Errr... China sets have warranty too... though its not as comprehensive as the Mihan sets. Also, for all intents and purposes those 3 extra bands are only really useful for use in the Continental US. Well, supposedly anyway.

Otherwise, not much difference TBH.

Source: I'm rocking an A6000 myself... as that's the only version the OP6Av comes in apparently. Also, most of these "China" units came with OxygenOS (vs HydrogenOS) already pre-installed by the sellers so it's pretty much "International" out of the box - though that also means it doesn't come "sealed" anymore.

Unless you're buying from GearBest or something lah, in which case they often come bone stock with Hydrogen rather than OOS, but should be sealed accordingly.

I agree with what Eiraku posted above. If you know how your way in flashing and stuff, it is easily to restore fully to stock and relock the bootloader. Usually within 1 year the phone won't really have any problem (if you cracked LCD, water damage etc memang not covered also). Unless it's like motherboard issue or overheat etc which is rare.

You mean something like the Sammy eFuse (aka Knox)? Nope. Zero. Zilch. Funnily enough this is one of the reasons why I decided on the OP6 over a Sammy phone TBH.

Unlocking and rooting the OP6 (or any of the OPs for that matter) leaves nothing but that slightly annoying "Your device is not secure" screen (I'd rather it just be just a screen with a huge Exclamation mark but that's probably just me) and downgrading your Widevine to L3, but eyyy that happens to most devices anyway.

And relocking your device returns it back to normal (even Widevine back to L1) with zero trace of anything being done to it.

Heck even if you mess up your device so badly you don't even have fastboot anymore (lol I've actually been there myself), you can always go into MSM mode and recover your device with the Qualcomm's own flasher and an easily obtainable image file - which shows, in a way, just how "hack friendly" OPs are.

A bit tldr, so I'm gonna spoiler this lol.

Well, back to my original intent, all I'm saying is while yes custom flashing still kinda sorta voids the warranty (especially with AP sets), it shouldn't be too much of an issue if you're careful, which you seem to be. So yeah, it's not really worth worrying about.

As for colour, yeah the Red one has a glossy back like Mirror Black. The depth of the color underneath is more like Silk White though, with shades of red, yellow and orange depending on how light hits it.

It's so nice, I would have gotten the Red myself if it came in 8/256 TBH lol.

Usually local A6000 sellers pre-flash the global ROM (aka OOS) on our device (which comes with Play), because otherwise most A6000 units actually come with HOS (which does not).

As for ROM, I'm actually just rocking stock OOS 5.1.11 right now, rooted + custom kernel (Franco) and modded to my tastes though Nova, Substratum, GravityBox, and a host of other tweaks.

Haven't really had the urge to go full Custom yet TBH.

Tbh, after using Oxygen since the OP3, I dont think you would need to use custom roms or kernels. Not much bloatware that needs to be removed as FW is already slick and smooth enough. This is not OP1/OP2 times anymore. Oxygen has really improved a lot and it should be one of the leading FWs on android just slightly behind vanilla android. Btw, if you still wanna mod your phone, you can ask King of Root seng89. He has customer kernels for his OP6.