OnePlus One Screen Repair

After almost three years I the glass of my OnePlus One broke. A repair shop in town refused to repair it, because it was a “not  so common” model (i.e. no Apple or Samsung phone).

The good thing is there’re several tear-down/screen replacement guides on the Internet. Also the screen + touch digitizer assembly + tools can be ordered from Amazon (for around 40€).

The phone is fairly easy to disassemble, and there’re tons of videos showing you the step by step (dis-)assembly.

There’s not much adhesives and it’s not very strong, so they’re not much of an issue (except the one for the battery, see below).

There’re still a few points to look out for:

  • the adhesive for the battery will deform the red wrapper around the battery
  • beware of the antenna connector behind the main board
  • don’t remove the ear piece speaker. It will more easily come apart than come out (and cost you around 3-5 € and 2-6 weeks of waiting time for a replacement) … been there, done that. 😐
  • there’s a thin black frame around the screen, don’t remove it. It has a small ledge on the inside where the screen assembly is fixed to with adhesive.
  • It’s quite a tedious task to heat up the corners of the screen frame and remove the old screen especially if it has splintered … and splinters of glass in the corners are the worst. 😫

In the end I managed to repair it, but the ribbon cable coming from the display is 3-5mm to long so it’s pushing on the display from below. After a few days one side of display separated from the adhesive tape below opening a gap. 😕

Comparing Signal-protocol-using messengers

There’re still privacy differences when you compare messenger apps all using the Signal protocol:

In this article, I’m going to compare WhatsApp, Signal, and Allo from a privacy perspective.

While all three apps use the same secure-messaging protocol, they differ on exactly what information is encrypted, what metadata is collected, and what, precisely, is stored in the cloud — and therefore available, in theory at least, to government snoops and wily hackers.

In the end, I’m going to advocate you use Signal whenever you can — which actually may not end up being as often as you would like.