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    tomman The latest security update for my Redmi Note 11 BROKE the lockscreen wallpaper!
    Oh, and it installed the OneDrive crapp, because fuck you that's why!

    Congratulations Xiaomi, you've succeeded in copying Microsoft's worst ideas on computing: abusing security patches to break unrelated features and to sideload crapware. I'm this close of declining every future security upgrade, sekuritah lolsearchers be damned. Seriously, nothing can be trusted ever these days, not even FOSS, much less proprietary junk from either 'merica or China.
    tomman Xiaomi is deploying Android 13 for the Redmi Note 11 (disguised under MIUI 14) worldwide, the second of the "at least two major Android releases guaranteed" for this model (whose support ends in 2025, AND apparently according to Xiaomi, we're getting Android 14/MIUI 15 sometime next year). You know this means: it's upgrade rant time!

    - The upgrade is a 3.4GB download for my phone, and to not repeat the disaster from the Android 13 upgrade (where the download got interrupted several times because either lolCANTV or Xiaomi CDNs throwing a fit), I visited a neighbor with 50M fiber. A <10 minutes download, followed by a ~15 minutes install, then a ~5 minutes reboot.

    - Got a new theme for the lockscreen, which also reverted my wallpaper. And of fucking course changing wallpapers in modern cellphones HAS to be ridiculously complex:
    1) Settings -> Wallpaper
    2) You will be offered a bunch of wallpapers EXCEPT for the one that you already had stored on your phone. Tap More Wallpapers instead
    3) Tap "Profile" icon (the one that looks like a minimalist human)
    4) Check the Wallpapers section on your profile, then tap the Add button
    5) Give permission to the app for accessing your pictures, THEN find your local wallpaper
    6) Go back two levels up, tap your freshly (re)added wallpaper, then confirm that you want it on your lockscreen
    7) Hope noone copies this shit on Real Computers™!

    - List of shitware to nuke (remember: pm uninstall -k --user 0 blah.package.name.goes.here)
    android.autoinstalls.config.Xiaomi.model (Bloatware trojan)
    android.autoinstalls.config.Xiaomi.qssi (Bloatware trojan)
    cn.wps.xiaomi.abroad.lite (Useless document viewer based off WPS Office, do not need)
    com.mi.global.shop ("MI Shop", yet another useless crappstore, disabled by default!)
    com.xiaomi.glgm ("Game center", another useless crappstore offering "install-less games")
    com.google.android.apps.tachyon (Google Meet, formerly Duo)
    com.mi.globalbrowser (Xiaomi's Blink-based web browser, do not want!)
    com.google.android.apps.safetyhub (Google Safety Hub, a new crapp that supposedly helps you in case of emergency. Yeah, riiiiight...)
    com.bsp.catchlog (Spyware shit with a CUTE CAT ICON, we should totally trust this because CUTE CATS are not evil, right?)
    com.google.mainline.adservices (Google spyware)
    com.google.mainline.telemetry (Google spyware)

    - The (non-installed) Google Assistant hijacked my power button, making it impossible to power down or reboot my phone. Claim your power button back with these instructions.

    - I lost the hidden FM radio app that was far more useful than the MIUI's one :/

    - Permissions are now more fine-grained than ever, this means for example that Musicolet now needs two permissions: one to access your MUSIC, and another one to read your cover.jpg PICTURES. A single "access all media" permission won't cut anymore!
    creaothceann Today Youtube broke the good old Youtube Vanced app.

    Seems like it's time to install the replacement...
    tomman When the battery on your Blu Zoey Smart turns into a "spicy pillow":

    1) If it hasn't cracked the battery cover yet, REMOVE IT ASAP!

    2) STOP USING THAT BATTERY, FFS!!!

    3) Don't bother looking for the original Blu battery online, the specific model used on the Zoey Smart is unobtanium...

    4) ...because it's actually a Nokia BL-5C knockoff! So go and buy one of those, they're readily available for $5 or less. Sellers online are mostly unaware of that (and will reasonably claim that it won't work/fit), but the Chinesium phone parts store on next corner won't even blink an eye and will just come up with another BL-5C knockoff that will Just Work™.

    Old popular Nokia batteries (mainly the BL-4C and BL-5C) have become a de facto standard format for many shit-tier cellphones and portable emuconsoles, and even hobbyist projects for which a readily available Li-ion battery format is desirable, so that means Chinesium sweatshops will keep making those 'till the cold death of the universe. Next time take a look at your battery: if it looks like a Nokia battery... it's because it IS a Nokia battery in disguise :D
    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by tomman


    - There is now a "jelly-like" scrolling effect when you reach the top or the end of some widget contents. Stupid as hell, and no way to disable it, of course.
    That was causing me genuine discomfort after my pocket PC updated the other day.

    Accessibility options, disable animations.

    Kills a bunch of other stuff too, but worth it to have a computer that doesn't literally make me wanna blow chunks.
    tomman More cleanup and exploring of Android 12, MIUI 13 flavor:

    - Context menu now hides the Copy option by default (have to tap the 3-dot menu to open a secondary context menu so I can copy, while Cut is now the first top-level option!). Yay, more daily annoyances since I copy text like... several times a day!

    - More Xiaomi bloaty preloads: it reinstalled their crippled (and absolutely useless) version of WPS Office. Thanks but no thanks, I am not interested into another PDF reader that isn't Google's or another text editor that isn't the one I have from F-Droid. *uninstall~*

    - Some apps now ask for extra permissions on Android 12: to place a call via WhatsFuckingCrapp it now asks... to be able to monitor if a phone call is ongoing!? Ugh, Meth. Telegram doesn't pull the same shit, so I don't know what the fuck is going here.

    - There is now a "jelly-like" scrolling effect when you reach the top or the end of some widget contents. Stupid as hell, and no way to disable it, of course.
    tomman Finally, my Redmi Note 11 got fucked its Android 12 update! The first of the (at least) two major updates guaranteed by Xiaomi for this device.

    Downloading the update was painful - it took nearly a week of continuously botched attempts (dunno who to blame: Xiaomi for not properly implementing download resuming, CANTV for being CANTV, or the fact the update is a single big fat ZIP file), but installing it was surprisingly painless and FAST! (thanks for not sucking this time, Qualcomm!). No undesired bloatware came back this time, but Xiaomi tried to preload a new bit of junk ("Funmax", with a gamepad icon... at least it's user removable). So far nothing I routinely use has broke yet, and MIUI customizations conceal quite a lot of Android 12's UI elements.

    A few random bits from the update:

    - Accent color for this release is violet-ish. I miss the pastry codenames... Google are such a bunch of killjoys!

    - Now every app has a mandatory pointless splashscreen, despite being useless for most apps. By default it's just a scaled up app icon (which looks dumb), and there is no way to disable that shit, although app developers have the option of customizing that and bringing a proper splashscreen - from all of my apps, the only ones who are doing this are Telegram (animated icon!), Shazam (same), WhatsFuckingCrapp (the regular WhatsCrapp by Meth™ splash), MercadoLibre (just the regular static splash) and VLC (no splash at all!). Sadly many apps now have two splashscreens: the Android 12 enforced one, and the regular in-app one.

    - I now get a green icon on top of the status bar when apps are recording audio/video. If the app hides the status bar, the icon becomes a unremovable green dot overlaid at the top corner of the screen. You'll now know when you're being outright spied!

    - The navigation bar now defaults to eye-searing WHITE for most apps, instead of black! There seems to be no way to change this, and I don't know if it is a MIUI customization or Android 12 behavior. SUCK!

    - I'm pretty much sure Google killed yet another bunch of useful APIs in the name of Sekuritah™ and progressive dumbing down of the platform...

    - NATIVE ANDROID SCREENSHOTS BROKE. VolDown+Power no longer does squat! I had to reinstall Xiaomi's screenshot garbage as I routinely do screenshots here (mainly from banking apps when you pay people), but that means downgrading to JPEGs! WHAT THE FUCK XIAOMI!?
    11-11 23:59:23.030  1611  2340 V KeyCombinationManager: Performing combination rule : KEYCODE_VOLUME_DOWN + KEYCODE_POWER
    11-11 23:59:23.032 1611 1803 W ActivityManager: Unable to start service Intent { cmp=com.miui.screenshot/.TakeScreenshotService } U=0: not found

    Ah, those pigfuckers at Xiaomi HARDCODED the screenshot functionality to its shitty JPEG-loving crapp - there is no fallback anymore to Android's built in screenshoting feature. FUUUUUUUUCK!
    UPDATE: F-Droid has Screenshot Tile which can make screenshots in PNG (and then some!)... but the "native" method just invokes the original VolDown+Power shortcut, AKA Xiaomi's crapp. Instead I now need to get used to make screenshots from the shortcuts tray, which is annoying as fuck. Thaaaanks, Xinnie!
    tomman If USB modes ever stop working on your KrapOS® handset...

    - and you're sure your cables are GOOD...
    - and the phone does not get detected at all by your PC, BUT the phone will charge the battery...
    - and the phone DOES get detected when powered down in charge-only mode (Gadget Serial / spreadtrum with musb-hdrc)...

    ...then it means KrapOS® internals are taking a dump on you. Here are the two ways I could find to "revive" USB modes (MTP / ADB / tethering):

    1) Consider a factory reset (as this Reddit suggests). Yuck.

    2) Open the Log Manager (*#*#0574#*#*), select "ADB Debug", then check the one and only checkbox (also named "ADB Debug"). Another Reddit suggests that it should be OFF, but in my case USB dies unless the checkbox is ticked ON! A side effect of this is that the useless virtual CDROM that pops up on boot (or when MTP is disabled) won't work anymore.

    Also: while KrapOS® phones beat your average dumbphone with unlimited storage for contacts/call logs/SMS, they're saved on whatever internal Mozilla database format they used on FF48, and those are extremely inefficient formats for relatively large datasets. My phone feels ridiculously slow every time I need to make a call or check my texts, but if I delete a few, performance improves slightly. And without a way to backup calls and texts, well... you'll have nothing and you'll like it!

    Oh, the battery is swelling on my Zoey Smart after 10 months of use. Joy.

    ...at least I finally caved in and paid the $10 tax to Movistar to finally upgrade this ancient 2G/3G USIM to a 3G/4G USIM, so when this KrapOS® turd dies, I can still salvage this phone line with either my Alcaturd and/or the free slot on my Xinniephone, now with a nanoSIM because Fucking Apple™.
    tomman How to unlock the bootloader on Xiaomi devices

    So basically I have to ask permission to Xiaomi for hacking the hardware I already own and has been paid IN FULL for with REAL money. And of course, surrendering loads of personal information straight to the CCP (BCC'd to the CIA/NSA/FBI/KGB/FSB/Meth/Jeff Bezos' secretary). How even is that shit legal!??!?!

    I guess I won't be reflashing this thing for years to come then, if ever. Unless someone comes up with a bootloader unlock that bypasses the desk of a Xinnie The Pooh-controlled corporation. But sekuritah researchers and phone nerds are too busy getting their panties wet over Apple/Samsung's next phones, I guess.

    In the meanwhile, the Android 12 upgrade for MIUI 13 on the Redmi Note 11 series is still in beta period, only available to "Mi Pilot" participants (which involves disclosing personal information to a Chinese corporation, of course), and its General Availability is expected for later this year. All I've heard from XDA is that it makes "phone go faster", battery draining faster, and camera crashes. Nope, for now.
    tomman True to its word, Xiaomi is rolling out Android 12 (well, their bastardized MIUI fork) for the baseline Redmi Note 11:
    https://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_redmi_note_11_gets_miui_13_with_android_12-news-54842.php
    https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/android-12-miui-13-0-2-0-sgcmixm-is-out-post-your-experience.4462795/

    But... so far only insiders, early birds, and people desperate enough to plug their phone to a Windows PC to run Xiaomi's flasher app are getting the 2.7GB upgrade. Hopefully by the time my phone gets it, they should have ironed out the kinks. But it's a smartphone, and Android gets shittier with each major release, so I expect intense hate when the install day comes out.

    For now, instead I just got a ~400MB MIUI 13 "security patch" here - this one took like 20 minutes to install, and "only" added some Korean preload bloatware (com.boundax.koreapreloadappinstaller - Google spies on everybody but they conveniently have no results for that, except for a lone XDA thread wondering about the same... and with this post, there will be two results!) that should be safe to nuke.

    So yeah, my phone is about to become shittier, I guess.
    On the flip side, it feels AWESOME to finally have a cellphone which hasn't been abandoned by its OEM after unboxing it! Android 12 is now real, and I suppose Android 13 will happen too on the Redmi Note 11.
    tomman If MIUI's nasty bad habit of saving screenshots to lossy JPEG instead of sane PNG pisses you off (including the non-standard save location of /DCIM/Screenshots), nuke com.miui.screenshot (it's fine if you disable it with pm disable-user, but you actually want to pm uninstall yet another pointless piece of Xinnie's bloatware), and you'll get stock Android 11 screenshot experience... which is meh, but at least you get sane PNGs as $DEITY intended.

    Also, recently I got an update for MIUI 13 on my phone. After taking over half an hour to install, surprisingly I didn't had to debloat again, aside of Xiaomi's Calculator, some T-Mobile Deutschland spyware, and some Chinesium payment provider crapp. And according to Teh Googles, my phone is "enterprisey-friendly", and will be supported until January 2025, while according to Xiaomi, the Redmi Note 11 (vanilla, non-Pro, non-5G) may even get Android 12/13 sometime before EOL. I guess this is the first time I got a cellphone that wasn't already EOL'd from the moment I took it out of the box...
    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by wertigon
    I am now in a position where I'm doing embedded web development.

    E.g. doing text parsing in C on a machine with 1 MB of RAM and 256 kB of storage total, that is supposed to serve HTML5-compliant and ECMAScript 6 compliant webservers. On a machine that, in all likelyhood, will never ever directly connect to the Internet. But a smartphone is supposed to connect to the device and download a PWA from it over a local network.

    I'm convinced this is a pretty accurate simulation of programmer hell. :D
    Oh no.
    You have my condolences.
    creaothceann
    Posted by wertigon
    C
    Posted by wertigon
    1 MB of RAM and 256 kB of storage

    https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/asm ;)
    wertigon I am now in a position where I'm doing embedded web development.

    E.g. doing text parsing in C on a machine with 1 MB of RAM and 256 kB of storage total, that is supposed to serve HTML5-compliant and ECMAScript 6 compliant webservers. On a machine that, in all likelyhood, will never ever directly connect to the Internet. But a smartphone is supposed to connect to the device and download a PWA from it over a local network.

    I'm convinced this is a pretty accurate simulation of programmer hell. :D
    tomman https://www.ghacks.net/2022/05/19/google-forces-total-commander-removes-the-ability-to-install-apks/
    https://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=76643

    FUCK
    OFF
    AND
    DIE
    GOOGLE ALPHABET!


    Seriously, this is the class of BULLSHIT I would expect from fucking Apple! It's almost as obnoxious as Xiaomi trying to stop me from owning my own cellphone because Xiaomi thinks I can hurt myself. Thankfully you can still sideload, but come on, even fucking Chrome let you install APKs!

    And to the morons threatening to defect to Apple over bullshit like this: fuck off too. It's like fleeing Cuba to North Korea.
    tomman For those having spotty/unstable/unusable WLAN problems with Spreadasstrum/Unisuck cellphones: before slamming the phone into the nearest trashcan, consider updating the firmware of your router/AP!

    Turns out that there was nothing wrong with all those Spreadasstrum phones' WiFi (or with that ol' broken BlackBerry Torch) that roamed on my airwaves: it always was my AP! Or to be more precise: the DD-WRT build on it.

    Let's get technical!
    While Saki does the routing duties on This House Networks, for obvious reasons she can't do wireless. Instead, since December '11, WiFis have been under the domain of a good ol' TP-Link WR743NDv1 (which isn't even full-N, but draft-N!). Old, but I don't really need that much as 1) for serious stuff, my computers have perfectly working Ethernet jacks, and 2) this house didn't really got polluted of WLAN-capable mobile junk until 2016 or so (and even then, with a 3MB DSL anything bigger/badder/better would be a waste of everything). This Atheros-based '743 has been running DD-WRT since Day One, and only have been updated once every few years - on DD-WRT, updates are a PITA since you have to reset and redo all your settings (and no, you can't backup&restore settings between different builds, unless you want a brick!), so I tend to drag my ass on it and simply forget, so the last time was *checks firmware* Build 30432, August 16, 2016.

    Normally that wouldn't matter (aside of horrible vulnerabilities on 802.11 that noone would bother exploiting in real life anyway) since for a device, a WLAN is a WLAN is a WLAN and all it has to do (after getting my WLAN password) is to blast bits back and forth on my airspace. Except for a long-gone BlackBerry Storm 9800, and more recently, every single Spreadtrum/Unisoc-powered Blu smartdevice that has visited this house (Advance L4, Zoey Smart). The symptoms are the same in all cases:

    - Heavy packet loss (noticeable on pings)
    - Total and complete WLAN blackout after a few minutes (actual length is variable, but in any case, no more than 5 minutes in the best case), requiring to cycle WiFi off/on on the device.

    Tried tweaking EVERY SINGLE SETTING available on DD-WRT, to no avail... except for one: WMM Support. Disable that, and WLAN suddenly is stable again on those problematic clients! BUT!
    Posted by DD-WRT
    Short for Wi-Fi MultiMedia, is a Wi-Fi Alliance interoperability certification that provides a basic QoS "best effort" like function to Wi-Fi as well as other functions such as power saving, its a requirement & part of the 802.11n (& AC & AX) specification. Disabling WMM will result in clients (ones that strictly obey specifications which is 90% of them) falling back to 802.11a/g LEGACY rates (54M), the same way as using TKIP with WPA2 yields LEGACY rates.

    So... uh, I get stable WLAN on a couple devices, at the cost of severely downgrading my connection and losing performance. Lovely. Years ago, when I tested with the Torch, I didn't bothered since eventually that phone was borrowed and eventually it left this house... and years later, I would get this craptastic KrapOS turd that won't stream a single song without dying midway. At first I thought I had got a lemon, but when testing the Zoey Smart on other WLANs, it actually worked just fine! And for that matter, that horrible Advance L4 worked fine too! (that one is still alive, BTW - it DID needed a new battery and a reflash)

    You can now guess where this is going: check the router, fiddle with every setting, until ticking out the magical "disable WMM" radiobutton. And sure enough, the Zoey Smart now had stable WiFi... at 802.11g rates. I was down to two options:

    - Buy a new router: I have better things on which to spend $30 (which buys me a shitty WR820N, unflashable to anything due to low RAM and craptacular Mediatek chipset that will never be supported by any 3rd-party firmware - less terrible but still crap routers are $80+, and still have unsupported Mediatek chipsets as Qualcomm Atheros seems to be a dying breed on the TP-Link universe these days), so NOPE, that's NOT happening. No, I'm not interested in OpenWRT/Tomato/[insert here your favorite router distro] - it's DD-WRT or bust for me.

    - Update DD-WRT, and hope for the best: Technically those ancient routers are still supported by their builds, but on a best-effort basis, as in "YOU are solely responsible for testing, don't bug us if it bricks your device, if it breaks you get to keep both halves, patches welcome". To make things more complex, starting with build 33375 you can't simply flash over your current DD-WRT setup: you need to revert to TP-Link's factory firmware, then upgrade from there, and with every step there is a mandatory reset (unless you want a brick. Did I've mentioned that bricks suck?). And from what I've read, recent builds are on the bloaty side (just like every other router distro, except that 4M/32M devices are no longer welcome by OpenWRT and friends), so they had to lose some fat to fit into the minuscule 4MB FlashROM, while gaining some bugs in the way.

    Long short story: Ended flashing to DD-WRT's "recommended" build (44715, November 3, 2020), although there are reports of more recent builds working fine for basic purposes on the '743 (as of today, last build is 48646 from yesterday!). After changing underwear for the umpteenth time this year (I'll never stop getting scared from BIOS/firmware flashing!), I finally got my '743 with a build where WMM is actually not broken, and now my Unisuck-powered Zoey Smart is happy to have its WLAN working for more than 5 minutes at a time. Dunno why only those (and old BlackBerries) are so stingy with proper WMM support (even asstacular Realsuck WLAN NICs were fine with my setup, but almost all of the wireless-capable devices on this house come from Qualcomm), but eh, that's no longer a problem here *knocks on wood*

    tl;dr: try to update your WLAN AP firwmare more than every few years!
    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by creaothceann

    Posted by tomman
    This phone is FAST. It boots far faster than ANYTHING ELSE in this house, including computers and dumbphones!

    So you don't have a C64 in your house. :) But seriously, maybe they just use hibernation?

    But the C64 boots sooooo slowly!


    https://youtu.be/JIEPqD4luG8
    tomman Ringtones! GAAAAH!

    - Copy ringtones to phone
    - Settings->Sounds->tap on the respective notification sound buttons
    - Get greeted by a blank screen with a very small loading animation, because in its unlimited wisdom, Xiaomi's sound gallery crapplet is the same used for wallpapers and REQUIRES Internet... on that day of the month where my DSL is wetting the bed.
    - Go back, try again. After enough tries, you will see a "use local media" option on top of the online picks. Tap that!
    - Pick which app you want to use as your sound provider - in my case I have at least FIVE options: the stock gallery, file manager, and music player crapps, Simple Gallery Pro, Total Commander, and something else I can't remember.
    - Since Total Commander is a honest-to-God (but heavily crippled by Google as of Android 11) file manager, browse to the folder where you placed your ringtones, and pick one.
    - The ringtone will be "installed" to the built-in ringtone library, so you only need to do this once per file (and if you mess it up, you'll end with unremovable dupes!)
    - Now you CAN apply the ringtone! Rinse and repeat for both notifications and alarm tones.

    Why this has to be rocket science, people!? Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and nearly every other cellphone OEM (excluding greedy telcos' lobotomized firmware THAT'S WITH YOU VERIZON!) had pretty much perfected ringtone/wallpaper selection by 2006. Now the whole industry has regressed so hard on this seemingly simple bit of UI/UX that we're barely one step above requiring firmware hacks just to change a ringtone!

    Cellphones. Must. Die.
    creaothceann
    Posted by tomman
    The OLED display is simply stunning. Every computer, TV, cellphone, clock, and anything with a display should be OLED, period. It's like going back to the Good Ol' Age of CRTs, but this time with Retina™ razor-sharp pixels, and actual blacks!

    There's the issue with burn-in though. At least, until the next best thing comes around.


    Posted by tomman
    This phone is FAST. It boots far faster than ANYTHING ELSE in this house, including computers and dumbphones!

    So you don't have a C64 in your house. :) But seriously, maybe they just use hibernation?


    Posted by tomman
    NanoSIMs. The phone is BIG, maybe too much for comfort, yet OEMs still insist into using those ridiculously small SIMs

    The argument for removing the headphone jack was space and waterproofness. Presumably every little bit helps for adding components / faster CPUs / larger batteries.
    tomman Why every cellphone I've owned since my RAZRs have been much worse than the previous one!?

    OK, because I can't be negative the 100% of the time, here are the positive things about my Xinniephone Redmi Note 11 (vanilla, not Pro, not 5G - there are at least four or five varieties of the Note 11):

    - The OLED display is simply stunning. Every computer, TV, cellphone, clock, and anything with a display should be OLED, period. It's like going back to the Good Ol' Age of CRTs, but this time with Retina™ razor-sharp pixels, and actual blacks!

    - This phone is FAST. It boots far faster than ANYTHING ELSE in this house, including computers and dumbphones! Apps install in a breeze - it now takes more time to download the .APKs than to actually install them! Gotta go fast, would Sonic say if he owned such a phone... I guess I made good for sticking to Qualcomm instead of defecting to Mediasuck, Unisuck, or whatever Samsung does these days with Exynos - the big Q is evil but they do know how to make speedy cellphone SoC, and this goes all the way back to my V3m's MSM6500.

    - The (main) camera isn't total garbage.

    - Dual SIM with LTE for both Latam and Euro frequencies, which means you no longer need a special snowflake phone just for Digitel's eurosnowflake UMTS/LTE bands.

    - 128GB ROM + MicroSD slot? YES PLEASE!

    OK, enough praising. The phone is a total pile of shit, aggravated by the fact that it's pure Chinesium crapware under the hood:

    - I'm FED UP with the constant nannying from MIUI's "this action is sensitive, you're not grown up enough for taking control of your own device". Fuck off with that shit, folks. We paid for the phone, it's OURS, not Xiaomi's property!

    - Even after unlocking Developer Options, half of the good stuff is still locked behind a mandatory "Mi Account" infosucking lockdown. Wanna unlock your bootloader? You need a SIM card for that! Need to install apps over USB? Nope, can't do - unless you're blessed by the Party, that is! Or... follow these convoluted instructions to actually be able to test your own code on your goddamned phone. FUCK OFF, XIAOMI!

    - Why setting up a custom wallpaper in Android is such a chore!? No, you can't do that from Settings, because Xiaomi wants you to connect to the Internet, accept an EULA, and use any of the wallpapers from their gallery instead of your carefully chosen .JPG already stored inside your phone! Instead, you must resort to your gallery application to be able to set your wallpaper. GOD DAMN IT XIAOMI/GOOGLE!!!

    - NanoSIMs. The phone is BIG, maybe too much for comfort, yet OEMs still insist into using those ridiculously small SIMs just because Apple says so, while generating a nice revenue stream for those greedy telcos that still insist into charging $10 for a completely pointless SIM swap. At least Soviet Venezuela will be a CDMA eSIM-free land for years to come...

    - The amount of bloatware on this phone is simply bewildering. Over 400 packages on the stock ROM out of the box, including:
    * The usual Google suite of bloaty crapps, including the dialer and SMS crapps.
    * Qualcomm's mysteryware™
    * CCP Xiaomi's spyware, thinly disguised as "system preloaded apps". Why in the fuck do I need to accept an EULA and grant permissions to a frickin' calculator application!?
    * Speaking of Xiaomi's spyware, this phone also ships with a bunch of Xiaomi's unremovable payment crapps that only work on India and China.
    * More chinesium spyware from misc sources (including Tencent and Tik Tok)
    * Of fucking course, Meth spyware: no less than FOUR Farcebook APKs (but surprisingly no Instagranola or WhatsFuckingCrapp)
    * For no good reason at all, a lone Deutsche Telekom package (de.telekom.tsc).
    * TWO FM radio tuners: including a hidden one from Codeaurora which is actually decent, unlike MIUI's overly minimalist abomination.

    - Seriously, MIUI is among the worst UIs I've ever seen on a cellphone. From annoying notifications for enabling shit you don't want (no, for the sake of Jesus Fucking Christ, I do not want to add ANY account to this cellphone!) to pointless duplicate control panels and separate crapps for setting up basic phone services. Can't believe people PAY for this garbage in droves! Where are the sanctions against Xiaomi with all that evidence!? We nailed Huawei and ZTE for less than that!

    - The fingerprint scanner (built into the side power button) is kinda garbage, a complete waste of time and money.

    - No notch, but a front camera hole. Oh, and a display with rounded corners. Jonny Ive, ROT IN HELL!

    ...

    Anyway, I've had little interest into tampering with this thing (it's a "work" phone, after all - I'm not getting rid of my Alcaturd anytime soon), but enough is enough, so I've had great satisfaction with the usual no-root debloating method. Sadly you can't get rid of half of Xiaomi's spyware, but at least now that F-Droid has decided to get along with this Note 11, I'm doing the usual replacements (Simple Mobile Tools are a godsend, and it seems I'll be forced to make a truce with Firefuxed Fenix for the sake of business)

    Stuff pending:

    - Ringtones. GAH!
    - Finding a suitable wallpaper. Now that I have a 24000x1080+px screen, finding suitable wallpapers from my favorite Touhou characters have become challenging - this stupid pointless ultrawide aspect ratio (20:9 says my trusty Casio fx-991MS) isn't doing me any favors.
    - Finish installing the usual crapps (banks, MercadoLibre bloatfest, check what am I missing from F-Droid)
    - Find a way to get banned from Meth use WhatsFuckingCrapp from Pidgin without losing my sanity or getting banned from Meth.
    - Try not to break the OLED display - the phone store salesdroid warned me that replacements are $75+!
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