“Oh that’s right,” he said, looking up from the phone and laughing. As he navigated the Android setup menu he asked me if I wanted him to link my Google account to the phone. SIM cards come in three different sizes-standard, micro, and nano-and my nano SIM wouldn’t fit in the S3’s micro SIM port.īy the time I explained all this to the Verizon employee, he had found a SIM card that would work. The only thing that remained to do before loading Sailfish onto the device was to find a SIM card that fit. So two days and $20-plus-shipping later, I was in possession of a surprisingly new-looking Verizon Galaxy S3.
I ultimately decided to go with that model after finding extensive documentation online from others who had had success porting unofficial operating systems onto their phones. I remembered using a Galaxy S3 while living in India a few years ago and liking it well enough. If I wanted to use Sailfish, I was going to have to get a different phone. As it turned out, Verizon had locked the bootloader on my phone model, which is so obscure that no one in the vibrant Android hacking community had dedicated much time to figuring out a workaround. They weren't fancy, but they’ve reliably met most of my needs for years.įor the past week and a half I had spent most of my evenings trying to port an independent mobile OS called Sailfish onto my phone without any luck. My phone was a Verizon-specific version of the Samsung Galaxy J3, a 2016 model that cost a little over $100 new. At the time I was using a cheap ASUS laptop at work and a homebrew PC at my apartment. Most of the tech I use on a day-to-day basis is pretty utilitarian. At that point I had found adequate, open source replacements for most of the services offered by these companies, but ditching the Android OS, which is developed by Google, was proving difficult. I was about to embark on a month without intentionally using any services or products produced by the so-called “Big Five” tech companies: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
“You want to switch from you current phone to an… S3?” he asked incredulously.
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