Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 18, 2014 18:19 UTC (Wed) by alogghe (subscriber, #6661)
Parent article: Android without the mothership

Excellent article.

I do think however you gave very short shrift to two great programs (to your own detriment).

Firefox is an excellent full time replacement for chrome and I find it to be rather better then it's desktop version (in the mobile space). Sync setup is lovely as it is for desktop versions.

K-9 is waaaaaay better then gmail or the android base email program. Of course we all like our desktop setups but its excellent for a mobile imap client.

Cheers

Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 18, 2014 19:08 UTC (Wed) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, I use Firefox almost exclusively on any platform because its continued viability is very important and the competition (Chrome/Safari/IE) are all tied to corporations who want you in their silos. Sadly, I run into sites that work nicely in Chrome with default settings, but not in Firefox with minimum font sizes set to non-defaults (web developers are young people without presbyopia?), or ad-block.

Thanks for the article, I've been procrastinating on getting CM installed on my phone. Seems like every app in the Play store wants to exfiltrate your personal data and social graph nowadays. I looked at a couple World Cup apps for example. Why does FIFA want my contacts and call info?

Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 18, 2014 20:02 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

You can install CyanogenMod with gapps like most people do. Then you get the playstore and other Google goodies, but without vendor modifications. Outside Android, people install "mods" to distinguish themselves from the crowd, but on Android, "mods" establish consistency across devices. Thanks to CyanogenMod, my Kindle Fire is very similar to my Samsung S4 mini.