What's a good phone now that doesn't force ads on me?

tester1121@lemmy.world to Android@lemmy.world – 99 points –

I'm using a Pixel 6 Pro right now, and I'm looking around to see if there are any good phones. However, I have heard that there are ads in the newer flagship phones (Samsung, Xiaomi). I am willing to spend around USD$750 on a new phone, but I just don't want any crazy ads or preinstalled apps like Facebook. Are there phones that don't suck nowadays? I can buy a phone that is sold in the US, Canada, or EU.

(I don't want to go through menus to disable ads (Xiaomi), and I'm currently looking at phones other than the Pixel lineup to see if there's a better option for me)
(I also don't want to mess around with custom bootloaders/systems, I rely on Google services way too much)

EDIT: If it wasn't clear enough, I am not looking for things like GrapheneOS or LineageOS or others, I am looking for a phone and judging based on the stock system on it.

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I'm on a pixel 6a, I swapped out my DNS server to dns.adguard-dns.com and now I don't get ads on any app or game I use, excluding YouTube (which I use very rarely).

I've got a 6a and I ended up rolling my own DoT server so that it would adblock, but also resolve to servers in my own country.

I also moved to GrapheneOS. The only Google stuff that broke was Google Wallet's tap payment thing. Reportedly even Android Auto is supported now.

Oh - my kid just got a Motorola G84. It was a very cheap handset for 12GB RAM and no ads so far. Very close to stock Android too.

Motorola seems to be a good choice for me, then.

I'm using a Motorola Edge 30 Pro that I got 18 months ago. I'm very impressed with it. It's got flagship CPU performance, and long batter life. Good screen, decent camera, and NO ADs.

Just taking the YouTube app off my home screen and replacing it with a Firefox shortcut has done wonders for my sanity. It's really disorienting now, when I follow a YouTube link that opens up the app. All of a sudden it's all ads and shorts and sponsors.

ELI5 swapping the DNS? (I know what it is, but thought that wasn't possible on the device.)

I believe you just add that to your network settings for private dns.

Go to settings - network & Internet - scroll down to see Private DNS and add a DNS of your choice like dns.adguard-dns.com.

Worked for me so far as I use pihole on WiFi at home but now not seeing adds on mobile data like I used to.

Update, this will override all DNS settings it seems. Just did a test at home and it now points to this DNS vs my pihole. If someone knows a better way, please lmk otherwise I'll poke around more.

Unfortunately, there isn't one, since it's working as intended, short of pointing the phone DNS and Pihole to the same servers.

You're overriding the DNS of the phone to point to the new server, and it will prioritise that over asking the router for one, like it might otherwise do if there wasn't one configured.

Got it, that makes sense. Just wasn't sure if Android had an option to only update per radio/device/adapter like you can in Windows and Linux.

For now, I'll just switch it when I'm on the go. Thank you!

You can also block ads on YouTube by using Firefox Mobile + uBO. Mobile browsers are good enough now that there's no reason to have the app anymore.