My Smartphone Setup

Some time has passed since the first article. I've learned a few things since then, and applied it to my setup.

A friend of mine, before buying an iPhone, had the same smartphone model as mine - a Redmi Note 11 (spes).

Since he kept it in a drawer with no use for it, I asked him to give it to me.
The one I had, already had a replaced battery and screen - and I missed the OLED. And would you believe it? He just gave it to me! And didn't even wipe his data. There were photos of him naked!

Anyway, after backing up some photos of me, I wiped the rest of the device. And off I went to unlock the bootloader. These Xiaomi devices are a real pain to do anything in the developer settings, you need to have a Xiaomi account, and when unlocking, you need a SIM to do it via mobile data. Anyway, I had done this before so it was easier this time around. But the process isn't simple. On the first time I had to watch a vietnamese tutorial to do it. I also had to use a virtual machine with Windows 10 to use the Xiaomi unlock tool and the spoof tool from the vietnamese guy. Unfortunately, CrDroid no longer had maintainers for my device.

So I found Project Matrixx, which is a CrDroid fork, and it had a maintainer. Thank you, to spesmynuts for your service! Note that the stock ROM was stuck in Android 13, so this allowed me to make the upgrade to Android 16! I installed it after flashing TWRP and such. And also took the oportunity to root it with Magisk. I learned a lot just experimenting. Trying to get all integrity flags working, spoofing bootloader status, using things like De1984 and Privacy Flip, both by Doru Moramu. Excellent work.
I also didn't install GApps, because I wanted to be free of Google entirely (which I still couldn't do).
I had a lot of help through the XDA Forums and Yuri's Telegram Channel.

A picture of the device with it's stock wallpaper. (linked to spec sheet):

How the device looks like at the moment, and the apps I use:
(I'll go over them later).

Here you can see:

I use the default Lineage OS apps;
I have Brave and Ironfox as browsers;
I use the Lawnicons icon pack;
I use Nekogram, a OSS app for Telegram;
I use Metrolist for music, a YTMusic client;
De1984 - used for managing apps permissions and network usage (needs root)
I have Capcut, which is alarming, but I've used De1984 to block it's internet connection and have an older version of the app (hopefully OpenCut will release for Android soon);
Aurora Store for the following apps: CNH do Brasil, Whatsapp, Protonmail, KdêBus and WireGuard;
Whatsapp - unfortunately everyone in Brazil uses this. I am still coerced to use it. I limit it's background activity with De1984;
E-mail: Tuta, Protonmail and K9-mail which I use for the UNI gave me;
Proton VPN to get around restrictions to my region (because of age verification laws);
Newpipe for YouTube videos;
Tabs Lite, an excellent app to access music chords;
Tuner - a OSS tuner app for my instruments;
Open Document Viewer for the eventual .docx and .xlsx;
No service can substitute how good GMaps is yet. So I use this webview wrapper for it - GMaps WV;
LocalSend for sending files over Wi-Fi. Brilliant, simple app;
NeoStore for F-Droid apps, which are most apps in the device;
Jitsi Meet for video calls;
Breezy Weather for weather, of course. And the clock widget;
Translate You, for translations. Includes many translation engines;
WireGuard and Jellyfin for my media server setup. Blog about it here;
KdêBus for bus routes in the city I live;
Plexus for sharing how well apps work on my device;
Xtra for the eventual Twitch stream I want to see;
Voice Changer with Effects for fun shananigans (internet blocked with De1984)
Privacy Flip - automatically disable features when the screen locks (Wi-fi, Bluetooth, Mobile data, cameras, microphone) - needs root
Audile for automatic music recognition

Some apps like KdêBus need MicroG to display a map in the app which is originally meant to use google maps. With microg it uses MapLibre instead to display it.

I don't recommend just anyone to do this. A lot of things were made more difficult for me because of this. It's the convenience dillema. Please do research on your device, if it's chipset has wide support for developers, if a ROM has maintainers for your device, TWRP also needs to support your device, and check the compatibilty of the apps you need, like banks and such before attempting any of what I've said. I got lucky my bank didn't mind me having a custom ROM or Google Play integrity, but it did mind the device being rooted, and I could spoof that.

Thank you for reading. I hope you've learned something.

-Ernopolis

July 28th, 2026

My screen has cracked.
It still works, but I don't want to change it to an inferior LCD, I want to keep the original working OLED. I'd like to only change the glass, but I haven't found a technician that would do that.

I bought an used phone.

A Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G (r8q).

I chose this model because it has good community support. So I've installed LineageOS on it, and it works very well. Unfortunately it doesn't have a headphone jack, which kind of upsets me, but I don't even use earphones any more so... (I lost mine). Bank app still works just fine, MicroG fixes the bus app I use. I haven't rooted it though... I'd like to, so I could further optimize it with the two apps by Doru Moramu and improve my privacy and battery usage, but I don't want to go through the - incovenient... - task of getting my bank app to work again. I wanted to keep the spes as my daily driver for most things and have the r8q stay at home for using the bank app and WhatsApp and other proprietary software I still need to use, but the spes was giving me headaches because it has much less custom rom support and every rom I was trying to install was giving me issues.

It was in that mess that I learned the function in spes: unlike the Samsung that after tripping off Knox you can't restore the stock ROM and lock the bootloader, through the spes fastboot you can!
You need to have the Fastboot ROM.

With the shell scripts this package comes with, you can reflash the whole device to factory settings. You can choose to either flash_all or flash_all_lock to relock the bootloader.
I wouldn't want to that after the trouble it took me to unlock - but since Brazil's government app doesn't like to be on a unlocked device or installed from outside the Google Play Store, it's nice to know I have that option for whenever I need to bend backwards to it...

Which would be troublesome since I don't have a Google Account anymore. I'd have to use the university's account. I'd take the opportunity to remove all proprietary software from the r8q - Whatsapp, my bank app and the bus app... I want to start a decomp project for the bus app eventually...
Create a FOSS client for all of the bus informations it provides... One day

-Ernopolis