its kind of amusing in a wag degoggling requires pretty much a phone from google :') by the comments on those post. bit unrelated to this post ofc but thought and wondered if they do that on purpose and how far these devices really get reverse engineered to see if they are actually de-googled down to the chips. just having a different OS doesnt have to mean anything in that regard if the entire device is owned by them -_-.

especially since its radio and thats not too easy to determine if a device is or isnt sending weird stuff. (dont come with the lte or wifi sniffers or such things. u'd need thorough spectrum analysis during operations on a quite broad spectrum too to rule that out. the antennae in the devices can produce a lot of types of signals... or do they decap the chips and reverse those to see whats in it? i doubt it would be possible at the right scale but theres options i guess.

people in certain regions/ high assurance security work roles will do this to hundreds of devices that are identical to try and determine if a supplier is compromised or not. order a full batch, take em all apart. taking x-rays, dissolving chips package, etching layers one by one, taking pictures with electron microscopes etc, probing bond wires in the packages as they run etc etc.

somehow i dont see some OS creator do all of this, but ofc i could be very wrong :). interested to find out why people think google while with a different OS is truly de-googled or if they kinda just hope for the best...