I’ve been using e/OS for a good amount of time now, but for the last 3 month my phone (Samsung S9 Edge) has hardware issues. Last month, a friend gave me his old S21+ (stock firmware). Today I inserted my SIM in the S21+ to test… for approximately 30 minutes.
Don’t get me wrong, the phone itself looks great, but the rest feels just wrong. It feels horrible when you switch from a de-googled phone to stock-android. Maybe it It feels like you have entered a bank-vault, knowing that you are not allowed in and you know there is someone around the corner that will hit you on the head with a baseball-bat, but you have to pass him to exit… It’s a stupid analogy, I know, but I don’t know how to describe it proper. It just feel WRONG and that nags constantly in the back of your head.
I understand that if LineageOS does not make an official ROM for it, you’re kinda screwed. Unless someone with the skills is making an un-official one. If someone with the skills wants to give it a go, I can give you remote access to a laptop (with your preferred OS, not Mac) and the S21+. Obviously, the person has to be verified. No, I will not send you the phone, so don’t even try. Too many dishonest people in the world.
It graves me that I have to to say goodbye soon. I’m not gone yet, but I’m afraid the day will come sooner than later. Thanks for all the work you guys have put into this project in advance.
Stock Android vendor driven bloatware would be absolutely no option, at least for me…The good news: There are multiple alternative OS for a wide choice of phones available :- )
I don’t know anything about your specific phone, but in general many developers release a ROM with instructions to download and install Gapps separately. So what you can do in many cases is just install the ROM but not the Gapps, and without Gapps most of the core services that Google needs to work its evil will not be present on the phone. Then for the core functionality that you do need/want you can install these open source components that masquerade as Gapps: https://microg.org For those to work best try to choose a ROM that supports signature spoofing out-of-the-box, otherwise you’ll need to use a patcher framework to add that functionality.
Throwing it out there…my rule of thumb is to wait until an /e/OS release is available before purchasing a particular phone.
In this particular case, that doesn’t exactly apply since you were given a phone. Over on XDA, it looks like there was no Google-free ROM available for it at all , /e/ or otherwise (no Lineage, no Graphene, no Calyx or iode)…so the sad reality seems to be that a deGoogled S21+ isn’t really viable, through no fault of your own.
I wonder how little data exfiltration can be done on a stock S21+ with as much declined and disabled as possible…but I have a gut feeling that the answer is ‘not much’, so that sinking feeling is one I certainly don’t envy. Similarly, I’m sure it’s not an easy thing to thumb one’s nose at a gift over a matter like this; from a hardware perspective, the S21+ is a solid piece of hardware and a replacement phone that does run /e/OS is either going to be a step down, or it’s going to be expensive.
I understand the feeling, I’m using /e/os since 3 months at least, and every time I have to “touch” an android-stock I can’t understand how I use so long the stock system.
Regarding your request, I hope they will soon release a rom for that model. From my vision (a vision from Argentina) it is best to buy used phones in good condition and that have a few years on top, which gives more chances to have full support. That is my case, I use a moto g7 power.
