Xiaomi has been pushing towards full lockdown of their phones the past year, just like Samsung. The difference is that Xiaomi is smarter at this game. Their business practices are definitely shady - relying on selling phones with minimal profit and then filling them up to the brim with bloatware that makes them money, like tons of preinstalled games and useless applications, as well as system programs filled with ads that you’re not intended to disable.

Regarding bootloader unlocking, they’ve clearly made it difficult, almost impossible, to unlock a device. Having to wait 30 whole days for your new community profile to meet the age criterias, then a week to hopefully get a chance to apply for the unlock, AND then you have to fight with thousands of other people for a spot in their limited server quotas at exactly 12am Beijing time. Needless to say, this gives them more than enough time to collect all your personal data.

If you are in the same situation as me and have to endure the waiting periods, you might want to at least debloat HyperOS. Some preinstalled apps can be uninstalled by hand, others you have to use adb. Here’s what commands I did to clean it up:

#!/system/bin/sh
# Debloat script for Redmi (executed commands from your adb session)

pm uninstall --user 0 com.amazon.appmanager
pm uninstall --user 0 com.microsoft.skydrive
pm uninstall --user 0 com.miui.extraphoto
pm uninstall --user 0 com.miui.audiomonitor
pm uninstall --user 0 com.miui.player
pm uninstall --user 0 com.miui.videoplayer
pm uninstall --user 0 com.mi.globalminusscreen
pm uninstall --user 0 com.mi.globalbrowser
pm uninstall --user 0 com.google.android.apps.bard
pm uninstall --user 0 com.google.android.apps.youtube.music
pm uninstall --user 0 com.miui.msa.global
pm uninstall --user 0 com.android.chrome
pm uninstall --user 0 com.mi.android.globalFileexplorer
pm uninstall --user 0 com.xiaomi.mipicks
pm uninstall --user 0 com.xiaomi.glgm
pm uninstall --user 0 com.miui.securitycenter