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OK I'm about to buy an Android phone for development, but I will try to keep this question from becoming a shopping recommendation.

I want to have vanilla Android on my phone (i.e. not Sense or TouchWiz or something similar). Can I just buy a random phone and somehow revert it back to vanilla Android? Is there any risk of compatibility problems or hardware problems when doing that?

An easier option is to buy a phone that comes with vanilla Android, but the options are limited. As far as I know (i.e. not much), the only phones with pure Android are Nexus One, Nexus S, ADP and ADP2. Is that really it?

Matthew Read
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phunehehe
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3 Answers3

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Yes, you should buy a Nexus One or a Nexus S. If you buy another phone like e.g. HTC Wildfire, you can't easily get the "vanilla" Android.

Lie Ryan
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Jonas
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You can get whatever phone you want, but since you're a developer you might not have any problems with flashing custom ROMs, and there are awesome custom ROMs for all the devices out there that will not come with any customization, just pure Vanilla.

If you want a good place to publish/promote your development work and also find the custom ROMs for the device that you need is XDA Developers

Nathan Campos
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If you're on a budget, I believe many of the older Samsung phones (pre-Galaxy S) are vanilla since Samsung introduced TouchWiz with its Galaxy S line of phones. You can get some of these older phones (not really that old, like a year) for very cheap on eBay if you're just looking for a device to develop on and don't want to pay for phone service with a data plan.

You can look at the list of phones that have TouchWiz at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TouchWiz and cross-reference it with a list of Samsung Android phones (you could use this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Android_devices#Smartphones).

Ken Fehling
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