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Comment by Huh1337 | Hacker News Reader

You ever tried that? It's a horrible experience. I love Android but you definitely need to spend much more to get something out of it. My advice is to get a second hand Samsung flagship - I have S9+, that's a great phone you can get for $200 - but don't go for anything less, you'll be very sorry if you do.

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A $20 Android phone is better than nothing when you're already struggling to pay bills and raise children. That's the reality many people face.

No, it's so bad it's better to have nothing for a while, save some money and then buy a better phone.

These phones really are so bad. Give it a go. Usually it's a horrible mess of Chinese tracking code, shitware apps you can't uninstall, and it won't be getting any system updates in a year.

Buy an older flagship second hand phone for $20, that's going to be much better experience than a new $20 one, even if it's 5+ years old and doesn't look good anymore.

It is when you need a phone to run apps to do your job or for simple things like banking. Talked to a pest control guy who works for a large company, and he needs a smartphone to do his job. He is quite literally managed through an app, needs it to check-in to work, for time sheets, find out where the next customer lives etc. Someone like that cannot go without a smartphone, requirements like that are leaking into low-level service and retail jobs, now.

No, it's not. Never buy a new $20 phone - it's subsidized by all that tracking and pre-installed shitware and it won't be getting updates soon, if it ever got even one, and the hardware is going to be absolutely terrible too. Buy a second hand one if $20 is all you can spend.

You don't care about bloatware when your first worry is whether you can end up homeless or malnourishing your kids at the end of the month.

You do because your phone isn't usable because of it. Hard to do work on a phone that barely runs the SMS app.

Your Samsung has more tracking and spyware installed you won't be able to uninstall. Never buy a Samsung and expect privacy.

Samsung has unlockable bootloader and good LineageOS support. Unheard of with these $20 phones. And even without flashing, I'd still rather be tracked by Samsung than whatever they put into these $20 ones.

Only some Samsung's have unlockable bootloaders.

Yeah, the flagships do, that's why I'm recommending them.

“ Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. ”

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