If you're worried about Google's sideloading ban, just check out the restrictions on these Android phones

If you think that Google is being a little heavy handed in its new restrictions on sideloading, then you ain't seen nothing yet. A YouTuber has got his hands on a couple of devices from North Korea, that takes the idea of restrictions to another level

The YouTuber in question is Arun Maini – MrWhosetheboss – who has landed two devices from North Korea, smuggled out by Daily NK, a South Korean news outlet. They are the Haeyang 701 a budget model, as well as the Samtaesung 8. That's not a typo, it's literally a spin on Samsung and this is a more "premium" device.

These phones run on Android, but it's like nothing you'll have seen before. These phones appear to show live censorship in real time, correcting banned words to the accepted party phrase. For example, type "South Korea" and it's corrected to "puppet state".

The content correction appears to run deep, with slang terms – originating from South Korea – getting corrected to the more proper form, or in some cases coming with a warning message guiding on how words should be used. I wonder what it would make of "6 7"?

Testing North Korea's illegal smartphones - YouTube

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It's reminiscent of the Newspeak propaganda language found in Orwell's 1984, but the interventions go much deeper. While this is a smartphone, it can't actually connect to Wi-Fi and there's no actual internet in the sense that we understand it. Instead it can only access an "intranet", which is packed full of party approved content.

The video gives us a look at the phone hardware – running Android 10 and Android 11 – and the phones themselves are well behind the times by global standards. The Samtaesung device looks a lot like it's been copied from a Huawei Nova 9, while many of the apps appear to be straight copies – including some interesting use of images and logos found on regular phones.

The phones come loaded with apps and much of the content is designed around offline use, because if you want new apps, you'd have to take it to a store to be authorised, with apps expiring and asking for payments to be able to use them again.

But beyond that, there's another layer of device-level monitoring happening in these devices – ironically called Red Flag – that's baked into the software to keep tabs on what the owners are doing and restrict material that’s available. Every app or file will have the signature checked and if it's not approved, it's deleted immediately – and you thought your sideloading restrictions were tough?

The surveillance continues, with the phones capturing screenshots, so there's a full record of user activity. It's not clear what happens with these screenshots, whether they are shared over the intranet or just captured for future inspection, but it's perhaps a good reminder that users of these phones are being constantly surveilled.

Some might argue that, while these devices are being monitored by the government in North Korea, the rest of the world is being monitored by Big Tech. On one hand is a government trying to own the narrative, the other is trying to make money from your data.