[Xiaomi Mi 10T Lite Guides, News, & Discussion] woelkchen:
Well this is my review of the device. Haven't read a lot of bad stuff about it and was wondering about that. But if you think about buying this device, take the time to read through my review. It is by no means complete, some points that piss me off might be subjective.

I bought this device recently because I thought it was a cheap smartphone with decent hardware and support for custom ROMS (especially LineageOS).

At first boot I was shocked about what bloat and garbage the manufacturer and Google decided to preinstall, but I was expecting as much.

I don't have a Google account and neither do I want one. So naturally I skipped that part. I also skipped the part where I connected the device to the internet at first.

As soon as I connected it, I was greeted with at least eight new Google apps I never asked for. Also some cool games I really didn't give two ****s about. Thanks, more work required to get rid of all that bloat!

Lets try to get some order into the things I really didn't enjoy about the device, its manufacturer and the steps required to rid myself of the bloat.

> "Security": Obviously my device is regularly scanned by some snake oil (provided by Avast...) for malware, viruses and whatnot. I don't remember agreeing to that but at least it can be disabled. You just have to through the pile of garbage that is called "Settings" and its subitems.

> "Data Privacy": Seems like one automagically opts into a ton of data collection, analytics and telemetry. I bet it's buried somehwere in their privacy agreement but I also bet that not even a fraction of the end-users bother to read it. You can revoke your agreement to data collection for virtually every app which renders most of them unusable. Also for every app you revoke your agreement you have to wait ten seconds, because obviously you can't be sure this is truly what you want!

> "Automatic updates": I was given the option to disable those at first boot. That's for MIUI only. Google (or is it MIUI too?) will still download updates for apps you meant to get rid of the first time it actually gets a connection. As well as those great promotion apps, google apps, amazon apps, facebook apps..hell even eBay....

> "Unlocking": This is the absolute worst part of it all. Usually you get a phone, create an account at the manufacturers site, allow OEM unlock in Developer Options and can do it via Fastboot. Not with Xiaomi you can't! You have to create a Mi account. Took couple of hours to get a verification mail, no biggie. You have to connect that account to your smartphone. Now you need their supercool Mi unlock tool. I got a background in software development and if that was my work, I'd shoot myself...for this specific device you are linked to some ancient version of the unlock tool. Online you can find newer versions but you're never really sure you wanna use this, since the source is at least questionable. Someone hosted it on Android filehost or Google Drive...I totally wanna run that with privileges on my windows, which I just needed to install on some machine, because you can't possibly run the required commands over fastboot on any system...Oh and did I mention that one is required to connect a phone number to the account, in case you lose access to the account?...I never wanted the account in the first place and only put up with it because I wanted to unlock the phone.

The Mi unlock tool is just painful to use...some steps aren't working at all. Sometimes you have to sign in via entering your credentials, sometimes you have to use a QR code which you scan with your phone...both seem to fail an awful lot. I had to search for help for literally every point in the procedure to unlock and I am certain the fact that it worked at all is pure luck.

If you manage to go to the step of actually unlocking the phone and all the excitement gets built up, you end up at 99% and FAIL! For "security reasons" you have to wait a week (i have read there are even worse timeouts). But you should NOT be doing anything else with your Mi account as that might reset the countdown!!!...I have also read there is another 30 days timeout if you use the account to unlock another device. For, uhm, SECURITY reasons!

You finally get to unlock the phone after a week if everything goes well and are able to rid yourself of that bloat- and spyware. Well sucks that the drivers for the camera are proprietary and there isn't any attempt to release it, so have fun with your four cameras and almost a 100MP taking 8MP photos that look like ****.

> "Camera on Custom ROMs": Seriously...don't try to tell people you are taking awesome pictures with GCam and xyz's build of it, blablabla. The pics still look worse than the ones with the MIUI camera. They are decent at best.

> "Cleaner": It seems like the awesome "Cleaner"-App dislikes anything that was installed from an unknown source. It recommended me to remove F-Droid altogether, since it takes up a couple hundred megabytes of storage (you know, cache and apks residing there)

> "ROM Support": Seems like apart from LineageOS there isn't really anything else you could use. Pixel Experience seems to be discontinued, other custom ROMs as well...either get the bloated MIUI garbage or LineageOS. I take that on me. I should have checked out this forum before buying the device. I only saw LineageOS builds and thought it would be well supported...joke's on me :/

Shouldn't end it with that much negativity, right? Well. If you can accept a decent camera making mostly ****ty pictures, it works just great on LineageOS ;)

If you disagree with any of the points, by all means contradict me on them. It is also possible that I'm missing something. If there is a MIUI ROM that removes most of the bloat and gives me at least some privacy that's worthy to be called privacy, feel free to point me to it.

Anyways, I just needed to vent about it. Perhaps something good will come out of this. This was my first and last Xiaomi smartphone.