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"It would be a better choice than one of these two makes. It's design and software additions are controlled by Google, not the Chinese Government. "

Huawei is the number one hardware platform for open source phone development. The company makes unlocking their phones a breeze via their website, they provide top-notch technical support to the developers at xda-developers.com (the place to be for phone devs) AND they provide serious hardware at great prices.

As to worrying about using a phone designed and built in China - I would much rather trust something that has been torn apart, examined and put back together by a world wide community of open source software and hardware developers than I would anything coming in a locked down package from Google.

My Huawei Honor 5x has been flashed with so many flavors of linux running every Android version since Kitkat that I can't keep count. It currently drops down from Android Mashmallow into a nuke hardened selinux which lets me hang out in unsafe spaces while my Honor 8 drops into Debian GNU/Linux and lets me do dev work in my home environment.

Can you tell I'm a big fan of Huawei phones?

I’m sure developers can figure out ways to make sure their phones aren’t trojaned, and they can obviously root and install whatever firmware they want on their phones. The question is how a normal user downloading firmware from Huawei’s or ZTE’s website using the firmware update button on the phone can check whether those updates have been seeded with malware.

My Huawei Honor 5x has been flashed with so many flavors of linux running every Android version since Kitkat that I can't keep count. It currently drops down from Android Mashmallow into a nuke hardened selinux which lets me hang out in unsafe spaces while my Honor 8 drops into Debian GNU/Linux and lets me do dev work in my home environment.

It's not the software YOU can flash onto the Huawei phone, it's what's already in the HARDWARE you can't touch and that you know-nothing about that's important. Apple iPhones have a built in processor and hardware section the data processor cannot touch or even see which handles encryption and user authentication. It's completely hardware walled off from the ability of the data processor, yet it can access the and hand off data to the data processor after it has deciphered it.

You have no clue what may be included in the ZTE and Huawei hardware that can see your data and activity. The US intelligence agencies know better than you that these devices are not to be trusted and are saying so, yet they have certified other Android phones as OK for government use. Just not these made by a company that is apparently completely controlled by the Chinese Government.