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Going FLOSS-only on Android
- Jaruzel 8y agoI'd love to do this to my phone (Moto G4). However I absolutely need my banking app, and I know it just wont work without Google Play running. Likewise as the article says, Google Maps is a must even with location tracking off. I do switch off as much personal data leakage as I can, but I'm not naive enough to think that Google isn't still collecting data on me. Unfortunately, I just don't think a free open source phone will full modern functionality is ever going to exist.
- androidgirl 8y agoFOSS android user here (I'm on the HN Materialistic app now actually)! I had the same issue with my bank, but I resolved it using the F-Droid app "Yalp Store", which wraps the playstore. Now I have my banking app on my phone! It's not FOSS, but even on my Linux PC I have binary blobs for drivers and stuff. It's good enough for me, it might work for your app too
- Jaruzel 8y agoCheers, I'll look into that!
- xf86alsa 8y agoGive Aurora Store a try as well, also in F-Droid. Nice UI on top of Yalp Store :)
- codethief 8y agoThe problem is not obtaining the APK, that's the easy part. The hard part with a lot of online banking apps (as well as apps like Netflix) is that they use (and require) Google SafetyNet to ensure that your ROM is "safe" (i.e. hasn't been tampered with). The guys over at the MicroG project are trying to find ways around that but it's really a cat-and-mouse game. Last time I tried (which, admittedly, was quite a while ago), neither my online banking app nor Netflix worked for me on a custom ROM.
- amaccuish 8y agoNah, I found my banking app (Barclays UK), just crashed with MicroG.
- philippnagel 8y agoOne tangential issue I have, is that all NFC-payment apps seem to use Google Pay or some sort of API detecting custom roms or root, disabling NFC-payment features.
- watermans 8y agoHonestly this is probably a good idea. When you think about how many people use Johnny No Good Hacker’s lastest ROM because it’s largely the OEM supported Android x with one or two Android ++x supported features, it really sounds like a good idea. It would be nice if there were a safe way to bypass that “immobilizer,” though for people that trust their ROM origin and the software on their phone.
- wcfields 8y agoThere's also MicroG wrapped in LineageOS so you can avoid G altogether https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/
- sweden 8y agoUnfortunately, MicroG hasn't been maintained in the past months or so and the only developer barely communicates anymore. It's getting to a state in which it will stop working very soon.
- ForHackernews 8y agoMaybe some community will step up and adopt that project. Anything that relies on a single dev is probably unsustainable.
- rapnie 8y agoRegarding OS there is still hope. Check out e.foundation (formerly eelo). And puri.sm Librem 5 if you want a linux-based OS (have to wait for android app support for a while still, I think).
- chupasaurus 8y agoThere is the Anbox[0] which looks promising. [0]https://github.com/anbox/anbox https://github.com/anbox/anbox
- tmalsburg2 8y agoI have a Fairphone 2 running their non-Google, largely FLOSS, version of Android with F-Droid app store. Sometimes, I'm slightly annoyed that I can't install app X but from the top of my head I can't even tell you what values X took. So it can't be that bad. The only regular annoyance is having to use Open Street Map. Very nice maps, but rendering and localization (GPS-only) are too slow.
- majewsky 8y agoWhich OSM app are you using? I've started using "Maps" (the OSS variant of https://maps.me/ https://maps.me/, available on F-Droid) and it has pretty much replaced Google Maps for me. Performance is good enough for me, and offline maps are a killer feature.
- liotier 8y agoAlso, try https://osmand.net https://osmand.net - great and getting better all the time !
- tmalsburg2 8y agoThanks. I just installed it and, yes, it feels much smoother than OsmAnd which is what I've been using so far. Unfortunately GPS doesn't seem to work.
- eptcyka 8y agoI wish we could just emulate non-floss Android Qubes style. Then the banking app could just be spawned when needed. Maybe not full emulation but containers might be good enough.
- implying 8y agoIt is worth noting that most ROMs are not FLOSS, and include binary blobs for GPU drivers, RIL services, and wireless drivers. The build process of lineageos involves copying select blobs from the factory firmware of a sample phone. The only true "FLOSS" ROM project is FSF's replicant, which is only available from phones that are old enough to have been reverse engineered.
- inawarminister 8y agoIndeed. I believe the latest full-FLOSS device is Samsung Galaxy S3 with free WiFi driver, but it's not too bad since the latest laptop with no blobs using LibreBoot is 2008-era Thinkpad X200 isn't it? Similat generation of hardware, yet mobile telephony has come so far compared to laptops...
- Fnoord 8y agoThe latest FOSS device for workstations is the TALOS II [1] [1] https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/
- izacus 8y agoMore problematically, a huge amount of ROMs is people blindly copy/pasting scripts, binaries and other components from other ROMs without fully understanding the consequences, security implications and/or verifying the source for malicious code. The code quality for huge majority of stuff you find on XDA is so poor I wouldn't touch it with a 15m pole.
- netsharc 8y agoIt would be neat if one could have both worlds: have a phone which normally runs FLOSS, but if one needs Google things, it can spin up all the services required, and launch the app needed. And when one is finished with that app, press Quit to terminate all the Google services. It seems phones are now powerful enough that even virtual machines should be possible...
- danShumway 8y agoWhat you're describing is a web browser. Spin up/connect to a service, in a sandbox, and then get rid of the app when you're done. Of course, many of Google's own apps are not particularly web or mobile friendly. It annoys me to no end that for all that Chrome/Android is pushing the progressive web, basically zero of Google's own apps utilize it. The progressive web does have some pretty serious shortcomings and problems, but for the most part, pretty much every major Google app (Google Music, Youtube, Maps, GMail) could be thrown out of the app store and replaced with a progressive web app with offline access, and everything would work fine. It's not even like the current offline support for their native stuff is any better than a progressive web app's would be; Google Music will often bug out and remove access to downloaded music if it can't find an Internet connection. Youtube Red loses and corrupts downloaded videos almost like it's on a schedule. A web cache would be just as reliable as whatever they're using now. As far as I'm concerned, there's zero technical reason why we couldn't have this right now.
- krn 8y agoI like to think about it this way: web is for documents, apps are for tools. If it can be linked to universally, it is a document. If it cannot, it is a tool. Would I install facebook.exe on my PC in order to browse it? No, it would feel like installing a virus. Then why would I do this on mobile?
- danShumway 8y agoI've had this conversation with people before on HN, but to take this philosophy even a step farther, I feel like I have an almost regressive view of most apps compared to a lot of people on here. I honestly don't see the difference between an application like Google Maps and a document. Google Maps should be presentable in pure text without CSS, and the overlay is basically just styling on top of that. You have a list of points with information associated with them including Latitude and Longitude. XML is perfectly fine for that. Or you have a list of directions or reviews, which obviously should be presentable in pure text. Same with Google Music. Google Music isn't an application. It's a search box that displays a list of links to audio files. It's fine that Google puts pretty interfaces on top of this stuff, and CSS is good for that, but I just still don't see what they're doing that requires native access. Minus the absolutely horrible performance that would come out of using Electron and JS for everything, I really don't feel like it would be difficult to remake the majority of what people call native apps in HTML/CSS. A lot of the native apps on my computer are basically just fancy ways to present tree-like information. Stuff like Gimp, or Blender, or a 3D game - okay, we can talk about applications. But Maps, or Youtube? I dunno, maybe I'm just old and cranky. Certainly Facebook and Reddit don't fit into those categories.
- jhabdas 8y agoYou mentioned evil and put emphasis on _TunnelBear_ in your apps list (which I was shocked to see Chromium listed in). Could it be logless VPN services are actually more dangerous than those which log activity?
- adrianmalacoda 8y agoI believe TunnelBear is highlighted because it is proprietary, not because it is evil (I'm not even sure if the author considers proprietary software in general to be evil; the author uses the word in reference to proprietary Google services).
- travbrack 8y agoI wonder if Stahlman would consider using a FLOSS-only smartphone. He could use wifi only so he doesn't have to give away his location to a cell provider.
- tmalsburg2 8y agoStallman commented on this here: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2200967/software/software-cell-phones-are-stalin-s-dream-says-free-software-movement-founder.html Quote 1: "I don't have a cell phone. I won't carry a cell phone," says Stallman, founder of the free software movement and creator of the GNU operating system. "It's Stalin's dream. Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I'm not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I'm not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop." Quote 2: Theoretically, Stallman says, phones that use only free software can protect themselves from the danger of electronic eavesdropping. "If it's all free software, you can probably protect yourself from that, because that's caused by the software in the phone," he says.
- majewsky 8y agoEven a FLOSS-only smartphone cannot protect you from all the surveillance concerns, like remote location tracking using Silent SMS: > In Germany in 2010 almost half a million "silent SMS" messages were sent by the federal police, customs and the secret service "Verfassungsschutz" (offices for protection of the constitution). These silent messages, also known as "silent TMS", "stealth SMS", "stealth ping" or "Short Message Type 0", are used to locate a person and thus to create a complete movement profile. They do not show up on a display, nor trigger any acoustical signal when received. Their primary purpose was to deliver special services of the network operator to any cell phone. The mobile provider, often at the behest of the police, will capture data such as subscriber identification IMSI. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Silent_SMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Silent_SMS
- icebraining 8y agoOP said "wifi-only"; that means no SMSs at all.
- zaarn 8y agoI would advice against using Chromium on Android. For one, it's still Google and to my knowledge still phones home to the mothership. For two, Chromium/Chrome is becoming the next IE and I sincerely believe that encouraging further ieficiation of the web towards Chrome is not desirable for anyone involved. On the other side, I would amend AnySoft keyboard into that list, which is much more useful than Hacker's Keyboard (due to being less dense) and has a pretty okayish autocorrect (still better than the rest). NewPipe is also a solid choice and I recommend it to everyone even if you don't want to FLOSS your phone since it's miles better than the youtube app (downloads, background play, doesn't require signup but still offers subscriptions and playlists, popup mode).
- Fnoord 8y agoYou can use Firefox on Android, but applications showing WWW will use WebView or whatever it is called.
- zaarn 8y agoCorrect, to my knowledge there isn't a way to avoid this cleanly.
- Fnoord 8y agoI got developer mode enabled on my phone and it allows me to select an alternative for WebView, but there's no options available. Its terribly annoying because a browser is about customising the WWW to your tailor. Not possible with WebView. Adblocker for example doesn't work. Though microG doesn't implement Google Ads.
- zaarn 8y agoI think that option only exists to taunt and laugh at you, not to actually change webview. For adblocking I use pihole in addition to uMatrix on the Firefox Mobile browser (and desktop), it gets rid of 99.99% of ads.
- adrianmalacoda 8y agoI'm not very familiar with TunnelBear but they appear to have instructions on how to connect from GNU/Linux with OpenVPN[0], so you might not even need their proprietary Android app to use their service. [0] https://www.tunnelbear.com/blog/linux_support/ https://www.tunnelbear.com/blog/linux_support/
- SimplyUnknown 8y agoI would love to go fully FLOSS on my phone. I would even love a dumbphone better. I just need/love to use my smartphone for a few things: - Spotify - Google Maps - Sygic car navigation - WhatsApp/Telegram There are just no viable fully FLOSS alternatives for all these services, AFAIK. Last time I had Lineage+MicroG these services kinda worked, but I didn't have the time to invest such that it would work as smooth as the closed source counterpart. Maybe I'll try again soon.
- sjdbwixb 8y agoTelegram's client is FLOSS. Get it on f-droid. Telegram has always had its own push service, so it works with out microg or google services installed. The telegram service itself is non-free, but it can be used with only free software
- slezyr 8y ago- Google Maps Never used it on mine phone. Try OSMand
- deivid 8y agoFor some reason osmand is unusably slow on my phone (30+s to render). I use "Maps" from f-droid.
- bopbop 8y agoThe task of FLOSS authors creating clients for walled gardens like Spotify always seems like a bit of own goal to me, tbh. I think we all love our phones - it's this amazing silent revolution that's happened where ubiquitous computing has already happened (at least in the first world) I understand you likely want specific features from the services you list but for others, if they were generics, this is the best either FLOSS or if not available, De-Googled list I could compile: ///Music Mp3s Spotify (closed source with a downloader on FDroid) I'm not aware of any open source clients for the streaming services. Some friends use Youtube-dl on a pc and send then files across. ///Maps OpenStreetMaps (edit: meant OSMAnd) Maps ///Messaging Signal Silence (Secure SMS text messaging) Telegram (On FDroid - again haven't checked with MicroG) Whatsapp (Closed Source with a downloader on FDroid, although I haven't tested it with MicroG) ///Sygic car navigation I don't think there's much hope for this one... (edit: sorry for the horrible layout)
- teolemon 8y agoFor all nutrition/food scanning purposes: Open Food Facts. Source code and data free as in speech. Think Wikipedia for food (and cosmetics)
- chrismorgan 8y agoI wish that replacing the ROM was so easy. If you have a flagship device, it’s achievable; but if you don’t use flagship devices, it’s frustratingly difficult and requires at the very least substantial technical chops and investigative skill. (And I have no interest in spending more money on flagship devices; I spend thousands of dollars on a laptop because I use it very heavily; but my requirements for a phone are very much more basic, so I am disinclined to spend much on one.) I would love to replace the ROM on my Samsung Galaxy J1 2016 or my Kogan Agora 6 to go with LineageOS with microG or similar, or even something more extreme; I’d even settle for just rooting the thing, for starters, so that I could use my own DNS server (which you can’t do on a cell connection without using a VPN, which is annoying as it requires a passcode set on the device, but I don’t want to do that). But no rooting tools succeed, and no alternative ROMs provide compatible builds. Using LineageOS, as one example, seems to require me to craft a config file describing the device’s capabilities and specifications (which I must find, somehow), then build LineageOS (thus I need to construct a suitable build environment), then get it onto the device in some way (admittedly the easiest part of the process). I want all of this, but I just don’t have the energy to pursue this further to try to figure it out. People keep on speaking of replacing the OS on your phone as straightforward, but it’s not. Could someone please make this process easier for me?
- chx 8y ago> but if you don’t use flagship devices, then get a Nexus 5, 50-60 USD on eBay, half of that on Craigslist if you have the stomach for CL. It still rocks.
- herbst 8y agoI have a Oppo a37 and face the exact same issue. It's either hard or straight impossible to do anything non standard with this phone.
- aruggirello 8y agoSame with Huawei Honor 7c - not even listed on XDA forum. Somebody should really write an article on the sad state of Android unlocking / rooting. There are countless reasons to unlock and root your phone: DNS, bloat, doing a full backup (TWRP doesn't work without root)... Unfortunately, it seems Android is rapidly catching up with iOS, where jailbreaking is mostly just a thing of the past.
- inawarminister 8y agoJust bought a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 because of the flourishing custom ROM developer scene just to flash a Google-less AOSP Android P ROM in the next month. Yes, there might be backdoors in the hardware itself, but at least I minimise any threat factor to myself in this regard, even if only through software. Beside, minimalist functionalism is raison d'etre of the Unix Way, isn't it?
- padraic7a 8y agoIt's not Android but HN readers might be interested in a FLOSS alternative; Ubuntu Touch. Despite being dropped by Canonical it's still going strong and is well worth a look. https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
- luxpir 8y agoNot using a smart phone atm, but this is my backup device for occasional quick photos/2FA etc. and it is fine for the job and doesn't leak data. It does try to get updates and info from Canonical, but I block that in my pihole setup. It doesn't do anything else, from what I can see, over the network.
- afandian 8y agoIs it any good? I bought an Aquaris M10 with Ubuntu touch and, to be honest, I felt that the advertising was dishonest and left a bad taste in the mouth, especially as Ubuntu dropped it shortly after. And it's not like I wanted the moon on a stick. I don't use 'apps'. Just capable web browser, reliable on-screen keyboard and a stable implementation of the promised 'convergence', would have done me fine. My thoughts from two years ago: https://blog.afandian.com/2016/04/i-got-a-bq-aquaris-m10-ubuntu-tablet/ https://blog.afandian.com/2016/04/i-got-a-bq-aquaris-m10-ubu... I still have it, and it's gathering dust. Would you recommend brushing it off and reinstalling?
- forgotpwd16 8y ago>I still have it, and it's gathering dust. You could have installed Android on it if you didn't liked Ubuntu. edit: Read your article. Very well-written.
- davidgerard 8y agoHN-dotted. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20180818203109/https://codingquark.com/floss/2018/07/04/android-floss-life.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180818203109/https://codingqua...
- Fnoord 8y agoInstead of K-9 I recommend pEp which has a material UI. Also, nearly everything mentioned has a web version. Which means the remote runs the proprietary software, and you can use an open source client to interact with it (Google in a nutshell). If you have a NAS, consider running your own Nextcloud on it (do make offsite backups). For camera app, I recommend Open Camera. Many good suggestions in the thread and throughout this thread. I can recommend the Fairphone 2 as FOSS device. It isn't perfect (still has some binary blobs), but you can run an open source OS on it and repair it yourself cause it is modular.
- muxator 8y ago> At times I feel that some services are really convenient even though they’re evil. For example YouTube. They probably track every mouse movement, but they give me pretty nice content. On Android, Youtube + Firefox + Video Background Play Fix is a combination that I find more comfortable than NewPipe itself. No app needed! [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...
- forgotpwd16 8y ago>FLOSS-only Lineage and Omni still isn't "going FLOSS-only." Drivers necessary for Android to run on one's device come in the form of binary blobs. LineageOS is ported by extracting those from the OEM firmware. A FLOSS-only ROM will be Replicant, which lags in releases and misses various things (3D graphics, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth) but a valiant effort nevertheless.
- craftyguy 8y agoExactly. Due to the way that phone manufacturers support Android (which is shit), there are a lot of proprietary drivers/firmwares required that only work on an ancient kernel. For a true FLOSS-friendly device, the Librem5 seems to be about as close as you can get (though some chips will still run proprietary firmware..)
- inawarminister 8y agoThis is going to be fixed in the future by Treble support, FWIW. You'll still have blobs and proprietary drivers/firmwares but they'll be unlinked to Linux kernel versions/Android software versions
- gpvos 8y ago> I have installed MicroG on OmniROM to get OsmAnd to work. Why would they do that? I have run OsmAnd on a completely Google-less Android phone, and it worked fine. (Fairphone 1 with Fairphone OS, which is basically AOSP with a few tweaks.)
- krn 8y agoThere is also MoKee Open Source Project[1] with OTA updates and monthly security patches. [1] https://www.mokeedev.com/ https://www.mokeedev.com/