I didn’t even know this happened. Mainly because the moment Google blocked rooted and custom ROMs for Google Messages. I just stopped using the app outright.

It also depends on whether it’s exynos or not. Qualcomm has been strong-arming Samsung into kindly locking their bootloaders.

It makes a really really good android tablet in my experience and breaks in half every other android tablet I have used as of recently and I can’t get rid of it.

Like sure battery life isn’t the best. But the amount of things that you can do with a generic android device is astounding and is well worth the investment and it has more ram than any other tablet in its price category when bought used on eBay. Such that it actually functions really well compared to the shittastic tablets you’d be buying for its price point.

That and you can just run Linux on the Nintendo Switch anyway and have a fully functional computer that mogs any single board computer out there including the raspberry pi. Like having better hardware decoding and actual vulkan and opengl support that isn’t gimped due to laziness surrounding drivers that surrounds these computers.

Oh finally I can pull it out of my closet and actually use it again! Oh wait… It requires you have not updated the device.

I guess I’ll just hit it with a sledgehammer then and continue to use my computer that doesn’t force ads on me by default because I run Linux and also use my Windows 11 computer with updates disabled on it that will probably be switched over to Linux when 24H2 comes out or when 23H2 no longer receives security updates.

P.S. You can’t change the default launcher anymore and scoped filesystems basically broke all functionality on the thing that I was using it for. I also don’t know the domains for Google’s ads that they show on the device and I don’t care anymore.

Also an IR blaster as someone who also has an LG V20. It’s a shame that these phones can’t rock custom roms beyond android 8 or 9 (only if you live in Korea) due to Qualcomm refusing to give the community volte drivers and technically these phones never having an official way to unlock the bootloader. But using android 8.0 in 2024 isn’t that bad yet and I can totally justify still using a 2016 smartphone in 2024 especially when it benchmarks the same as low end smartphones today plus it has a removable battery.