Totally, look for phones in “excellent” or “mint” condition, read the description carefully, and check the seller’s feedback carefully. I’ve bought 4 or 5 phones on eBay with great results. Every phone I’ve gotten is indistinguishable from new.
eBay is fine. Just check the seller’s reputation first before buying.
If overall positive feedback is greater than 99%, and they’ve sold hundreds of items, then there’s no problem buying from them.
I’ve bought dozens of phones from eBay over the last two decades, never had any issues.
Personally I’m worried to buy a phone that is filled with spyware and adware.
On a phone with spyware installed that wouldn’t do anything. There are probably ways to get rid of it, but how can you be sure?
By checking whether the bootloader is unlocked or not. If the bootloader is unlocked, then all bets are off, but if the bootloader is locked, you can only run the original, unmodified firmware. Any alternation to the firmware will result in the dm-verity check failing, causing the system to not boot at all. The only data which can be altered is user data, which is wiped in a factory reset. So a factory ressr definitely gets rid of it.
If you’re paranoid though, you could always flash the stock firmware downloaded directly from the manufacturer’s website, which will override all system partitions, so you can be absolutely sure there’s no spyware - besides the spyware included by Google etc of course, or the spyware embedded into the hardware by the chip manufacturers…
Over the past 10 years most of my phones have been used, and I’ve been way happier with it. Save money for the same thing.
Yeah, maybe not ebay. I used Swappa back in the day and that was cool. But phone hardware hasn’t improved THAT much in the past 5 years. You can go pretty far back and have a pretty decent phone. Android phones lose their value a lot faster so you can usually get them super cheap. Should probably buy unlocked
