11–20 of 496 posts
> you can make encrypted phone calls directly, using the built-in integration for Signal and WhatsApp calls Does this mean WhatsApp is automatically installed with Calyx, or just that there are extra features if you manually install it?
Anybody have experience using something like this (or others like GrapheneOS) as a daily driver? I’m interested in moving away from Apple and big tech in general, but I don’t know how practical that is yet.
LineageOS is superb for getting rid of stock OS bloatware and spyware and I have an experience on it that's better than stock Android. However it doesn't have hardened security like GrapheneOS, which is why I want to move to that later. On the other hand microG is needed for push notifications and maps APIs, which GrapheneOS doesn't support so I'm not sure how the fallback options of some of my currently used apps will fare on it.
If microG turns out to be necessary for my workflow then I'll get CalyxOS instead, since it includes microG and is somewhere between LineageOS and GrapheneOS in terms of security.
So, what's the current experience like on Android w/o Play services? I know at some point it was quite bad but that there were some up-and-coming solutions.
> you can make encrypted phone calls directly, using the built-in integration for Signal and WhatsApp calls Does this mean WhatsApp is automatically installed with Calyx, or just that there are extra features if you manually install it?
> In social science, agency is defined as: the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices.
> built-in integration for Signal and WhatsApp calls
Signal and WhatsApp are both fully centralised, tied to a single organisation each — they are antithetical to agency.
Why not use open protocols like DeltaChat, Matrix or XMPP instead?
> built-in free “Virtual Private Network” services from trusted organizations protect you from being spied on
Trusted by whom?
Anybody have experience using something like this (or others like GrapheneOS) as a daily driver? I’m interested in moving away from Apple and big tech in general, but I don’t know how practical that is yet.
LineageOS (and perhaps other ROMs) have the option to disable all networking features for apps, so I actually still use Google Camera, Google Photos (as an offline gallery) and Gboard (again all offline) and the majority of features just work. They don't complain about missing Google Services, nor about the missing internet connection.
There are great alternatives to apps like YouTube (NewPipe), Maps (OSMand), Chrome (Chromium, or I use a browser called Privacy Browser on F-droid) and I have tried apps like Spotify and they too work without Google services (although I guess some features might be lacking).
F-droid is an amazing service and has many FOSS alternatives to apps. I found myself today recompiling my browser application to fix some small bugs which just made me sit back in my chair and think "that is so cool"!
I think making the change can be gradual (for example switching to LineageOS for MicroG to get a subset of working Google services) before fully de-Googling, but the change is definitely possible (and easy) to make.
From https://calyxos.org/about/ : > In social science, agency is defined as: the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. > built-in integration for Signal and WhatsApp calls Signal and WhatsApp are both fully centralised, tied to a single organisation each — they are antithetical to agency. Why not use open protocols like DeltaChat, Matrix or XMPP instead? > built-in free “Vir…
Calyx VPN uses the same tech stack as Riseup VPN, which are branded versions of the Bitmask client - CalyxOS is a part of the Calyx Institute family. You can instead use the Bitmask client from the F-Droid repo and choose to connect to either service with the same app (rather than using branded apps for each service).
I don't know if they have this, but a good feature a privacy centric android experience would be, to have a simple accessible log of what app accessed what using which permission.
Probe all the files in a directory to see which ones are “yours”: “What? Why is it accessing all the files? So suspicious!”
Require a specific name pattern or something: “I never have to remember to do this on the other apps…”
There's a lot of these tradeoffs that in human life are resolved through reference to all sorts of subtle human things that the machine knows not of. We're at this liminal point where “app” software is given a bare form of “agency” from a social perspective as an extension of its developer, but it doesn't have the intelligence to negotiate over it much (and I think that's behind some of the model-simplification pressure that's encouraged heavy vertical integration).
I don't know if they have this, but a good feature a privacy centric android experience would be, to have a simple accessible log of what app accessed what using which permission.