CyanogenMod, how I loved thee
AOSP
Android Open Source Project
look inside
not open source
mfw
You can still use AOSP to make your own phone, but you’ll just have to built your own apps too, since eventually, all of google play apps aren’t gonna work on degoogled Android.
Not a big deal, considering that FOSSIFY project offers all the basics you’d need for a degoogled phone: call app, messaging, contacts, calculator, calendar, gallery, etc. F-droid also has a good selection of apps, though most people, me included, will still need whatsapp one way or another. At least that thing doesn’t need any of Google’s “essential” apps.
Don’t forget rock solid app gets an unexpected update 3 years later and now is jammed with ads and offers an ad free subscription at $14/week
Yeah app purchases sure went to shit, didn’t they? Sorry turns out buying an app one time for a small fee isn’t good enough, we need you to buy it again every month.
And the apps that do have lifetime licenses went from $5 to like $80
Dude fuck that noise.
I bought a lifetime copy of hex edit like 30 years ago. 20 years later I needed something and the dude answered and sent me a new code.
Fucking rock on hex edit brother!!!
I’m glad I heard of Discord’s plan to add ads to their Android app beforehand so I had the chance to disable updates. It’s annoying that Android keeps reminding me there’s an update available, but it’s less annoying than ads.
Blocking basically all ads on your phone is trivially easy.
- Find “Private DNS” (or something similar) in your settings
- Set it to dns.adguard-dns.com
And that’s really it. There are other ad-blocking dns providers out there, and they all use slightly different block lists. I like adguard because their blocklist is less aggressive than others I’ve tried, and I’d rather an ad or two get through than for something legitimate to stop working.
You can also set it up as your dns provider in your router to block ads on your entire network. People tend to like to self-host adguard or pihole for that, but as long as you don’t care about a dashboard or manual dns entries, using a free dns is as easy as it gets and is very effective. I self-host as a hobby and I still just use adguard’s public dns.
iOS jailbreaking used to be incredible too.
I guess it might still be for those who slipped into the “window” to do it, but I have no clue what Cydia looks like these days.
There’s so much bullshit with smartphones now that make them a pain to use, I’m honestly considering at this point to just get a flipphone and buy separate devices for the things it can do. Get a camera, MP3 player, and portable DVD player and live life the way people did 20 years ago.
I am very happy on GrapheneOS. Even in terms of flashing it was much nicer experience than what you had to go through back in the days
holy crap this is so true. i miss twrp
Holy crap that dude aged like milk in 3 years time
I’m gonna carry around my steam deck and add a USB camera module, a GPS module, and add some meshtastic radios modules, and I’m gonna daily drive it as the ultimate all-in-one device, and Mr. Google Pichai can’t stop me! xD
This is cruel, now I feel like some kind of criminal. Who knew that the most dangerous criminal is an ordinary consumer who wants freedom…
There are phosh based phones and over time more people will hopefully switch to them, use them, and work on making them better. Phosh-based phones are currently are not as usable as something like GOS, but with Google challenging itself to become more and more enshitified in the interest in marginal tiny profit gains (even if it destroys their brand over the long term) nerds needs to band together prepare for an alternative. Part of this is going to be advocating for Apps that work in Linux mobile Phosh environments and just refusing to use containerized apks and part of it is going to be people doing what they can to support native linux phone apps that work well in Phosh.
For those wondering what happened, the Android Open Source Project (ASOP) launched in 2007, but started decoupling major parts of the project from the main in 2012 instead forcing them to update through Google Play store and over time restricting access to the codebase before just this year deciding to shut down the ASOP.
In their defence, they’ve also made lots of changes to make android compatible with more devices and to make third party stores work better, but they’ve just as often made changes that intentionally harmed development of alternative android-based OS.
To add to this, the only redeeming quality of Android is that the Google Play Store developer account currently only costs a $25 one time fee, meanwhile the Apple App Store costs $99 per year. Google also seems a bit more permissive with its apps. You can still use an adblocker extension when you download firefox, even torrent clients are there. Apple doesn’t really allow alternative browsers, every browser is just Safari reskinned, no extensions, absolutely zero usable torrent clients whatsoever. And, there aren’t really any Tor browsers on iOS (probably because of the same reason why iOS browsers have no extensions), those that do exist seem very badly built, not officially made by the Tor Project, and some even require you to pay for it (which make sense given the $99 yearly fee).
But you know, its capitalism and the current pricing could soon change… 👀
(Edited phrasing for claification)
Capitalism is never going away unless people build a system to redistribute wealth and so far they’re doing the opposite lately.
I mean that the pricing of the dev account could soon change because of the fact that we live under a capitalist society, not saying that capitalism is itself is going away.
Oh, lol, sorry. My bad.
so will linux foundation drop android using linux kernel?
Soo, anyone ELI5. If Android is basically Linux, how hard would it be - given drivers are not an issue - so just make a Linux phone and mass produce it? You probably don’t have that many apps, but it will be possible to call and/or use messaging apps.
Linux is just the Kernel, Android is the OS. There’s a ton of stuff on top of Linux that makes an Android device.
Making an Android device (or Android device hardware) run Linux isn’t hard. In fact, you can just use Termux on pretty much any Android device to run a regular desktop Linux distro run in a container on Android. That way, the Linux distro uses the kernel from the host Android OS and just runs its own userspace parallel to Android’s userspace.
But if you want to make a stand-alone Linux phone without Android, your biggest issue is that you won’t have phone apps. There’s close to no app support for phone-linux. So on your Linux phone you won’t get any banking/authenticator/messaging/games/… apps. You can run desktop apps, but that sucks on a tiny touchscreen display. And many use cases (e.g. authenticator/two-factor/buying public transport tickets) are very cumbersome or sometimes even not possible on desktop OSes.
Now you an make your Linux phone run Android by emulating the Android userspace. That’s possible, but then again you are basically running Android at that point anyway. But Android with one big caveat: It’s not a Google Play Store Certified device, and it will never be if it’s not running full Android.
And missing Google Play Store Certification means no google services and no apps that rely on Google Services or require Google Play Store Certification. That means e.g. no Banking/Authenticator apps and many games won’t run.
Also, if you aren’t actually running Android but some kind of Android emulator, you will always be outdated and buggy.
So essentially you made a phone that
- Runs Linux apps a little better than an Android phone
- Gives you more control
- Allows you to do much, much less in regards to it being an Android phone
People have done it. There are a handful of Linux phones (e.g. Librem 5, Pinephone) that are barely usable as phones due to lack of app support.
They’ve done the opposite as well, so running Linux on a phone originally designed for Android (e.g. PostmarketOS), also barely usable as a phone.
There’s also the middle-ground with custom ROMs, some of them degoogled (like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/ and many others). They run full-fat Android, but without all the Google apps including Play Store, Google Services and of course also without Google Play Store Certification. That’s more usable as a phone, but you will still be cut off from anything using Google Services. There are some hacks and workarounds that sometimes work and sometimes not. You might get stuff to work but it’s a constant race.
The problem is that currently if you want to use a phone as a full phone that covers all phone usecases, it’s got to be an iPhone or a Google certified Android phone.
😢 AOKP was king. I miss all the extra silly features they packed in. You could make it look almost nothing like Android by the time you were done.
YES! I was talking with someone recently about this ROM. I couldn’t remember what it was called, but I had decked out my phone on a fully wild unicorn theme based on it lmao.
