The success of Android has brought Linux to many millions of new users and that, in turn, has increased the development community for Linux itself. But those who value free software and privacy can be forgiven for seeing Android as a step backward in some ways; Android systems include significant amounts of proprietary software, and they report vast amounts of information back to the Google mothership. But Android is, at its heart, an open-source system, meaning that it should be possible to cast it into a more freedom- and privacy-respecting form. Your editor has spent some time working on that goal; the good news is that it is indeed possible to create a (mostly) free system on the Android platform.
Meanwhile, some claim AOSP is a “featurephone” and a “barebones husk”. It’s always nice to see reality beat punditry.
I can boast using a linux phone that, while not 100%, is much more open and free than android and doesn’t report everything about you to google and/or NSA.
So you get about 1000 apps in fdroid vs 1,200,000 in google play. Feature phone sounds about right. Email, calendar, and maps doesn’t make a smartphone anymore. Of course you can get apps outside of fdroid but increasingly with google play services android is a google experience. Not that there is anything wrong with that
…or about 250000 in the Amazon application store, or any of the other third party application stores.
So you’re using your very own extra special definition of “feature phone” now? Nice to define your own words.
Install Aptoide and you get pretty much everything that was in the Play store. F-Droid is a fork of Aptoide that focuses on Free software, whereas Aptoide is a distributed model where individual stores are ran by developers and enthusiasts.
A word of warning though: There isn’t as much oversight when it comes to malware. There is a community moderation system where users will evaluate an app to ensure that it’s legitimate, but it’s not foolproof. I’ve never had any rogue apps come from there, but that’s no guarantee.
You can always sideload. An Appstore does not a Smartphone make…
It’s an empty console.
The position that that Android without Google’s closed apps being viable is still a weak proposition. I am not convinced.
Amazon can because they have lots of cash.
Right, and even if it were, I’m still not sure what the tangible benefits are. ‘ZOMFG, Google is going to find out that I spent all day at the office, had 3 meetings, and then went to the grocery store afterward.’ I mean, are you THAT f-king paranoid? I can understand not wanting health information and other super-sensitive data in the cloud, but my day-to-day activities would certainly be of no interest to anyone except advertisers, and I run ad blocking software anyway.
Mind you, I’m not one of these people that say ‘if you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide’, but there is literally nothing on my phone (except maybe login info) that I wouldn’t care if it showed up in tomorrow morning’s headlines. Plus, the benefits from services received (esp through Google Now) makes it worth the information that is provided.
With all of the technology that we have available now, it just doesn’t seem very realistic to expect that you can live your entire life without anyone or everyone knowing what you’re up to. Even if you don’t log this information, other people who interact with you probably do. For example, even if you don’t store your itinerary in the cloud, somebody else probably has every meeting listed there, along with a list of all the participants, that you have attended, so they probably know anyway. Same with contacts.
Oh, and how much of this information (like your location data) that you try so hard to keep from Google doesn’t end up getting captured by the phone company anyway?
Edited 2014-06-27 19:30 UTC
I’m perfectly happy with fdroid and side loading. I don’t want to spend any money in the play store because everything I use is open source or free.
When you add the humble bundle app, I can’t really think of why I keep the play store at all.
Flashed cm without gapps and configured everything using fdroid or side loading other apk’s.
This actually reminds me of when I switched from windows to Linux. Everything is there but is either much more effort to achieve the same result or just isn’t as smooth.
https://github.com/microg
Essentially, an attempt to write an open-source clone of the Play Services and the other GApps.