On TV, petty criminals get burner phones and they're using them ten seconds later.

In real life, I bought a burner phone today and spent 90 minutes trying to get it set up and failed.

First there's this tremendous circular yak shave because the phone isn't a phone yet when you take it out of the box -- it doesn't have a phone number assigned. But you need to register with the weirdass carrier it's locked to. So you go to make an account with the carrier, and that requires an email address. But all the free email address providers want you to give a phone number. (Protonmail says it doesn't... but haha, it won't let you verify any account creation unless you do.)

I eventually sliced through that knot. It took over an hour, but I did finally have a working phone that had a phone number and some amount of prepaid minutes and data good for 30 days, all without using my real email or phone number anywhere in the process. Victory!

Except no: because the whole point of this was to install Chinese spyware on the burner phone, and it turned out that the app I wanted to install (WeChat) says it's incompatible with my device (but refuses to say what the incompatibility is). Some people on the internet say that it's because this particular crappy burner phone is running a 32-bit build of Android despite the hardware being 64-bit?!? I'm not sure that's true, there's conflicting evidence.

Yes, I could now attempt to install the APK manually and watch the errors go by, but all the yaks in my immediate vicinity are already cleanshaven and so I will abandon this misadventure and go to bed instead.

The upside is that now I have a working burner phone and it doesn't even have Chinese spyware on it, so I could do some crimes with it I guess?