"phone home" head line, by accident or design?
Because every piece of pre-installed software on xiaomi phones does exactly that. Use the IR blaster, it homes home, use the calculator, it phones home, before twrp was available for my current xiaomi phone I was running Net Guard no root firewall and it was blocking a constant stream of attempts from what looked like every apk on the phone to call home.
Thankfully there's plenty of support for ASOP roms, hardware can't be beaten for the price IMHO, but without installing an alternate ROM I'd not touch them with a barge pole
Biting the hand that feeds IT
