I’ve never heard of those brands you’ve mentioned but they surely sound Chinese. If Motorola and OnePlus are owned by Chinese companies I would also count them in the list.
You are totally right about outsourcing, it is more or less the same thing if biggest portion of the phone design is outsourced to china. The paper is very interesting, thank you for sharing.
Regardless of outsourcing, when it comes to privacy, Samsung surely don’t have a bulletproof reputation either.
I don’t remember the brand my friend used, it was a brand in Redmi price range.
Yes, it isn’t obvious in the marketing, but a lot of people are buying Chinese phones and not even knowing it. The largest seller of smartphones on the planet is B&K Electronics, which is the parent company of the OPPO, Vivo, Realme and OnePlus companies. Lenovo owns Motorola. TCL licenses the Alcatel brand, and used to license the Blackberry brand. ZTE owns the nubia brand. Xiaomi owns the Redmi brand. Transsion Holdings owns the Itel, Infinix and Tecno brands. Huawei recently spun off Honor as a separate company to get around the US government’s ban on using American tech. These Chinese companies together represent about 65% of the global smartphone market.
The Chinese government is creating a 1984-style surveillance society inside of China, but I personally fear the actions of the “5 eyes” governments far more, because I think they represent a far greater threat to most people on this forum (who are mainly Europeans and North Americans).
As I see it, we shouldn’t paint all Chinese companies with the same brush, because PINE64 and Rockchip are pretty good companies in terms of their support for FOSS, providing documentation and working with the community, whereas Huawei/HiSilicon and UNISOC aren’t good in any of these areas. Just like the American companies Apple, Google and Qualcomm are evil in some ways, but good in other ways, so it is best to not generalize and to focus on the specifics.
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