I mean, there are sellers on Taobao and such that sell imported versions from HK and Japan, but I doubt that’s what the majority does. Most locals probably never get tempted to install some Western apps that won’t work without a VPN anyway, and if they have the knowledge and skills to install and use one, they know what to look for.

Crap. I got OnePlus 7 pro and 10 pro in China and could still unlock them easily, haven’t checked since.

Plenty of foreigners live in China and sign up with smaller lemmy instances that aren’t blocked (yet). lemmy.world (and funny enough,.ml) are. I also chose mine because it wasn’t blocked, spent almost 7 years in China and only left in July.

That’s only on their local android varieties though. That looks like a Xiaomi/Redmi phone? In that case head over to xiaomi.eu, download the EU version of the ROM, and flash it following the instructions there, it’s very straightforward.

With Oppo and OnePlus phones it’s equally simple, there are a ton of how-to’s over on https://forum.xda-developers.com/ for all models. If you stay in China, best get their Indian ROMs, the EU ones have some mobile bands inactive that are not in use there, but are in Asia.

For other phone manufacturers, it’s anywhere between trivial and impossible (Huawei for example). Xda-dev is your best source of info usually.

Not really. Brexit is permanent.

Yep, and having used sync for over a decade makes me not miss reddit at all. It looks nearly identical anyway, I never used either website unless for the initial signup.

My friend’s dad has a CNC machine that requires floppy disks to load the design patterns. He’s worried that a mechanical failure of the disk drive will eventually be the end of it, rather than the machine itself being obsolete. It’s been going strong for almost 40 years now.