Setting up phones is a nightmare

As I shared on previous posts, my dad and mom acquired new devices, the same model, but with quite different uses!

Regardless, as the more tech-savvy member of the family, the responsibility to set them up fell upon me, having to deal with a lot of progress indicators, toggles asking me to track everything the phone does, and logging in to a online accounts, because that’s how these things go now for regular people.

Many years ago, this blogpost could have been quite different, I may be mentioning some nifty program that can easily back up things and transfer them to the next device.

Especially when I used custom ROMs and root utilities to do all the heavy lifting, I often loved setting up my device again and again every few months. Even getting a new one wasn’t bad at all when I knew I’d eventually use it how I want.

But as time goes on Android has been more locked down, and I have to admit I haven’t caught up with recent backup tools that deal with all that—Even less so when my parents have phones that I can’t really root.

At the very least, the backup tools by OEM’s have caught up quite well, if at the cost of my peace of mind.

I must admit I didn’t do that much this time around. Just the bare minimum list of the things that I had to change.

• Data migration - I did this with the Android built-in method, transferring data from device to device. I hate to admit I also used Samsung’s Smart Switch to migrate even more data, like all folders and files, photos and the like. This was not ideal, but I was lazy.

• Log-in to Google - Rather unavoidable for a normal person who uses a phone, unless I offered myself for tech support even more setting up Droid-ify or something like that, but no.

• Avoid extra log-ins - I didn’t make a Samsung account nor used their Microsoft OneDrive Integration. Of course, some preinstalled apps like Netflix went away too, so no big deal.

• Avoid telemetry - Disabled every checkbox that I could find, including personalized ads, both from Google and Samsung services.

• Uninstall Bloatware - Removed any Samsung duplicates and most of Google’s junk—still keeping some basics like Calendar or so, sadly. These devices come with a lot of unecessary things…

• Default browser - Samsung Internet and Chrome went poof, and I decided to switch both phones to Vivaldi Browser, there was a time where Firefox would have been it, but not today.

• Other app replacements - There were not many extra apps I installed on their devices—you are always free to check what’s on my phone though—other than Vivaldi Browser, Fossify Gallery and a password manager like Bitwarden or KeepassXC. I could install some more things, but, meh.

All in all, the new phones are pretty good hardware-wise, and I still need to do a couple of things like installing their banking apps or maybe a few logins that I missed.

Honestly, this experience and the implications was kind of terrible.

Without me, my parents would have ended up creating at least one extra Samsung account. Cloud services like OneDrive or Google Photos would be sucking up files and copying them to their servers, getting filled up with the data and then asking them to subscribe to unlock more storage a couple of months down the line.

Left on their own, my parents may be seeing ads popping up constantly in OneUI, as well as browsing the web without an adblocker, they would be using default applications that don’t work as reliably, that track whatever they do to a certain degree.

And of course, all of those AI assistants would be listening in in the background. It really is a nightmare out there, and it’s not only affecting my parents, it affects all of those unaware of the dangers that these practices bring. It’s a mess all around.

I don’t know how to get out of this one, the hold these companies have is just too much, and I keep on losing my patience and conceding more and more of my—or my family members—data just to get over with it.

So, do you have have any advice or thoughts about this? What would be some phones that don’t have as many privavy-invasive tactics? It would be nice to be aware of hardware that doesn’t do this as much…