I’ve got some old phones from the 2000s and early 2010s. Mostly early smart phones, but I also have a flip phone. All of which I’m interested in jailbreaking. Mostly to see if I can forge one into a simplified, degoogled “dumb phone”.
Are there any online communities you guys know of dedicated to doing this for older phones specifically? I have the phones, a computer running Linux, and the desire… but uh, no idea how to actually do this. So I think a dedicated community to guide me would be a good idea.
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I haven’t been into the Android rooting/ROM scene in quite a while but XDA Developers was the place to go for all the info back then.
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I was into the BananaHackers stuff for a while but sadly dont use my Nokia with KaiOS much anymore and the jailbreak was a little hard for me, but jailbreaking or softmodding is the bomb man, if you do anything to them old phones I’d love to check it out
I spend a while combing through their device categories; I think they may have something for my Nook but I can’t get much info on its model right now.
As for the actual phones I want to jailbreak… nothing! Not surprising for the flip phone, but it is surprising for everything else :( especially since their brands have forum categories (with one exception), just not their exact models.
Not sure if they’re old, or obscure, or what… I’ll poke around more to see if there’s any very general guides for starting with android but yeah, nothing for what I’ve got.
EDIT: I’ve also checked both LinageOS and e/OS and, while they’re not the end-all to degoogled Android OSes for older phones, the fact I couldn’t find any of these devices there may also be telling of… something. I know nothing about this stuff other than the proprietary and locked-down nature of phones makes it an absolute pain to get into them.
I don’t think there’s loads you can do with really old phones… I tried Lineage OS on an old Wileyfox handset I had, but - despite their claims that it was supported - it barely ran in any meaningful sense… unstable display, almost every function failed etc. etc.
My daily phone now is a Google Pixel 7 Pro running Graphene OS with all the Google crap disabled. This cost me £130 from eBay and, while it’s the most I’ve ever spent on a phone, I accept that it represents a good deal in terms of privacy and security.
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That’s a bummer that you couldn’t find anything for your old devices. That’s the unfortunate thing about these communities, each phone can be vastly different and people only really work on the devices they have themselves so there is a limited range of support.
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Yeah, will probably do that for an actual daily phone at some point. I mostly just wanted to mess around with these old devices, see if I could give them new life somehow.