A much better rule imo, which I've had success with, is "no software from the Big Five" rather than FOSS-only. This has a bigger impact on actual privacy concerns and gives you more leeway when it comes to media apps, etc.
Using only open-source software on Android
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: Using only open-source software on Android
#22Also, the Brave browser is a great FOSS option. It's a chromium fork that only adds privacy/adblocking features and doesn't require google services.
Re: Using only open-source software on Android
#23> There are no FOSS clients for Plex, Netflix, Hulu, or Spotify.
Hm... there's a client that is suspiciously absent from that list...
> In other words, I couldn't listen to any of my music, unless I copied the MP3 files from my Plex server to the phone's internal storage. I couldn't stream any TV shows or movies, either.
Ok, that's just technically inaccurate. The author didn't want to use a particular open-source app (or perhaps category of apps) to stream video/audio to the Android device.
There is certainly a persuasive argument as to why one would refrain from installing such apps. But a piece about following FOSS-only dogma which omits a discussion of that app category is misleading. Especially when there are probably tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of users who currently have such a FOSS app installed on their Android devices.
Edit: typo
Re: Using only open-source software on Android
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
From your linked thread: > Restrict the permission to apps in /system/priv-app. This requires to ship microG or two placeholder apps with the ROM (or to allow modification of /system, which is a far worse option). Modifying the permission to be for system apps only is changing one word in the patch (from "dangerous" to "system"), creating a placeholder apps is about writing ~10 lines of XML code and thus could be don…
I don't really understand why signature spoofing is needed at all.
The framework Google provides for apps to interact with Google Play Services checks the GmsCore's signature to validate that it's talking to only their app.
Re: Using only open-source software on Android
#25"...and Firefox on Android still isn't a great experience..." As a daily FF on Android user, I am not sure what he is finding issues with. I wish he would elaborate so his issues can get fixed.
I have a Nexus 6 updated with the latest OS version and FF. I spend about 90% of my browsing time on HN, LinkedIn, and a couple of miscellaneous other news sites. I observe the following problems: Loss of UI, where the only thing I see is either a white or black screen. Swiping up or down as if to scroll or refresh "peels back" some of this to reveal the web page underneath, but it doesn't become functional unless I…
Did you try using the Beta version?
Re: Using only open-source software on Android
#26> Firefox on Android still isn't a great experience News to me! I've been using Firefox on Android for six years now, and I'm very happy.
Scrolling performance is terrible, even on high end devices. I'd imagine its borderline unusable on mid-range devices.
Weird, what device are you using? I used it on my Nexus 5X and now on my non-Edge S7 and it's fine, maybe some slightly-perceptible judders but certainly fluid enough to be usable.
Re: Using only open-source software on Android
#27> Firefox on Android still isn't a great experience News to me! I've been using Firefox on Android for six years now, and I'm very happy.
I tried to use Firefox on Android recently. It felt like my phone was about to melt; I wasn't able to stick with it.
May I ask which phone do you have? I used Firefox as my primary browser for at least all of 2016 on a Samsung Galaxy S2 (a 2011 phone) and on a Sony Xperia Compact since fall 2016. No problems with performance. Opera has a much better text reflow on zoom but that's all. Chrome, no difference, but I never used Chrome much so I might be missing something.
Re: Using only open-source software on Android
#28"...and Firefox on Android still isn't a great experience..." As a daily FF on Android user, I am not sure what he is finding issues with. I wish he would elaborate so his issues can get fixed.
I have a Nexus 6 updated with the latest OS version and FF. I spend about 90% of my browsing time on HN, LinkedIn, and a couple of miscellaneous other news sites. I observe the following problems: Loss of UI, where the only thing I see is either a white or black screen. Swiping up or down as if to scroll or refresh "peels back" some of this to reveal the web page underneath, but it doesn't become functional unless I…
Definitely not my experience but I believe you. If FF runs so bad on some phones Mozilla has still a lot of work to do. Maybe they should start with a list of phones that are known to run FF well (eg. Sony Xperia Compact) and badly (which phone do you have?) and start digging into what's wrong with ones in the latter list.
Re: Using only open-source software on Android
#2990% of the objections here seem to be "I can't use Google's online services very easily without using Google Play", which is precisely why Google's spent the past few years piping as much of Android's runtime as possible through Google Play. The rest are mainly just that the main streaming and social media companies don't have open source clients.
I'd always heard that moving more and more functionality into play services was their strategy for end-running the carrier fragmentation problem.
That's the crux of it.
Though Google have fixed it in such a way that's benefited them by consolidating services and potential data collection for revenue raising.
I've not used anything but a Nexus of Pixel in years. But carrier fragmentation (and with it, the difficulty for OTA patching!) is a much bigger risk to the Android ecosystem and it's uses than closed source code.
Re: Using only open-source software on Android
#30> Firefox on Android still isn't a great experience News to me! I've been using Firefox on Android for six years now, and I'm very happy.
Scrolling performance is terrible, even on high end devices. I'd imagine its borderline unusable on mid-range devices.
I use it as my main browser on a phone that was mid-range when it was released 2 1/2 years ago, and I've been pretty happy with it.