Re:Xiaomi becomes number two smartphone vendor for first tim...
by oriolid on Sunday July 18, 2021 @01:07PM
(#27874558)
It doesn't help if you're an app developer. All you can do is to keep hacking around Xiaomi's bugs because the users sure won't install LineageOS. The part about preventing adb is just icing on the cake. The nice part is that unlike with Samsung, the users know that they're buying crap and often don't really expect apps to work.
Re:Xiaomi becomes number two smartphone vendor for first tim...
by grishka on Sunday July 18, 2021 @01:46PM
(#27874836)
In my experience they do expect them to work and complain the loudest. And then there's Meizu. No idea what it's like now, but ~5 years ago they meddled with the system framework enough to make my app crash. We had to buy one of those phones and I then decompiled their POS ROM to work around this madness. I had to ask myself "how on earth did this pass Google's CTS" multiple times, and the answer apparently was "it never did".
Just unlock and root the thing as soon as you get it and Xiaomi will not get any data - either put LineageOS on it or de-fang MIUI by removing the nasty bits. Don't use the phone with a logged-in Mi account, the only valid reason for using the Mi account is to get the unlock code. Once unlocked and rooted you can remove nearly all the Mi-account-related parts from the phone as well as the ad-related APKs. If you happen to disable debugging over USB (adb) you can re-enable it without using a Mi account (in a terminal, use root):
Open /data/data/com.miui.securitycenter/shared_prefs/remote_provider_preferences.xml in an editor and add <boolean name="security_adb_install_enable" value="true" /> before the closing </map> tag. Reboot the device and voila, adb works again....or just install LineageOS and be done with it, you'll probably end up doing this anyway so why wait?