AT&T cutting off my LG flip phone in 30 days

[Zebulon Walton]

From my own experience, modern flip phones are running an outdated de-Googled Android with a shell to work with a keypad (which doubles as a trackpad).
But when tinkering around with it, I found no Google software in it at all.
One nice feature is the built-in TV functionality, except TV is either anime, or drama, or propaganda.

But if you want to check, I suggest to turn that phone on without inserting that SIM card, and without connecting to WiFi.
And wrap your living room in aluminium for paranoid mode.

I remember someone (I think it was you even) who said that AT&T won't support a Pinephone, so you can already start looking for another provider.

Looking at the feature sheet that came with the new phone the first thing it talks about is "Google Assistant" in your face, so I don't think this particular phone has been de-Googled.

I'm really not quite paranoid enough to worry about turning the thing on long enough to activate the new SIM card if that's necessary, I just don't want to be using the blasted thing as a daily driver. The whole idea behind having a Pinephone is to get out from under the Google and Apple spyware empires.

Others have brought out that the Pinephone is not on AT&T's whitelist and I think a few have reported being kicked off of services that use AT&T's network. So far I have not had a problem. Of course I've just been using the Pinephone for testing thus far, it's not in use every day.

My main problem with moving to another provider is losing AT&T's "outcall notification" feature which I depend on to be able to leave my phone off most of the time. (It alerts a simple receive-only pager when someone leaves a voice message.)  No one else seems to have this, which is really a legacy feature from the early days of cell phone service.  Otherwise I would have left AT&T for a less expensive service some time ago. (I started out with a bag phone around 30 years ago and never changed service providers, though the original I signed up with has long since been bought and sold multiple times before winding up with AT&T.)

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Apparently there is an AT command that let's you change the IMEI of your PinePhone's modem, e. g. to an IMEI of another phone of yours that you know is working with the carrier. Haven't tried it myself. Just saying ...

Very interesting, I'll have to look into that, thanks!