I have been using xiaomi phones for a long time now, for most of them the (xda) community eventually had great ROMs that (eventually) worked without problems or with very little.
Though these days I need a working phone so I didn’t bother with my (Mediatek) Note 8 Pro - last time I looked phones with these chips were a lot harder and more dangerous to flash then the Qualcomms I had before (loved my Xiaomi A1 for that tinkering with Ressurection Remix).
So I am looking for an investment - a device I won’t have to replace for another ~6+ years but I really want my device to do mostly what I would expect, without any snooping or other privacy shenannigans - I know xiaomi is probably the worse choice for this but their hardware specs were always the best for the price and were generally easy to flash.
I don’t like pixels - they are too expensive for the hardware it offers, at least in my country.
Thank you for any tips in advance.
Update: iPhone is a no go for me because of the walled garden - I am a software developer by trade and hobbyist, I like to have the possibility of cracking the device open, both HW and SW wise. I am willing to trade the longevity of the device for this.
I was in the same boat about a month ago. Pixels battery life wasn’t as good and the processor heating made me not consider it.
My previous phone was a Redmi which I had updated to android 13 with custom roms so I ended up getting a poco f5. I have to say that this is probably good enough for me. It doesn’t have NFC but that’s about the only complaint from me. Battery life is solid and the cameras, even though not excellent, are decent and get the job done.
I still haven’t moved to a custom rom yet as I wanted to give the official rom a try but there are a few roms already available which I’ll try later.
Definitely worth the money spent.
