A blog post on Google free smart phones

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 ?