Why are we still fighting smartphone bloatware in 2025?

The frustrating thing is all the information and materials to support Samsung devices is out there, but the custom ROM development community is so ridiculously toxic and unhelpful to newcomers that few people are willing and able to mainline new devices (and supporting a new device is complicated enough that you pretty much can't get started without someone more experienced to point out the decades of cruft, pitfalls, and vendor-specific workarounds that the build processes have accumulated). More of the old guard leaves every year without enough new blood to replace them.

I buy my device only based on if I can load a differenti os

This is the mandatory prerequisite for me.

So i bought a refurbished s20u (same spec of s24u except for camera and CPU basically)

Search for lineage os your phone model if you're lucky someone will have ported the project to your device, the more popular it was the more likely

There are reasonable instructions

Your phone will need an unlocked bootloader, and it will not be able to be locked again while running lineage. This will prevent the use of any secure software which includes most bank apps, login authenticators. Local security is entirely bypassed by the unlocked bootloader

No clue, my phone is not exactly recent.

Member cyanogenmod?

I do wish they would switch to a non profit or sell a product.

I get why they don't though

Of course not! But it doesn't go away even in 2026 and I wouldn't write that in the article.

Canta + Shizuku is what I use as well.

Shizuku is a way to temporarily get semi-root privileges without needing a computer, via wireless debugging to your own phone.

• Canta
• Shizuku

Thanks for the Canta recommendation!

I bought my current phone specifically because it was supported by LineageOS. Before that I used an unsupported Samsung phone, which was such a shitty experience that I made a promise to myself that my next phone has to have custom ROMs available

I like what GrapheneOS is doing, but it's focused on having the absolute best security rather than supporting a lot of phones. If you aren't wanted by three letter agencies then LineageOS is good enough

And I can immediately say goodbye to important apps I need.

I'm so fracking tired of not being able to just use the OS 😞 want on my phone because apparently my phone isn't mine.

GrapheneOS and iOS

Take a wild guess lol