The best way to debloat and prevent phones from calling home servers in China is simply by running LineageOS; don't even bother with anything else. I use Lineage on multiple devices (OnePlus, Poco F1), and it's at least as good as plain Android on a Pixel.

Warning: Poco F3 is different from the Poco F3 GT available in some regions - GT uses Mediatek Dimensity 1200 instead of Snapdragon 870. Mediatek SoCs don't work well with LineageOS.

Xiaomi makes great hardware for the price but the software is simply terrible. I would not recommend buying their hardware if you come from a high end Samsung or iPhone and expect to be able to debloat it easily without wiping the entire thing and installing something like LineageOS.

I've bought a Mi 9 which had a similar price to features ratio in the hope the it'd become popular with the LineageOS community so I could run the latest and greatest open source ROM (it didn't) and the phone is pretty great.. . except for the terrible Xiaomi software. Nothing quite makes a premium piece of hardware feel cheap like a shitty "storage cleaner" application and ads (which you can disable, luckily) built right into the OS.

I'll probably buy Xiaomi again because of the hardware value for money, but this time I'll probably wait until LineageOS support is there officially instead if just hoping someone will add it eventually.

Quote: "It was funny because I was removing these applications to stop sharing my personal data"

and goes later to

Quote: "Here is the list of apps that I deleted from my phone.

    com.android.chrome

        Alternative: Microsoft Edge"

> Unfortunately, this list doesn’t cover all installed bloatware because some applications are breaking the phone if you remove them... Uninstalling the Security Center application (com.miui.securitycenter) or the Find Device service (com.xiaomi.finddevice) puts the phone in a boot loop.

those are the only two apps truly necessary for the manufacturer to recoup the costs of producing the device

Does debloating using this method actually eliminate the phone-home/telemetry functionality? Or is there still some left from the packages that can't be disabled (eg. telemetry code is in frameworks-base)? Personally I don't trust xiaomi enough to settle for a bunch of pm disable commands. It has to be a clean install (eg. lineageos).

dude. i bought moto g30 yesterday with "near stock android" and this is the best android experience i have ever had. i can disable EVERY frigging thing including multiple facebook apps, installer, service and some other facebook crap. i had an old Mi pad 1 and i broke its bootloader from some crappy image.

i had made a point to not buy realme or xiaomi or oneplus or oppo or samsung because of their "custom ui" are ladden with crap.

i do not own a google account so i use aurora store and f-droid store to get mah apps. i use pi-hole at my home and i generally see around 80% blocked requests.

edit: i disabled google assistant so the dedicated assitant button doesnt work. i dont know if it can be reused somehow?

For £80 more you can get a Pixel 4a that runs GrapheneOS

The GUI tool mentioned in the article the author cites in his post is just awesome. It's a one-stop-shop for everything from debloating to flashing ROMs and recoveries for Xiaomi phones:

https://szaki.github.io/XiaomiADBFastbootTools/