Pitt: De-Googling my phone

[Posted May 2, 2018 by corbet]

Martin Pitt describes his experience running a fully free-software Android phone. "I previously used Opera as a web browser, because it is relatively lightweight (important on my previous phone) and the really good builtin ad blocker. But these days Firefox is really fast and good enough, so I replaced it with Fennec, which is more or less Firefox with some non-free bits removed. After installing uBlock Origin I’ve never looked back."

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 2, 2018 15:09 UTC (Wed) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link] (4 responses)

"Martin Pitt describes his experience running a fully free-software Android phone."

Since he is using lineageos instead of reprlicant, he's using a lot of
additional nonfree software in lineage (blobs, modules, userspace
hal). Basic reference:
https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.en.html

Also, if he's using the phone modem, again he's using nonfree softare
since all known modem firmware, aka baseband software, for android
capable phones is nonfree.

I've seen similar headlines floating around elsewhere but I expect
better from lwn.

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 2, 2018 15:43 UTC (Wed) by voidplayer (guest, #124098) [Link]

We usually say running a fully free-software pc, even tho strictly, this is rarely true

Im currently de-googling my phone. I wont go into specifics about the problems im facing with my phone, but its proving to be harder than expected due to bugs in the different softwares

Please, dont diminish and belittle the good [article] for the perfect

You could had pointed out that the full stack is not free-software but instead, the way you worded, Im eager to read your post about running a fully free-software android phone

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 2, 2018 16:28 UTC (Wed) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

Actually, LWN`s headline is pretty precise, it is that one sentence in the text body which is slightly off. Please note that his main purpose was to "reduce my dependency on Google Play Services and Google apps". If you set out to do that, using the remaining blobs might not be that bad.

BTW, the DB Navigator (German railway ) app works just fine on a de-googled phone without Play services here.

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 3, 2018 6:20 UTC (Thu) by martin.pitt (subscriber, #26246) [Link]

I never claimed to run a "fully free phone". The goal was to "reduce the dependencies to proprietary Google bits" and get back to owning all my data. I knew right from the start that I'm not going to get rid of some non-free apps that I want (WhatsApp, Nextbike, and some others; see the article), and likewise I'm not ready to sacrifice working sensors etc. because of non-free firmware blobs. I want a phone that is better, not a phone that is mostly useless :-)

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 3, 2018 8:59 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

The headline says "de-googling my phone", not "running an entirely FSF-approved software and firmware stack on a phone".

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 2, 2018 15:34 UTC (Wed) by cdufour (subscriber, #116907) [Link] (3 responses)

Interesting post, yet no mention of hardware support/issues.

Last time I tried to stray away from proprietary Android for an AOSP-derived alternative (Cynogen 10 if I remember correctly), I ended with no GPS, no accelerometer, no HDMi output, etc.
It took painful days of reverse-engineering the original Android stack to find the required non-free blobs to fix only part of those issues.
I finally gave up.

FOSS smartphones without open hardware is a delusion :-(

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 2, 2018 17:39 UTC (Wed) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link]

Things are rather more straightforward today, especially with a "Project Treble" device. Camera quality will not always be as good as with the software that comes with the hardware, but everything does work. LineageOS in particular has a set of compatibility standards they enforce for official downloads, which essentially boil down to "It has to work at least as well as the official distribution."

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 3, 2018 6:25 UTC (Thu) by martin.pitt (subscriber, #26246) [Link] (1 responses)

The Nexus 4 that runs LineageOS has no noticeable non-functioning hardware. Audio, sensors, etc. all work fine. Supposedly LineageOS ships the driver blobs, as pointed out by IanKelling above. There is no LineageOS build for my Sony Xperia X Compact, so no data.

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 3, 2018 9:17 UTC (Thu) by shiftee (subscriber, #110711) [Link]

My main criteria for buying a phone is LineageOS compatibility.

I have been with Samsung for a few years now but I hear they're locking the bootloaders nowadays.

This has made me resolve to buy a Librem 5

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 2, 2018 18:10 UTC (Wed) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link] (1 responses)

Mr. Pitt does not mention the possibility of using microG to provide some Google services without Google software. In my experience it works well-ish, and is useful even for some free software on the Play Store (like Conversations or Riot) that use push notifications. He did point out software I was not aware, though. Time to fire up F-Droid!

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 3, 2018 6:30 UTC (Thu) by martin.pitt (subscriber, #26246) [Link]

Right, I didn't mention that, but I did spend some hours on that. Pretty much all the recipes that I found how to install migroG on an existing LineageOS (add support for signature faking etc.) didn't really work for me, so I installed a build from https://lineage.microg.org/ instead which comes with microG pre-installed. That was much better, and the API is then available. It was enough for e. g. the DB Navigator to start, but none of the location services actually worked. I tried to install a few, but didn't get very far.

I'm sure it can be done and this was just a matter of patience and more reading/configuring, but it was enough to learn that this is not a trivial drop-in that I should recommend to non tech-savvy people. So after a while, I gave up on this, and went back to a standard LineageOS without Play Services.

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 3, 2018 11:02 UTC (Thu) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

@Martin
LineageOS as an inbuild night mode, no extra app neccessary.

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 4, 2018 3:32 UTC (Fri) by Sylos (guest, #109852) [Link]

As a (partial) replacement for DB Navigator, there's also Transportr. Which doesn't allow for buying tickets, to put that out there right away. But for finding out how to get from A to B, it works perfectly fine.
It's been a few years since I used DB Navigator, so I don't know what its current state is, but back then when I switched, I actually was happy to do so, because DB Navigator's UI was incredibly cluttered. Transportr provided only what I needed and all of that in one simple screen.

https://f-droid.org/app/de.grobox.liberario

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted May 31, 2018 9:08 UTC (Thu) by mcfrisk (guest, #40131) [Link] (1 responses)

Just in case it's not visible here, there is a followup post: https://piware.de/post/2018-05-21-android-degoogle-2/

Since I'm trying to do the same, I also found out from the Internet that LineageOS is calling home to google in every network connection to detect captive wlan portals. This feature comes from AOSP but it can be disabled with adb shell command "settings put global captive_portal_mode 0", source https://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-6p/help/disable-na...

I suspect there might be other built in features from AOSP which call home to google.

I'm also looking into ways to disable all web trackers with DNS hosts file tricks like I nowadays do with all my Linux machines.

Pitt: De-Googling my phone

Posted Jun 8, 2018 18:38 UTC (Fri) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

It should also be possible to redirect that captive portal detection to another server, I suppose?