China gets all the cool smartphones, but should you try importing one?
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ProductProperty 1db7b2e0, com. ProductProperty f1d, com. ProductProperty 1f52fb78, com. The question is, though, should you? Importing a smartphone will result in a number of challenges, so there are a few things to think about. The biggest problem you'll run into is with cellular connectivity, where a foreign phone might not work on your local cellular network. Each carrier has a set of LTE bands that it operates in, and while phones sold in the US are usually careful to hit the right carrier bands, Chinese smartphones might either not work on your carrier at all or work with reduced connectivity.
Droid Life has a nice cheat sheet here for US networks, and you'll need to compare that to the spec sheet of each individual phone. You'll have a much harder time with Sprint. Also keep in mind that phones can have variants for different regions, so make sure the version you're buying has the bands you need. If you're really desperate, the phone you want should work on Wi-Fi no matter what, which means it should work at home or at the office. That also means just carrying around a hotspot is an option, too.
Strictly Chinese smartphones, or phones that come with a Chinese-region build of software, are going to be a problem. Google doesn't do much business in China, so Android phones from China won't come with the Google apps. This means your phone won't have the Google Play Store, so you'll have a hard time accessing most of the Android app ecosystem. Restoring the Play Store isn't as easy as downloading a Play Store APK and installing it on your device—most Google apps rely on myriad other supportive Google apps for things like background syncing, cloud messaging, and logging in.
Getting the Play Store to work on a non-Google build of Android is tough.
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Downloading the requisite Google apps to a PC is easy— opengapps. The problem is installing them on a phone. Some of Google's apps need system-level permissions to work, so they need to be installed as system apps, which normally a user isn't allowed to do.
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With an unlocked bootloader, you can boot into a recovery mode and modify the phone so that you can get system-level permissions and install the Google apps you need. Whether or not your phone has an unlockable bootloader can be hard to even figure out. It's usually not on the spec sheet, so you'll need to hope someone technical has posted the information on the Internet somewhere.
A good place to check is the XDA Forums , which are meticulously broken down by individual phone model. Chinese companies have been pretty good in the past at providing unlocked bootloaders, but lately they've been throwing up barriers due to security concerns.
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As we experienced firsthand when we imported the Xiaomi Redmi 3 , smartphone retailers aren't necessarily trustworthy. In our case, the reseller opened our device, unlocked the bootloader, flashed the Google apps to the system partition, put the phone back in the box, and sold it to us as unopened and "new. Who really knows?
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The scary part is we didn't even notice our phone had been tampered with when we received it. So to stop retailers from mass unlocking and modifying consumer devices, some companies require a code or PC program to unlock a bootloader, sometimes with a waiting period.
Xiaomi, for instance, requires that you "Apply" for an unlock code by making a Xiaomi account, logging in, and downloading the "Mi Unlock Tool. This wait period has ranged from two days to as much as two months. Huawei has shut down bootloader unlock requests altogether. The company recently threw up a roadblock for "uncertified" Android devices that originally didn't ship with the Google apps.
Just like with Xiaomi's unlock process, this requires jumping through some hoops so you can be tracked and judged. Google's instructions require you to have the Android developer tools installed and a rooted device, and then you have to run a command to grab a Google ID and submit it to Google while logged in to your Google account. If you have personally flashed Google apps to your Chinese smartphone The Right Way, you will have done most of this work already, but it would be a pain for an unscrupulous phone seller.