As I said before - that doesn’t matter, there will always be someone spying on you (e.g. just because of having Google services installed), it’s just to decide who. Any government whether Chinese or U.S. or whichever will gladly take the chance to spy.
Yes, there are phones that are Google free and such, but they’re either expensive or seem have their own challenges (idk what apps rely on Google services, but I can imagine a few app may not work well)
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YMMV but even now I’d much rather have a U.S. corp looking to add to its billions than the Chinese state spying on me, as a reasonably frequent visitor. Rather neither, of course.
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I see now, I just searched and came to know the smartphone division only is owned by chinese… otherwise rest of motorola is american.
I would rather not let US spy on me and happily accept china, I believe china is much more advanced and honestly in terms of people better than america…
US is basically a monopoly right now, handling the world on its own terms… If they just get more data, they become stronger…
Honestly these are geopolitical talks, idk how these entered on a topic about cheap phones being good.
I’m not sure. But there are some clues. 
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Samsung was recently found to have put Israeli spyware in all of their phones sold in the WANA region.
I think that besides GrapheneOS, and maybe some heavily degoogled options, there really is no way to escape any spying.
I don’t believe that the CCP is any worse than the US and soon Europe when it comes to international theft of private data.
It’s not really only big tech that will use your data. We know that Google and other services have been compromised for a long time and feed data to the US government and by consequence the 5 eyes.
Who remembers this? 
Maybe I’m too blackpilled, but for me the only difference is that China doesn’t try to hide the fact that it steals your data and surveils its citizens, while the big western governments do it behind the curtains.
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More or less. All governments are basically the same, just a different flavor as I say.
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I’m running Sailfish OS on a Sony Xperia 10 III and on a Volla Quintus. No Google, no China, no social media and no adds but of course there is a price for that. Some loss of comfort. But for me it is worth and I’m not missing much.
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I’m just gonna add this reply to the comments above and then that’s it cos we’re going way off the point. But there’s, IMV, a non-trivial difference between a government that can (rightly or wrongly) seek data for criminal and nat security purposes on an individual basis, usually requiring judicial oversight and with the constant threat of leaks over breaches in a largely open society, and a state that routinely records all data of every individual within and often outside of its borders. There’s also a reason that the current U.S. administration is facing open resistance to its aims and in China there is none bar a few extremely brave individuals in prison or disappeared or in exile. Thank you
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Chinaman here, I’ve considered Motorola when switching my phone. My criteria basically forces me to buy a cheap phone:
- No OLED screen (for longevity).
- Anonymously unlockable bootloader (because Xiaomi, Realme, etc., require you to register an account (which requires your real identity by law) to possibly unlock BL, not to say Xiaomi asks you to also complete an impossible test to get BL-unlock approval).
- Something better than Snapdragon 845 because Chinese softwares’ optimization sucks.
Nowadays few phone uses LCD and even fewer allows BL unlocking (and it’s getting stricter in China). I’m basically stuck with old phones which I find more than acceptable. I eventually bought a $80 phone.
If you think western spying is worse than China, please think twice. China:
- Bans E2EE IM tools, and requires all IM tools connect themselves to police’s chat monitoring system.
- Collects as much personal info as possible and doesn’t care about protecting them at all. Everybody (billions of people)'s info is available due to a leakage.
- Apps have unhinged permission requirements. I believe some calculator in Huawei’s appstore demands Location permission (and other stuff) to boot. Many Chinese apps demand irrelevant permissions if you downloaded them from Chinese manufactures’ appstore. Some Chinese folks download Google Play version’s app for good reasons. As much as Google is hated, they certainly do better than Chinese. Not to say the Pinduoduo incident where they use 0-day exploit to elevate the app itself (funnily enough, I heard that after the exploit was discovered, some Chinese used this exploit to temporarily gain root access to their impossible-to-root phone (not that it practically helped)).
That’s not remotely all, but I’m not gonna say more since I don’t want to actually get jailed 
.
Oh, forgot to mention, if you want to change your phone’s hotspot name, there is a name censorship list, and also you need to be online to do that because they want to record what name did you use for your hotspot and is certainly more than willing to talk to you if some inappropriate names are used.
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I agree with your other points, but I think you should reconsider this one:
Modern OLEDs are pretty decent against burn in, especially in phones. Does your usecase make you use your screen showing a static/semi static image over long periods of time?
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I agree, I’ve got an OLED screen since 2020 and so far no signs of burn-in. In the dark and at low brightness, dark greys are not even, but it’s not too bad.
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I used a IPS LCD display for 6 years, it still got burnt in in the starting 3 years…
And everyone uses there phone for atleast 5-6 years before throwing it out, or otherwise if it gets broken somehow.
Any phone can get burnt in if you just use one single screen for a long time.
The S22U has been the same, an amoled screen but no problem yet.
Yeah I agree.
Not really, burn-in is not much of an issue to me too, because as you said, it doesn’t happen as often now (it’s only a problem when I try to buy 2nd hand phone because it’s pretty much either expensive perfect OLED screen or purple (heavily burnt) OLED screen here on the market). The real problem to me is brightness drop. I replaced my Oneplus 5’s OLED a year ago, at first I have no problem reading things under sunlight, but now I barely could. It’s still than my LCD, but not much anymore. So I thought I’ll just go with an LCD.
Also OLED (or maybe my eyes) could suffer from low-frequency PWM dimming, which I’m not a fan of.
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