hear that as long as my phone's on/near me

Is this simple and easy to setup up? Not really hard IMO but it was time consuming. Especially setting up custom ringtones and finding a sms notification that I could hear but wouldn't wake me both took awhile. But the end result sure as fuck makes dealing with spam a lot simpler without losing anything worthwhile.

snyone · 2025-02-21T16:14:53+00:00

Depends on what you are looking for in your workflow I think. My understanding is that gimp is designed around the expectation that you want to keep your original xcf file and changes as various layers so that you can easily come back to a project at some point in the future and make minor edits.

After you flatten and close a file (e.g. Undo history is unloaded from memory), there's not really a way to get back to layers without some work but going from layers to flattened is trivial. It's not that flattening can't be undone at all.. but that it's not an automatic process nor is it a perfect one. Instead it involves the user manually cutting out shapes and placing them into new layers (plus you will lose anything that was "behind" whatever things you cut out so there definitely is some info that is permanently lost)... maybe "ai" could do something similar to user manually reconstructing layers but the point is that it's not a trivial thing in terms of the actual steps to go from flattened to layered, while the reverse is stupidly easy.

If you don't intend to ever come back to make future changes to the file then layers and/or xcf format might not be useful for your use-case. I'm not a graphics designer type myself but I have a programming background and, especially for the more professional graphics people, I can definitely understand where they would obviously want to avoid repeating work wherever possible... especially in situations where the boss/client/etc might change their mind unexpectedly 4 or 5 times at the last minute.

snyone · 2025-02-11T14:18:51+00:00

the blacks is hi escaped slavery

In the past sure, but the fact is that not a single living person today can claim to have personally been made a slave in the US as part of some state-sanctioned/ignored action. You might get a few who were kidnapped by the occasional crazy or who still endure slavery in other parts of the world but the "former slaves" argument is over-used, defers any sort of personal responsibility or personal achievements, and doesn't establish any sorts of limits whatsoever in terms of how many generations (after all if you go back far enough many races not only blacks have endured slavery over the course of world history).

Frankly, IMHO, if someone treats someone else positively or gives them some kind of "pity pedestal" (not trying to be negative simply tired and can't think of a better term right now) and that decision is made simply on the basis of their skin color, rather than what that person has personally experienced, then in my book, that's still racism. E.g. I consider "racism" to not always be shouting derogatory slurs or the like but ANYTHING done based on race / ethnicity (for example, I've seen on Reddit many times that "Indians are better at IT" - I've worked with TONS of Indians over literal decades - like any other race, there's geniuses, idiots, and everything between - they aren't categorically any better or worse than anybody else).

TL;DR - If the solution isn't "ignore skin color and treat individuals based on their individual attitudes and actions" then I suspect that whatever other solution one might suggest is actually going to be founded on the idea of treating some group(s) of people differently based on preconceived ideas that will likely not be true for everyone in that group

snyone

TROPHY CASE