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Tue 31 Aug 2021 7:08PM

A blog post on Google free smart phones

PP Pirate Praveen Public Seen by 56

Today while sharing our letter to teachers of Kerala (https://fsci.in/blog/letter-to-kerala-teachers/) a friend suggested we should write a letter to govt of India/IT ministry about mandating choice of operating systems to smart phone users. Though I personally don't think such letter will have a direct outcome, it is still an opportunity to inform the public about this issue.

So I suggest we write a blog post to highlight options of Google free smart phones, like

  1. RYF certified 100% Free Software - Purism Librem 5 (costly and hard to get in India, but it funds Free Software development)

  2. More affordable though still having firmware blobs but still all apps are Free Software - PinePhone

  3. Phones that comes without gapps - iode OS phones, volla phone https://volla.online/en/index.html (list all phones that ships without gapps)

  4. Flashing your existing phones with custom roms without gapps - may be a dedicated blog posts for finding suitable ROMS for your model from xda forums.

  5. Removing google apps and using only fdroid

and we could ask govt to mandate choice of Operating Systems.

Note: iPhone is even worse than android with gapps when it comes to Software Freedom, you can't even install apps outside play store. Though until recently some people considered Apple is better than Google for privacy.

Anyone interested to draft this blog post ?

RD

Ravi Dwivedi Tue 31 Aug 2021 8:05PM

iPhones are Google free by default.

PP

Pirate Praveen Tue 31 Aug 2021 8:42PM

Yes, but another proprietary one. May be we should make iPhone not a choice explicitly. There is no choice of installing any other OS on iPhone so that is not even consideration.

RD

Ravi Dwivedi Tue 31 Aug 2021 8:50PM

Just update the criteria in your proposal text so that it excludes iOS explicitly. Write that the operating system must be free software. Google free does not equal to free software is what I am saying with my example of iPhone. Plus, as you said, no possibility of installing another OS on iPhone.

PP

Pirate Praveen Tue 31 Aug 2021 8:58PM

I added a note about it.

RD

Ravi Dwivedi Tue 31 Aug 2021 8:08PM

I like another aspect of Librem phones and Pinephone-- hardware freedom, in the sense that people can repair the phones, remove battery etc. I support such practices in addition to running free software. My suggestion is-- we can add that aspect + hardware level kill switches in the description of these phones.

RD

Ravi Dwivedi Tue 31 Aug 2021 8:15PM

Though I personally don't think such letter will not have a direct outcome, it is still an opportunity to inform the public about this issue.

I think there is a typo.

Correction: Remove "not"

LIke this: "don't think such letter will not have ....."

PP

Pirate Praveen Tue 31 Aug 2021 8:42PM

Thanks, fixed.

RD

Ravi Dwivedi Wed 1 Sep 2021 9:34PM

Can anyone please add a few lines explaining the issues with nonfree firmware?

PP

Pirate Praveen Wed 1 Sep 2021 10:30PM

firmware is code run on a secondary processor instead of the main CPU. For example the WiFi chipset will run this code directly instead of the main CPU. So there is different opinions if this should be treated like a regular software or not. Debian and FSF considers it as non-free but Fedora does not.

PP

Pirate Praveen Wed 1 Sep 2021 10:32PM

Some hardware like raspberry pi, you can't even boot without these non free firmware (binary blobs). They are distributed in binary format and cannot be modified (source code is not available).

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